So My Great Grandfather Wrote Some Sci Fi 80 Years Ago *UPDATE

It’s a pretty great story (I know I’m biased), with characters borrowed from some 30s hardboiled detective story plopped into a time-travelling romp through space. Think Casablanca meets the Fifth Element. But there’s an interesting backstory to how this book came to be, and a bit of a mystery too if you ask me (and not just because I’m related to the author).

*Skip straight to the bottom if you're just looking for the update.

Apologies for the repost, but there were some commenters looking for a way to find the book that I never got back to. There's a link at the end for the ebook and paperback version. Plus.... new info from Janos Corp!

This is the first page.

Relativity was written by this guy below, Henry Abner. Handsome devil, huh? Not a selfie, but feel free to #roasthim anyways. What's up with that tie?

Henry Abner was the pen name of Henry Abner Sturdivant, my mother’s mother’s father. He was a fairly prolific writer of early pulp detective stories, but my family never really knew he had written anything in his life other than case reports. Because you see…

...Henry Abner Sturdivant was a cop. That’s him on the left, posing with his two brothers who were also cops. His eldest brother T.O. Sturdivant was the Chief of Police of Atlanta (in the center) and his other brother William was a Pinkerton railroad detective. Nice haircut Unky Bill!

Henry Abner Sturdivant was the chief of police for the tiny town of Washington, Georgia. Now not much happened in Washington in those days (still doesn’t) and it’s probably best known as a possible location for some lost Confederate gold from the American Civil War. But one day in 1935, something did happen. My great, grandfather was killed in the line of duty.

The story I’ve always heard was that some guys in a neighboring town stole a car from a teacher on the 4th of July, and that the suspects were spotted driving down the road towards Washington. My great grandfather got the call, and waited in the town square with his deputy and their squad car.

This is a similar model to their police cruiser (although this is not the actual car). Notice that wide running board under the “23”.

When the car thieves drove through town, Henry Abner Sturdivant JUMPED from the running board of the police car onto the running board of the stolen car, and attempted to apprehend the suspects like some sort of 1930s Mad Max badass. In the ensuing fruckus, the driver crashed into a telephone pole and Chief Sturdivant was thrown onto the road. He spent 6 days in the hospital before he died on July 10, 1935.

This is me posing with my grandmother, Chief Sturdivant’s daughter Sara (mentioned in the article above), showing off some mementos she was given by the town of Washington to commemorate her father. She was only 7 years old when he died, so she doesn’t remember a whole lot from before his death, but she was always immensely proud of her father. Little did we know she had a lot more to be proud of than just his police service!

Cut to almost 80 years later, and my grandmother gets a weird call. In the summer of 2014, the Washington police department was disbanded to save money (the county sheriff’s department took over) and someone had found something interesting in some of the old records, buried deep down in some old evidence storage locker or something.

What they had found were manuscripts for a series of science fiction novels & short stories, written by her father, Henry Abner Sturdivant. Whaaaaaaat?!

Novels? Growing up I never heard anything about him writing anything. My grandmother certainly never told us about it, but lo and behold a little digging revealed he apparently had written a bunch of detective stories and even a few novels back in the 20s and 30s under the pen name Henry Abner!

The names and plots of some of these early stories sound pretty racist to me (check out his wikipedia page to see for yourself), but I imagine that wasn’t too unusual for those times. So why didn’t grandma tell us about any of this? Near as we can tell, her parents kept it from her. His writing was supposedly pretty violent and vulgar for those days. He was a town leader and a man of God, so maybe he didn’t want anyone in tiny Washington to find out he was writing this “filth”, especially his young daughter.

So the people that contacted my grandmother represented a publisher called the Janos Corporation. They wanted to know if they could publish her father's work as a tribute to his contributions to literature. Of course Grandma was delighted (she loved to read). Anything to honor her father was fine by her, and she had never really known about his publishing career anyway. She asked them to contact me, her grandson, since she knew I liked to read science fiction and I was "good with computers and such”.

The Janos Corporation requested the family’s permission to publish these new stories, so they sent me the first book and some short stories to review. This is where it starts to get weird. The Janos Corporation was IN THE BOOK! One of the main characters works for them, the whole first part of the story takes place in a Janos Corporation resort out in space. They are major players in the world of this book.

I haven’t found much about them, other than a corporate website which mostly has information about Relativity. Certainly not anything indicating a company that's been around since 1535, like it claims in the book. But where does the fictional company end and the real company begin?

I guess our family is just happy that someone is doing anything at all with Henry Abner’s lost work, and that we learned about his writing career in the first place. But it seems to me like maybe this Janos Corporation is using his writing to promote themselves, or something else weird is going on. There are ads in the book for other companies that are in the story, but none of them seem to be real and most sound like old-school parodies of real companies.

Anyways, I just thought this fabulous Imgur community might find my family’s story interesting. Thanks for making it this far down!

If you like classic sci-fi and pulpy, hard-boiled detective stories, check out his book on Amazon. There's a free sample for Kindle. I really enjoyed it, and I think others might as well.

So guess who reached out again? That's right, everyone's favorite possibly fictional, possibly evil book publisher. The Janos people let grandma know that a SECOND Henry Abner manuscript is nearing the final stages of "compilation" and is almost ready for the estate to review it. No word yet on whether it's the sequel to Relativity or something else entirely. I'll keep you posted when I learn more!

(or you could follow Henry Abner on Facebook and get the news straight from the corporate overseer's mouth)

More like shameless promotion of a long-dead relative, but they didn't have a .gif for that. Bonus points for anyone that makes one :D

In the meantime, Amazon is running a sale on the e-book version of Relativity to honor the anniversary of Henry Abner's death. So for those of you that were interested in picking it up before, sorry I never posted the link; I didn't want to feel like a used car salesman (but I guess I got over it :P). Here is the link for both the print and kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FDTKFTI

AND FINALLY...
I’ve still got one or two promotional “signed” copies of Relativity that the “Janos Corporation” sent to me. Not sure how they managed to get them signed, seeing as the author has been dead for over 80 years, but I’m happy to share them with my fellow imgurians. If this makes it to the FP (or even if it doesn’t), I’ll mail a copy to the top comment, and maybe 1 more to MY favorite comments.

TL;DR
My great grandfather wrote a book 80 years ago, then died on duty as a cop and everyone forgot about it. Now someone has published it that may or may not be exploiting it to promote their company, which may or may not exist.