Percy Greg

Percy Greg was an English writer born in 1836 and died in 1889. He worked largely as a journalist and also wrote fiction and history, with contributions noted in major British periodicals of his time. He was the son of the essayist William Rathbone Greg.

His best-known book is Across the Zodiac (1880), an early science-fiction novel about a journey to Mars. The novel is often remembered as an important forerunner of later planetary romance, and it is one of the main reasons Greg still appears in discussions of nineteenth-century speculative fiction.

Greg also wrote on political subjects, and some later reference works describe his views as strongly reactionary. For general readers, though, his lasting reputation rests above all on the strange ambition of Across the Zodiac and its place near the beginnings of modern science fiction.