Granville, Austyn
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1854-1922) UK-born author, ultimately in US, centred in Chicago from the 1880s or earlier; he wrote some boys' stories as by Jack Talbot, none apparently of genre interest. He was apparently 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, known as the Anonos and almost spherical in shape, are ruled by a White queen, who is of American parentage. 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 after he has rescued her from an aggressive neighbouring tribe of Aboriginals. If the Devil Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Misrepresented by One Who Knows What It Is to Be Misrepresented Himself (1894) with William 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/JC]
see also: Sex.
Austyn W Granville
born London: 10 February 1854
died Chicago, Illinois: 29 September 1922
works
- The Fallen Race (New York: F Tennyson Neely, 1892) [illus/Edward Mason: hb/nonpictorial]
- If the Devil Came to Chicago: A Plea for the Misrepresented by One Who Knows What It Is to Be Misrepresented Himself (Chicago, Illinois: The Bow-Knot Publishing Co, 1894) with William Wilson Knott [hb/]
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