Robert Cromie (17 July 1855 - April 1907) was born at Clough, County Down. He worked as a journalist, novelist and bank employee, and became one of the important early Irish writers of scientific romance.

A Plunge into Space (1890) is an early interplanetary novel in which its characters travel to Mars in an antigravity spacecraft and encounter an advanced civilisation. The Crack of Doom (1895) was his most successful book and is his most historically important: it turns on atomic energy and the threat of global destruction, and contains what is often described as the first description of an atomic explosion in fiction.

Cromie wrote about future war, advanced submarines, antigravity, Mars, atomic energy, political conspiracy and lost-world adventure.