author
Gregory Casparian
1856–1942
Best known for a single, striking novel, this Turkish-Armenian-American writer imagined a future world of political alliance, technological change, and gender transformation long before those themes were common in fiction. His work has drawn lasting interest as an unusual early entry in speculative and queer literature.
1 Audiobook
An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future
by Gregory Casparian
About the author
Little is firmly documented about his life, but reliable reference sources describe him as a Turkish-Armenian who served as an officer in the Turkish army before emigrating to the United States in 1877. He settled in New York and worked as an artist, painter, and photoengraver.
His only known published book is An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1906). Set in a then-future 1960, the novel mixes social satire, political speculation, and romance, and it is now often remembered for its remarkably early treatment of gender transition and same-sex desire.
Because so little personal information survives, his reputation rests largely on that one imaginative and hard-to-classify novel. Even so, the book has earned him a small but important place in the history of speculative fiction.