George Griffith (1857-1906)

George Griffith, son of a vicar, was born in 1857 and died in 1906. He was a prolific British explorer who wrote during the late Victorian and Edwardian age. His son, Alan Arnold Griffith, was the inventor of the Rolls-Royce Avon jet engine.

Many of his visionary tales appeared in magazines such as Pearson's Magazine and Pearson's Weekly before being published as novels. Griffith was extremely popular in the United Kingdom, though he failed to find similar acclaim in the United States, in part due to his revolutionary and socialist views. A journalist, rather than scientist, by background, what his stories lack in scientific rigour and literary grace they make up for in sheer exuberance of execution.

Although overshadowed by H. G. Wells in the United States, Griffith's epic fantasies of romantic utopians in a future world of war, dominated by airship battle fleets, and grandiose engineering provided a template for steampunk novels a century before the term was coined. Michael Moorcock claims that the works of George Griffith had a dramatic impact on his own writing. The concept of revolutionaries imposing "a pax aeronautica over the earth", at the center of "Angel of the Revolution," was taken up by Wells many years later, in "The Shape of Things to Come." Wells himself once wrote that Griffith's "Outlaws of the Air" was an "aeronautical masterpiece."

Though a less accomplished writer than Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, his novels were extremely popular in their day, seeing many printings. Griffith's stories foreshadowed World War I and foretold a utopian communist revolution in the United States [which ones?]. It also predicted that Great Britain would ally itself with Germany against a Franco-Russian-Italian alliance, almost the exact opposite of what actually happened when World War I started. Griffith also employed the concepts of the air to surface missile and VTOL aircraft. He wrote several tales of adventure set on contemporary earth, while The Outlaws of the Air depicted a future of aerial warfare and the creation of a Pacific island utopia. Sam Moskowitz described him as "undeniably the most popular science fiction writer in England between 1893 and 1895." Some of his books (especially "The Gold Finder") reflected a belief in the undesirability of racial mixing, due to a supposed deficiency in the black race. These beliefs were similar to those of some other socialists of the time, such as Jack London.

His science fiction depicted grand and unlikely voyages through our solar system in the spirit of Wells or Jules Verne, though his explorers donned space suits remarkably prescient in their design. "Honeymoon in Space" saw his newly married adventurers exploring planets in different stages of geological and Darwinian evolution on an educational odyssey which drew heavily on earlier cosmic voyages by Camille Flammarion, W. S. Lach-Szyrma and Edgar Fawcett. Its illustrations by Stanley L. Wood have proved more significant, providing the first depictions of slender, super intelligent aliens with large, bald heads — the archetype of the famous Greys of modern science fiction. His short story The Great Crellin Comet, published in 1897, was the first story to not only include a ten second countdown for a space launch, but also the first story to suggest that a comet's collision with the earth could be stopped by human intervention.

As an explorer of the real world he shattered the existing record for voyaging around the world at the behest of Sir Arthur Pearson, completing his journey in just 65 days. He also helped discover the source of the Amazon river. This was documented in Pearson's Magazine before being published as a book, "Around the World in 65 Days".