Percy Greg

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

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)