Among these were an 1894 publicity stunt in which he circumnavigated the world in 65 days, an 1895 journey to South America where he covered the various revolutionary movements active there at the time, and an 1896 trip to Southern Africa that resulted in Griffith writing the novel Briton or Boer?

He regularly incorporated his personal viewpoints into his fiction, and anti-American sentiments expressed in this way ensured that he never established a readership in the United States as publishers there would not print his works.

[2]: 184  He also spent considerable time exploring his father's extensive library, which was filled with the works of authors who would later serve as Griffith's literary influences, including Walter Scott and Jules Verne.

The learning was hammered in a little too hard, mostly with a rope's end and the softest part of a belaying pin, so I took French leave of that class-room and went to another; in plain English, I ran away from my ship and went up in the bush.

[2]: 185 [4]: 104  He passed the College of Preceptors exam the same year, thus completing his formal education in teaching, and promptly left that line of work in favour of pursuing a career in writing.

[2]: 195–196 [4]: 106  Pearson's Weekly had serialized Elizabeth Bisland's 14 November 1889 – 30 January 1890 circumnavigation under the title "Round the World in 76 Days", starting with the magazine's very first issue on 26 July 1890 and finishing on 25 October.

[2]: 200  Large portions of the South American continent were undergoing political turmoil at the time,[c] and Griffith covered the various revolutionary factions in harshly critical terms, viewing them as aspiring oppressors.

[2]: 201 [4]: 107  The story is a fantasy wherein the title character, an Inca princess, and her brother enter suspended animation ahead of the Spanish conquest in the hopes of one day restoring their rule.

[2]: 203–204 [3]: 50  These included a March 1896 article harshly critical of US involvement in the construction of the Panama Canal and of the Monroe Doctrine more generally, titled "The Grave of a Nation's Honour", and the short story "A Genius for a Year" published under his pseudonym Levin Carnac in June 1896.

[2]: 212 [3]: 51  He next wrote The Virgin of the Sun, a fictionalized but non-fantastical account of Francisco Pizarro's conquest of Peru in the 1530s, inspired by his South American journey a few years prior.

[2]: 214 [4]: 107–108 [5]: 25  The Lake of Gold, where the discovery of the titular reservoir results in a US syndicate conquering Europe, became the only one of Griffith's works to be serialized in a US magazine[a] when it appeared in Argosy in eight instalments between December 1902 and July 1903, and was published in book format by White in 1903.

[3]: 53 [15]: 308  The year 1904 also saw the publication by John Long of A Criminal Croesus, where a war of South American unification is financed by a lost race that lives underground.

[3]: 53 [5]: 25  With his finances likewise deteriorating as a result of decreasing book sales after 1904, he moved with his family to Port Erin on the Isle of Man where the cost of living was lower.

[2]: 215 [4]: 108 [5]: 25  The story concerns a war between Britain and Germany, armed respectively with rifles firing explosive radium pellets and a ray that turns metals brittle.

[3]: 54  On the subject of specific authors who were influenced by Griffith, Peter Berresford Ellis lists several including M. P. Shiel and Fred T. Jane,[5]: 19  and Sam Moskowitz posits that George du Maurier drew direct inspiration from The Angel of the Revolution sequence for Trilby (1895) and The Martian (1898).

[2]: 182–183 [3]: 54 [5]: 19  A commonly cited explanation is that his works were timely but not timeless; Moskowitz writes that "He has not survived because his literary output was for the most part a reflection, not a shaper, of the feelings of the period.

"[5]: 19–20 [9]: 313 [10]: 47 [26]: 379  The antiquarian bookseller Jeremy Parrott comments that the outbreak of World War I in 1914, along with the development of powered flight and emergence of submarine warfare, quickly rendered Griffith's visions of the future obsolete.

Bleiler summarizes Griffith as "Historically important, but a bad writer technically";[15]: 302  Harris-Fain outlines his principal failings as "an uninspired, if not clichéd, style, poor characterization, weak ideas, and repetition".

[4]: 108  Stableford calls Griffith "rather inept" and views him as lacking originality, noting that he would often name his sources of inspiration outright;[3]: 45, 54  The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction similarly describes him as borrowing themes "more conspicuously from earlier texts than was the custom then".

[1] Many have noted an apparent prioritization of quantity over quality especially in the later years of his career,[3]: 54 [4]: 108 [24]: 167  and his earlier works are commonly regarded as broadly superior to his later ones,[1][4]: 107 [11]: 12  with some critics such as Stableford and Darko Suvin opining that he peaked as early as his debut novels in The Angel of the Revolution sequence.

[3]: 48–49 [8]: 303/398  Stableford comments that Griffith's second novel Olga Romanoff left no room for further escalation in scope, and that toning the extravagance down for later works drained his stories of their initial vibrancy.

[3]: 48  Michael Moorcock, in the introduction to the 1975 anthology Before Armageddon, calls Griffith "the first 'professional' science-fiction writer", inasmuch as he wrote primarily for money and in service of his employers, and comments that "any integrity that his earlier fiction had possessed was soon lost".

[11]: 11–12 [21] The serial format has also been noted as detrimental to the quality of several of his works: they were written piece-by-piece to meet tight deadlines and provide cliffhangers, which resulted in uneven pacing, poor structure, and unsatisfying resolutions.

[5]: 20, 22–23  Beyond this, Moskowitz finds Griffith to exhibit "a fine imagination, a reasonably good flair for characterization, and an excellent storyteller's sense of pace" while acknowledging that he lacked "the literary touch".

[7]: 79  McNabb similarly opines that "what Griffith lacked in literary style, he made up for in imaginative and exuberant story telling", comparing him in this regard to Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Wood focuses on Wells depicting aerial warfare as insufficient to maintain control on the ground and draws comparisons to strategic bombing during World War II.

[3]: 44–45  He advocated fiercely for secularism as a young man; Stableford writes that he evidently tempered his opinions on this later in his life, as he wrote the serial "Thou Shalt Not—" for a religious audience in Pearson's The Sunday Reader in 1899.

[29]: 132  In particular, Melchiori highlights Griffith's vision of the abolition of private property as incomplete, suggesting that the concept was so deeply ingrained in his worldview that he could not properly imagine its absence.

[3]: 49 [...] a brief and simple service of thanksgiving for the victory which had wiped the stain of foreign invasion from the soil of Britain in the blood of the invader, and given the control of the destinies of the Western world finally into the hands of the dominant race on earth.

[30]: 18  McNabb identifies themes of social Darwinism, eugenics, and outright race war, while commenting that there is a notable lack of the antisemitism that often accompanied such stories.