James Blyth

Born in 1864 and dead in 1933, this British writer was born Henry James Catling Clabburn and legally changed his name to James Blyth in 1898. Reference works on speculative fiction describe him as a UK author who wrote popular fiction and note that he is especially remembered in that field for The Tyranny (1907), a near-future tale of Britain under a tyrant and at war with Germany.

Family-history and regional literary sources say he was born in Norwich, first worked as a solicitor in London, then returned to East Anglia in the 1890s and went on to publish a large number of novels. Literary Norfolk also notes that he lived in Fritton, and that the marshes and reed-beds of the River Waveney helped shape the setting of many of his books.

His surviving reputation seems to rest on both his productivity and his range: mainstream popular fiction, supernatural or uncanny work such as The Shadow of the Unseen, and early speculative novels that still attract genre historians today.