George Chetwynd Griffith

Born in Plymouth in 1857, George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones wrote under the name George Griffith and became one of Britain’s most popular science-fiction writers in the 1890s. Before turning fully to fiction, he worked as a journalist and traveler, experiences that fed the restless energy and global scale of his stories.

He is best known for The Angel of the Revolution, a hugely successful future-war tale, and for A Honeymoon in Space, an imaginative planetary voyage. Writing in the era before science fiction was firmly named as a genre, he helped define the “scientific romance” with stories about aerial combat, political upheaval, and life beyond Earth.

Though later overshadowed by writers such as H. G. Wells, Griffith was an important early popularizer of speculative fiction and a major influence on the shape of adventure-based science fiction in Britain. He died in 1906, but his work remains a lively window into the hopes, fears, and inventions of late Victorian imagination.