Wirt Gerrare was the pen name of William Oliver Greener (1862–1935), an English author, journalist, and firearms expert. Born in Aston, Warwickshire, in 1862, he was the son of the celebrated gunmaker William Wellington Greener, and died at Kingsbridge, Devon, on 10 August 1935. Trading on his family background, Greener built a career as both a technical writer on weaponry and a fiction author, publishing almost all of his output, fiction and nonfiction alike, under the Wirt Gerrare pseudonym. His nonfiction includes A Bibliography of Guns and Shooting (1896) and The Science of Gunnery, both still regarded as useful reference works in their field, and as a journalist he contributed more broadly on military and technical subjects. As a novelist he is now chiefly remembered for a handful of late-Victorian genre works: Rufin's Legacy: A Theosophical Romance (1892), his earliest genre-relevant novel, featuring a Russian woman spy with powers of astral projection; Phantasms: Original Stories Illustrating Posthumous Personality and Character (1895), a story collection centered on Horace Vesey, an occult detective; The Men of Harlech (1896); and The Warstock: A Tale of To-Morrow (1898), a scientific romance imagining rival advanced city-states, one of which holds a weapon capable of detonating ammunition stockpiles worldwide. He holds a minor but recognized place in the history of early science fiction and fantasy, alongside his more enduring reputation as a technical authority on firearms.
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