Fitz James O'Brien (also spelled Fitz-James; December 31, 1828 - April 6, 1862) was an Irish-born American writer, some of whose work is often considered one of the forerunners of today's science fiction. CONTENTS What Was It? My Wife's Tempter The Child Who Loved a Grave The Diamond Lens The Golden Ingot The Wondersmith

O'Brien's earliest writings in the United States were contributed to the Lantern, which was then edited by John Brougham. Subsequently he wrote for the Home Journal, the New York Times, and the American Whig Review. His first important literary connection was with Harper's Magazine, and beginning in February, 1853, with The Two Skulls, he contributed more than sixty articles in prose and verse to that periodical. He likewise wrote for the New York Saturday Press, Putnam's Magazine, Vanity Fair, and the Atlantic Monthly. To the latter he sent The Diamond Lens(1858) and The Wonder Smith (1859), which are unsurpassed as creations of the imagination, and are unique among short magazine stories. The Diamond Lens is probably his most famous short story, and tells the story of a scientist who invents a powerful microscope discovers a beautiful female in a microscopic world inside a drop of water. The Wonder Smith is an early predecessor of robot rebellion, where toys possessed by evil spirits are transformed into living automatons who turns against their creators. His 1858 short story From Hand to Mouth has been referred to as"the single most striking example of surrealistic fiction to pre-date Alice in Wonderland (Sam Moskowitz, 1971). What Was It? A Mystery (1859) is one of the earliest known examples of invisibility in fiction.

FROM a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been toward microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement. Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes that intervened between that promise and his departure.

Fitz-James O'Brien capitalised on the success of his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe in writing disturbing stories with demented protagonists. This collection of three tales shows his mastery of the macabre. 'The Diamond Lens' tells the tale of a lone scientist's discovery of a microcosmic world within a drop of water, and his growing obsession in particular with the beautiful Animula, a fair maiden within this world which he can see but never enter. The insights O'Brien gives us to the scientist's uncompromising pursuit of knowledge at any cost foreshadow the mad scientist familiar to science fiction readers in a multitude of works. In 'What Was It?' an invisible man is discovered by residents of a boarding house. Predating H.G. Wells' 'The Invisible Man' by nearly four decades, the residents' capture and investigation of the creature blends the fantastic with the scientific as they seek rational explanations for this extraordinary phenomenon. 'The Wondersmith' is a macabre tale of an embittered toymaker who seeks revenge upon the society that has persecuted him by creating demonic mannequins (a precursor of robots) and imbuing them with life in order to slaughter the masses. The tale is a fantastic melodrama in which the dominating and cunning Wondersmith is offset by the unassuming and unlikely hero Solon the hunchback, who is in love with the villain's daughter.