Monday, December 30, 2024

Cool pictures from the "English Jules Verne"

The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror (1893) is a science fiction novel by the English writer George Griffith. It was his first published novel and remains his most famous work.

Griffith was hugely successful in his day but is now all but forgotten. I only came across him because he popped up as a featured article on Wikipedia. The modern consensus seems to be he just wasn't that good of a writer. Certainly nothing I saw made me want to read more than a few lines. I did, however, enjoy the illustrations.

Angel came out seven years after Verne's Robur the Conqueror, which was itself beaten to the punch by Frank Reade Jr., and His Queen Clipper of the Clouds. All of these were in the helicopter family though dirigibles were also a popular option. I'm sure an actual expert could come up with numerous other examples. The genre even inspired an early UFO mania in the 1890s.