author
Samuel Barton
1839–1895
A New York broker who wrote a sharp, early work of speculative fiction, he is remembered for imagining a future conflict in North America with a mix of satire and military alarm. His best-known book turns fears about coastal defense and politics into an energetic what-if story.
1 Audiobook
The battle of the Swash and the capture of Canada
by Samuel Barton
About the author
Born in 1839 and dying in 1895, Samuel Barton was an American writer from New York who also worked as a broker. Some reference sources note that he published under the pseudonym A. B. Roker.
He is best known for The Battle of the Swash and the Capture of Canada (1888), a novel of imagined future war. The book presents a fictional conflict involving the United States, Britain, and Canada, and was written to draw attention to what Barton saw as the weak state of American coastal defenses.
That combination of political anxiety, military speculation, and storytelling has helped the book endure as an early example of speculative fiction. Even though little else about his life is easy to confirm, his surviving work offers a vivid glimpse of late 19th-century fears and imagination.