Manning, Laurence
Entry updated 18 March 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1899-1972) Canadian-born author, in the USA from 1920, a founder of the American Interplanetary Society and editor of its journal, Astronautics, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The City of the Living Dead" with Fletcher Pratt for Wonder Stories in May 1930. He is best remembered for his numerous contributions to Wonder Stories and Wonder Stories Quarterly in the 1930s. His best-known series was the Man Who Awoke sequence in Wonder Stories, five stories later published as The Man Who Awoke (stories March-August 1933 Wonder Stories; fixup 1975), in which a man periodically awakes from Suspended Animation into a pulp-Stapledon succession of five societies, the last of which is in a world of Immortals, but all of which, en passant or directly, are rendered as showing some of the terrible consequences of Climate Change; twentieth-century humans are known as the "wasters". Another series was the Stranger Club sequence: "The Call of the Mech-Men" (November 1933 Wonder Stories), "Caverns of Horror" (March 1934 Wonder Stories), "Voice of Atlantis" (July 1934 Wonder Stories), "The Moth Message" (December 1934 Wonder Stories) and "Seeds from Space" (June 1935 Wonder Stories). The Asteroid sequence of above-average space stories comprised The Voyage of the Asteroid (Summer 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly; 2017 dos) and The Wreck of the Asteroid (December 1932-February 1933 Wonder Stories 2021 dos). Manning's style was very much of his time, but he had a more wide-ranging imagination than many of his colleagues. [JC/PN]
see also: Automation; Canada; Dystopias; Evolution; Fantastic Voyages; Generation Starships; History in SF; Leisure; Living Worlds; Mars; Spaceships; Utopias; World Ships.
Laurence Edward Manning
born St John, New Brunswick: 1 January 1899
died Highlands, New Jersey: 10 April 1972
works
- The Man Who Awoke (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975) [fixup: five stories first published in Wonder Stories, March-August 1933, beginning with title story: pb/Dean Ellis]
- The Voyage of the Asteroid (Medford, Oregon: Armchair Fiction, 2017) [dos: first appeared Summer 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly: pb/Frank R Paul]
- World of the Mist (Medford, Oregon: Armchair Fiction, 2017) [dos: first appeared September-October 1935 Wonder Stories: pb/Ed Valigursky]
- The Wreck of the Asteroid (Medford, Oregon: Armchair Fiction, 2021) [dos: first appeared December 1932-February 1933 Wonder Stories: pb/Frank R Paul]
collections
- The Stranger Club (Rialto, California: Fiction House Press, 2018) [coll: stories first appeared 1933-1935 Wonder Stories: pb/Frank R Paul]
links
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