The angel of the revolution: a tale of the coming terror
"The Angel of the Revolution" by George Chetwynd Griffiths is a science fiction novel published in 1893. It blends elements of adventure and political commentary, envisioning a future where a revolutionary movement is aided by advanced technology and airships. The story follows the protagonist, a journalist, and his interactions with a powerful female figure who becomes a symbol of the revolution.
Griffiths uses this narrative to explore themes of liberation, technological progress, and societal change, reflecting the anxieties and hopes of the late Victorian era. The novel's imaginative scope and its critique of oppression make it a significant read for those interested in early speculative fiction and its socio-political underpinnings. Overall, it combines excitement with thoughtful commentary on the dynamics of power and progress.
Excerpt:
They were strange words to be uttered, as they were, by a pale, haggard, half-starved looking young fellow in a dingy, comfortless room on the top floor of a South London tenement-house; and yet there was a triumphant ring in his voice and a clear, bright flush on his thin cheeks that spoke at least for his own absolute belief in their truth.
Let us see how far he was justified in that belief. To begin at the beginning, Richard Arnold was one of those men whom the world is wont to call dreamers and enthusiasts before they succeed, and heaven-born geniuses and benefactors of humanity afterwards. He was twenty-six, and for nearly six years past he had devoted himself, soul and body, to a single idea to the so-far unsolved problem of aerial navigation.
This idea had haunted him ever since he had been able to think logically at all first dimly at school, and then more clearly at college, where he had carried everything before him in mathematics and natural science, until it had, at last, become a ruling passion that crowded everything else out of his life, and made him, commercially speaking, that most useless of social units a one-sided man, whose idea could not be put into working form. He was an orphan, with hardly a blood relation in the world.
He had started with plenty of friends, mostly made at college, who thought he had a brilliant future before him, and therefore looked upon him as a man whom it might be useful to know. But as time went on, and no results came, these dropped off, and he got to be looked upon as an amiable lunatic, who was wasting his great talents and what money he had on impracticable fancies, when he might have been earning a handsome income if he had stuck to the beaten track, and gone in for practical work.
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