Percy Greg

Percy Greg (7 January 1836 Bury – 24 December 1889, Chelsea), son of William Rathbone Greg, was an English writer.^[1]

Percy Greg, like his father, wrote about politics, but his views were violently reactionary: his History of the United States to the Reconstruction of the Union (1887) can be said to be more of a polemic, rather than a history.^{[citation needed]}

His Across the Zodiac (1880) is an early science fiction novel, said to be the progenitor of the sword-and-planet genre. For that novel, Greg created what may have been the first artistic language that was described with linguistic and grammatical terminology.^[2] It also contained what is possibly the first instance in the English language of the word "astronaut".^{[original research?]}

In 2010,a crater on Mars was named Greg^[3] in recognition of his contribution to the lore of Mars.^[4]

Percy Greg used the pseudonym 'Lionel H. Holdreth' when writing for George Jacob Holyoake's freethinking periodical, The Reasoner, in the 1850s, and he edited the paper for a while in 1859 when Holyoake was ill.^[5]

Bibliography

• Across the Zodiac (1880)
• History of the United States to the Reconstruction of the Union (1887)

References

1. Butterworth, L. M. Angus (1980). Lancashire Literary Worthies. W. C. Henderson and Son Ltd. p. 70. Retrieved 26 November 2014.
2. Ekman, F: "The Martial Language of Percy Greg", Invented Languages Summer 2008, p. 11. Richard K. Harrison Archived 2008-09-08 at the Wayback Machine, 2008
3. Greg Crater data from the International Astronomical Union
4. Blue, Jennifer, "Six New Names Approved for Features on Mars" 21 June 2010
5. Obituary in Manchester Guardian, 30 December 1889; see also more generally, Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels (Manchester UP 1974), p. 311 and passim.

External links

• Works by Percy Greg at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Percy Greg at the Internet Archive