author
James Cowan
1841–1906
A 19th-century American journalist and novelist, he is now chiefly remembered for an imaginative science-fiction tale that sends its travelers from a disrupted Earth to Mars. His work has a lively, adventurous feel, mixing big cosmic ideas with the moral questions of his time.
1 Audiobook
Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World
by James Cowan
About the author
Born in Danbury, Connecticut, on March 8, 1841, and later dying in Springfield, Massachusetts, on October 10, 1906, James Cowan worked as an American author and journalist. Although he is not widely known today, reference sources still note him as a writer of speculative fiction from the late 1800s.
His best-known book is Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World (1896). The novel imagines an extraordinary celestial disaster and a journey to Mars, showing the kind of bold, wide-ranging invention that early science fiction often embraced.
Cowan's surviving reputation rests mainly on that single novel, which has been preserved through library and digital archive listings such as Project Gutenberg. For listeners curious about the roots of science fiction, he offers a glimpse of the genre before it fully took shape in the 20th century.