George Griffith was a prolific and popular writer of scientific romances around the turn of the nineteenth century. You will frequently see it asserted that he was as popular as HG Wells in his day, although I have no idea what that means or if it's true. You'll also see it asserted that he was not published much in the US because of his political views, which according to Wikipedia were revolutionary and socialist, although I've seen very little evidence of that in what I've read so far. In fact, if anything he has struck me as fairly conservative. Then again I've only read two of his books, the other being A Honeymoon in Space (1901), which is a fix-up of a series of short stories about a tour of the Solar System in an antigrav spaceship.
The World Peril of 1910 was published in 1907, the year after Griffith died. It's an expansion of a short story, "The Great Crellin Comet", which was published in Pearson's Weekly in 1897. Apogee books has published the novel (for the first time in North America, according to them) and the short story together. The short story is much better than the novel, I'm afraid to say. It's about the discovery that a comet is about to hit the Earth and what is done by a young British astronomer and an American millionaire to attempt to avert it. There's a love story involving the American's daughter, but the thing is very efficient and atmospheric in telling its tale of impending global destruction.
The novel takes this basic premise and makes it the appendage of a future war story that also involves a heated contest for the hand of the American heiress. The war story is completely superfluous to the story of the comet, and I found it pretty tiresome stuff. Some neat superweapons are invented, a couple of which are flying machines (though one is also a submarine). Beyond that, however, we have too many chapters in which we are told that such and such a fleet has so many ships of this class, so many ships of that class, and so many ships of the other class (with loving descriptions of associated weaponry), and then one of the superweapons proceeds to sink every last ship in turn. Huzzah! Or groan, if they're British ships.
The main drama here is that Fortress Britain is invaded by an alliance of the French, Germans, Russians, and Austrians. The superweapon the invaders get their hands on is the invention of a treacherous Irishman, although his brother and sister are loyal to the British. Some of these ancient politics are interesting, but mostly it's a jingoistic appeal to British patriotism. Lord Kitchener -- referred to I thought rather familiarly as the K. of K. -- even shows up to put the screws to the infuriated German Kaiser. To be fair, once all the ships have been sunk and the invaders are ravaging the British countryside while preparations are being made in the north to deal with the comet, things do get a bit exciting.
No doubt the main problem is that I'm not a big fan of war stories. I found A Honeymoon in Space an altogether more interesting book, because I'm more interested in imaginary or extraordinary voyages. Still, I'm happy that Apogee has put this book out, and I hope they publish some of Griffith's earlier novels, such as The Angel of the Revolution (1893), which is apparently about anarchists. If you are more of an enthusiast for war and superweaponry and the doughty mean of Britain, you may find The World Peril of 1910 more entertaining than I did.
On a side note, I thought it was interesting that Jules Verne still seemed to be the main science fictional referent here, getting a namecheck more than once, specifically in regards to one of the superweapons, which is similar to a device used in one of his famous novels. Flammarion and Wells also get a call out. That's two Frenchmen to one Briton, which might make one think that SF was a mostly French genre at this stage of the game. But more about that in my next review.
The World Peril of 1910 was published in 1907, the year after Griffith died. It's an expansion of a short story, "The Great Crellin Comet", which was published in Pearson's Weekly in 1897. Apogee books has published the novel (for the first time in North America, according to them) and the short story together. The short story is much better than the novel, I'm afraid to say. It's about the discovery that a comet is about to hit the Earth and what is done by a young British astronomer and an American millionaire to attempt to avert it. There's a love story involving the American's daughter, but the thing is very efficient and atmospheric in telling its tale of impending global destruction.
The novel takes this basic premise and makes it the appendage of a future war story that also involves a heated contest for the hand of the American heiress. The war story is completely superfluous to the story of the comet, and I found it pretty tiresome stuff. Some neat superweapons are invented, a couple of which are flying machines (though one is also a submarine). Beyond that, however, we have too many chapters in which we are told that such and such a fleet has so many ships of this class, so many ships of that class, and so many ships of the other class (with loving descriptions of associated weaponry), and then one of the superweapons proceeds to sink every last ship in turn. Huzzah! Or groan, if they're British ships.
The main drama here is that Fortress Britain is invaded by an alliance of the French, Germans, Russians, and Austrians. The superweapon the invaders get their hands on is the invention of a treacherous Irishman, although his brother and sister are loyal to the British. Some of these ancient politics are interesting, but mostly it's a jingoistic appeal to British patriotism. Lord Kitchener -- referred to I thought rather familiarly as the K. of K. -- even shows up to put the screws to the infuriated German Kaiser. To be fair, once all the ships have been sunk and the invaders are ravaging the British countryside while preparations are being made in the north to deal with the comet, things do get a bit exciting.
No doubt the main problem is that I'm not a big fan of war stories. I found A Honeymoon in Space an altogether more interesting book, because I'm more interested in imaginary or extraordinary voyages. Still, I'm happy that Apogee has put this book out, and I hope they publish some of Griffith's earlier novels, such as The Angel of the Revolution (1893), which is apparently about anarchists. If you are more of an enthusiast for war and superweaponry and the doughty mean of Britain, you may find The World Peril of 1910 more entertaining than I did.
On a side note, I thought it was interesting that Jules Verne still seemed to be the main science fictional referent here, getting a namecheck more than once, specifically in regards to one of the superweapons, which is similar to a device used in one of his famous novels. Flammarion and Wells also get a call out. That's two Frenchmen to one Briton, which might make one think that SF was a mostly French genre at this stage of the game. But more about that in my next review.