Robert Cromie

Robert Cromie (1855–1907) was an Irish novelist and journalist from Belfast, where he worked on the staff of the Northern Whig. He wrote a dozen novels, several of them early examples of science fiction: A Plunge into Space (1890) describes a journey to Mars by an antigravity sphere and carried, in its second edition, a preface attributed to Jules Verne; The Crack of Doom (1895) imagines a scientist who plans to destroy the world by releasing the energy locked in atoms, one of the first fictional treatments of the idea. He later accused H. G. Wells of borrowing from him, a charge Wells denied.