Happy New Year, everyone.

It’s evening as I write this, and if you’ve watched the news today, you know it hasn’t started off well.

But I want to keep things positive and upbeat. So, I’ll wish each of you a Happy New Year.

I’ll give an end fo the year wrap-up on my writing progress tomorrow or the next day, plus lay out some goals for the year.

But since there are some birthdays today, I’ll look at a couple.

First up is Seabury Quinn (1889-1969).  Quinn was born on New Year’s Day and died on Christmas Eve.

His work has experienced something of a resurgence in recent years with affordable collections of the complete Jules de Grandin tales. Those stories were collected in three volumes in 2001 by The Battered Silicon dispatch Box. Those are massive tomes. They came with instructions on how to read them without breaking the spines, and the dust jackets were in two pieces glued together.

But Jules de Grandin wasn’t Quinn’s only output. He wrote a number of short stories. The first story by Quinn I read was “The Phantom Farmhouse” in the anthology Famous Monster Tales when I was in seventh grade.

The single story Quinn is best known for isn’t a Jules de Grandin story. It’s the novella “Roads”, which I looked at here. It’s a Christmas story. The original publication in the January 1938 issue of Weird Tales had some wonderful illustrations by Virgil Finlay. Since the date on magazines is typically a month or two ahead of when they appear, this issue would have been on  the newsstands during December of 1937.

Quinn wrote a number of other stories, and not all of them were fantasy. A few ot those have been collected in electronic editions.

But there are plenty of stories that never saw the light of day after their original publications, usually in Weird Tales. It would be nice if a publisher could put a collection of them together.

The other birthday for today is Laurence Manning (1899-1972). Manning was a Canadian author. With the exception of three stories published in 1952 and 1953 in minor science fiction magazines, all of his work appeared between 1930 and 1939. The first and last of these stories were collaborations with Fletcher Pratt, another writer who was once prominent but whose star has faded.

Manning would probably be totally forgotten today except to a few remaining pulp fans if it were not for his five part serial that began with “The Man Who Awoke” in the March 1933 issue of Wonder Stories.

The story concerns a man who goes into a state of suspended animation and awakens centuries in the future. After various adventures, he goes back into suspended animation at  the end of the story. Each story is independnt of the events of the previous tales with the exception that he had put himself back into suspended animation. At the end of the last story he decides to stay since mankind has moved out into the stars.

There was a three part serialization of “The Man Who Awoke” in the back pages of Captain Future in 1941, but I don’t know if the first story was the only part serialized or not.

Isaac Asimov reprinted the first installment in his massive anthology Before the Golden Age in 1974. The entire series was published in paperback by Ballantine in 1975 and reprinted in 1979, with British and German editions appearing in 1977.

I read the book when I was in high school and again about a decade ago, when I did a detailed post on it at Black Gate.

There’s always a risk when you reread a story you enjoyed in  your youth. It might not hold up to your memory. I’m glad to say, this book did.

I don’t know anything about Manning’s personal life, such as why he stopped writing at the end of the thirties. He was a Canadian citizen, so he might have been involved in the war effort in some capacity. Canada entered the war before the US did.