Set in 1903, a world war approaches and an international group of terrorists mean to take advantage of the situation after getting their hands on a new form of combustion, which finally solves the problem of powered flight.
This is pretty prophetic in some ways, it combines the devastation of machine warfare realized in the first World War with the speed of machine warfare realized in the Second.
George Griffith it has to be said, isn't a particularly good writer. His writing tends to be quite plain and pulpy, its not bad, but its by no means spectacular.
He does however have two things going for him. One is a great imagination, and the other is his love of strong female characters, which is pretty unusual for the time.
Apart from the fact its hard to like anyone in this story as they're all gradations of evil from a modern perspective, the other major flaw is the racism in favour of anglo-saxons. Which is all the more remarkable given that most of the main characters are russian. Still i suppose it's no more racist than Star-Trek and every other sci-fi show in which the entire world appears to be ruled by white english speakers.
A very interesting plot, i am planning on reading the sequel. ( )

In the future year of 1904, an impoverished English inventor solves the secret of aerial navigation. He hands it over to the nihilist organization, the Terrorists, dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and militarism. This starts out as pretty poor sf, much below what Wells was doing, but it builds up to a harrowing depiction of a vast, apocalyptic total world war, which prefigures World War I with the unusual wrinkle of the UK and Germany fighting against Russia and France. For fans of Michael Moorcock, this seems to be one of the influences behind the Bastable novels, but I think it's better since this is the pure source. ( )

The thing about proto-sf is that there are several very different strains, and never shall they meet. Mary Shelley might set The Last Man two hundred years in the future, but it's mostly a vehicle for political speculation, and there's no serious attempt to imagine what technology will be like in the 21st century. On the other hand, Jules Verne is writing tales of fantastic technology, but never seriously imagines how society would be affected by it; his inventions belong to one lone person who for some reason won't share them. There's no reason Shelley and Verne would even think of themselves as doing the same thing, and they're not; we just lump them together in retrospect.

It's not until the end of the 19th century that these strains start to converge. I'm sure someone did this before George Griffith, but future-war fiction is one of the places it begins to happen. These tales of the War to Come ask what political implications there could be from fantastic new technologies of war-- Angel of the Revolution gives us a race to develop air-ships, since they will determine the war in Europe. This kind of stuff really is the moment where anything we can meaningfully call "science fiction" comes into being.

As for the book itself, as you can tell by it retroactively applied series title of "Tsar Wars," it's vaguely Star Wars-esque. A secret band of rebels called the Brotherhood of Freedom (or the "Terror"), an alliance of socialists, nihilists, and anarchists, recruits the inventor of the air-ship and gets him to build them a fleet. The Terror has been trying to forestall a war between the European powers, not because they don't think the war should happen (in fact, they think it's inevitable), but because they want to make sure that when it's over, they're the ones with an advantage. You see, the Terror hates "Society," especially the Russian Tsars, who have oppressed them. The book is tremendous fun at first, what with secret ceremonies and a rescue scene that really is straight out of Star Wars: they're trying to rescue the head Terrorist's daughter, and during a sledge chase through Siberia, she grabs the gun because the men don't shoot well enough!

It's kind of downhill after that, though. The Terror's air-ships give them such an advantage that they never really encounter difficulty, not even when one is stolen. And then all of a sudden you learn that the Buddha has come back and is about to lead the Buddhists in a war on Christendom, which can only survive if the Anglo-Saxon race is given back its natural supremacy over all. Um, what? It's not even consistent with all the complaints about Society in the first half of the book. From this point on, the Terror just goes around establishing its own despotism, which is apparently justified because 1) it is one of peace and 2) Anglo-Saxondom is awesome. It would be bearable if the plot was interesting, but it's not.

But the book is a great read, not just because it manages to synthesize everything needed to create science fiction, but because of its jaw-dropping weirdness at some points. Such as when the head Terrorist suddenly has mind control powers... but for one scene, and never again. And the final battle is awesome. It would make a great steampunk film, but you'd have to do a lot of rewriting.