(1854-1922) UK-born author, ultimately in US, centred in Chicago; also resident for some years in Australia. His racy, bigoted Lost-Race novel The Fallen Race (1892), one of the earliest sf books set in Australia, shares the belief in a great inland sea which in real life led to the disappointment or death of many explorers. Stranded in the desert, a doctor finds a lost race developed, absurdly, from the primeval union of aboriginals and kangaroos; its people, almost spherical in shape, are ruled by a White (human) queen. The protagonist outwits a palace revolution, survives the amorous attentions of a female spheroid, establishes – through technological knowhow and Cultural Engineering – a middle-class Utopia, and marries the queen. If the Devil Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Misrepresented by One Who Knows What it is to be Misrepresented Himself (1894) with W Wilson Knott, a fantasy about vice in which the Devil finds little in Chicago to comfort him, was written as a rebuttal to W T Stead's If Christ Came to Chicago (1894). [PN]
see also: Sex.
Austyn Granville
born London: 10 February 1854
died Chicago, Illinois: 29 September 1922
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