Smeaton, Oliphant
Entry updated 24 June 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1856-1914) Scottish editor and author, in New Zealand and Australia 1878-1893, where most of this fiction was set, including a modestly fantasticated adventure, The Treasure Cave of the Blue Mountains (1898), whose central guide to the hidden horde is a young woman. Smeaton is of sf interest Lost Race tale for boys, A Mystery of the Pacific (1899), though the various protagonists of the tale are all adult: three Englishmen, searching for a lost relative, penetrate a mysterious Sargasso Sea-like barrier in the South Pacific and are taken in a trireme to a giant Island inhabited – they think exclusively – by descendants of ancient Romans. As the plot thickens, however, they discover Underground a second, far more ancient civilization comprising survivors of Atlantis. After the three Englishmen demonstrate Western superiority with their guns, the inhabitants of Nova Sicilia gladly seek an elevated client relationship with the British Empire, and the narrator weds a prominent young Nova Sicilian. Smeaton exhibits throughout a mildly liberalized understanding of the Imperialism, though he does not come very close to deprecation; his take on "natives" is similarly liberal (see Race in SF). [JC]
William Henry Oliphant Smeaton
born Aberdeen, Scotland: 24 October 1856
died Edinburgh, Scotland: 31 March 1914
works (selected)
- The Treasure Cave of the Blue Mountains (Edinburgh, Scotland: Oliphant, Anderson, Ferrier, 1898) [illus/hb/Joseph Brown]
- A Mystery of the Pacific (London: Blackie and Son, 1899) [illus/hb/Wal Paget]
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