In contrast to Robert Louis Stevenson, who complained that the Irish reminded him of toads, some nationalist authors confronted British imperialism by writing fiction that promoted republican separatism and tried to explain the rationale behind the 1881–5 bombing campaign. Some of these dynamite novels even ended with the Fenians achieving political independence and becoming the ‘undisputed masters of the whole of Irish soil’. Displaying a global perspective, from which the planting of bombs in England and attacks on British forces in Ireland are compared to the anti-imperial efforts of the Transvaal Boers and Zulus, the pro-Fenian fiction that was written during the 1880s offered its readers a radical political perspective by criticising the concept of empire per se. This re-imagining of the dynamite novel as a medium for Irish nationalist discourse repeated the political logic found in the threats that were published in the pages of republican journals like Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa's The United Irishman and Patrick Ford's The Irish World. Bombs are rarely defused in these tales nor do they, as in Stevenson's yarn, offer imperialist readers a reassuring sense of closure by conveniently exploding prematurely in the hands of their makers. Instead, they speculated over what could happen if Rossa's and Ford's hopes of experiencing ‘the satisfaction of seeing London laid in ashes’, and of witnessing the destruction of Britain's ‘most cherished public buildings’, were realised.