Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848–1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, and a public promoter of Evolution in the second half of the 19th century. In the early 1880s, Allen turned his attention to fiction, and between 1884 and 1899 produced about 30 novels. In 1895, his scandalous book titled The Woman Who Did, promulgating certain startling views on marriage and kindred questions, became a bestseller. The book told the story of an independent woman who has a child out of wedlock. Allen also became a pioneer in science fiction, with the novel The British Barbarians (1895). This book, published about the same time as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, also described time travel, although the plot is quite different.