James De Mille was one of the most successful and prolific nineteenth-century Canadian writers of popular fiction during his relatively short writing career. He is best remembered for A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), an apparently unfinished utopian novel of a lost race. Described by George L. Parker in the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997) as "the most complex and philosophical nineteenth-century Canadian novel," the work has a firm position within the canon of nineteenth-century Canadian literature and an unquestioned, if minor, place within the tradition of world science fiction.

James De Mill (he later changed the spelling to "De Mille") was born on 23 August 1833 in Saint John, New Brunswick. He was the third of ten children of Nathan De Mill, a Saint John merchant, and Elizabeth De Mill. Both his parents were descendants of the Loyalists who had fled the United...