George Griffith

Griffith was a clerk addressing envelopes in the offices of Pearson's Weekly when the magazine began serialising his first novel in January 1893. The Angel of the Revolution imagined a secret brotherhood with a monopoly on flight, using airships to overthrow the governments of Europe. Powered flight was still ten years away.

It made him, briefly, one of the most widely read writers of scientific romance in Britain — ahead of Wells in sales for a time, and much less careful. He wrote fast, for serial deadlines, in a vein of future war and world revolution that fed straight into a generation of invasion stories, and he followed it with sequels, interplanetary voyages and dozens of adventure novels.

His employers also used him as a stunt. In 1894 they sent him round the world against the clock; he did it in sixty-five days.

He drank, and it caught up with him. He died in 1906 at forty-eight, his reputation already fading, and slid out of the histories of the genre he had helped invent — partly because his politics were too hot for later anthologists, and partly because the thing he did best, writing at speed for a weekly audience, does not preserve well.