HARBEN, Will(iam) N(athaniel)

(1858-1919)

   US writer, most of whose novels variously depict life in the South. "In the Year Ten Thousand" (1892 Arena) is a UTOPIAN sketch espousing vegetarianism. His sf novel, The Land of the Changing Sun (1894), is a LOST-WORLD tale featuring an underground utopia/dystopia,Alpha, founded 200 years earlier under the Arctic by a group of inventive Englishmen, who espouse a rigid eugenic regime, and who heat and light their habitat with an artificial sun, which moves on tracks and changes colour pleasingly. Intruding magma threatens their world, and they decide to evacuate Alpha in advanced submarines.

   JC

   See also: HISTORY OF SF.