author
Samuel Barton
1839–1895
A little-known American writer and broker, he is remembered for a single vivid 1888 novel that imagines war with Britain and the capture of Canada. His work sits at the early edge of future-war and speculative fiction, mixing political anger with sensational adventure.
1 Audiobook
The battle of the Swash and the capture of Canada
by Samuel Barton
About the author
Born on Staten Island, New York, on February 27, 1839, Samuel Barton was an American author who also worked as a broker. Reference sources note that he sometimes published under the pseudonym A. B. Roker.
Barton is known for The Battle of the Swash and the Capture of Canada (1888), a novel presented as a "historical forecast." Set in an imagined near future, it warns about weak American coastal defenses and builds its story around a conflict between the United States and Britain that ends with an invasion of Canada. Later genre historians have treated it as an early American future-war tale.
He died in New York on November 16, 1895. Reliable sources about his life are sparse, and he has often been confused with an earlier Samuel Barton who served in Congress, but current reference works distinguish the novelist as that politician's son.