Who? I hear you say, and well you might. Fitz-James O’Brien seems to be a rather obscure author to me but according to all sources he’s considered a forerunner to modern science fiction, born in 1828 and dying in 1862 it puts him well before Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. I found him in the Webster’s Dictionary of American Authors as well as Wikipedia and found various sources of ebooks. If you do a quick search you’ll be able to read his works online, but I will give you links to buy three works as they look really good.

O’Brien was born in County Cork, Ireland with the first name of Michael but his family moved to Limerick when he was young, strangely enough he went with them. When he moved to the United States in 1952 he changed his first name to Fitz-James.

He wrote for a number of periodicals including Harper’s Magazine, Vanity Fair and the Atlantic Monthly. It was to the Atlantic Monthly he sent The Diamond Lens and The Wonder Smith. What Was It seems to have short stories with everything in speculative fiction except for science fiction.

As he had robots in his texts I do wonder how much influence he had on Isaac Asimov. I have done a little googling to try and check my theory but I think I’d something rather more detailed than the articles I found.