GRANVILLE, Austyn

(? -?)

   19th-century US author, resident for some years in Australia. His racy, bigoted lost-race (LOST WORLDS) 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.

   PN

   Other works: If the Devil Came to Chicago (1894) with W. Wilson Knott, a reformist fantasy about vice.

   See also: SEX.