The Messiah of the Cylinder
Victor Rousseau
Victor Rousseau Emanuel (1879-1960) was a writer of pulp fiction who was active in Great Britain and the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century who wrote under the pen names Victor Rousseau and H. M. Egbert. After an early career as a reporter for the New York World and as an editor of Harper's Weekly, he became a fiction writer. He wrote in a variety of genres, including historical fiction, frontier stories, western romance, and crime fiction, but was probably best known as an early exponent of science fiction and fantasy. His best known novels in those genres were The Messiah of the Cylinder, a story of a man placed in suspended animation for 100 years, and The Eye of Balamok, a lost-race novel. Several of his stories were adapted for Western films, and he was the author of one silent film screenplay, The Devil's Tower, based on one of his stories.