In 1938, he was approached by the venerable New York publishing house of Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction. Wanting to capitalize on the proven reader appeal of the
L. Ron Hubbard byline to capture more readers for this emerging genre, they essentially offered to buy all the science fiction he wrote. When he protested that he did not write about machines and machinery but that he wrote about people, they told him that was exactly what was wanted. The rest is history.
The impact and influence that his novels and stories had on the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror virtually amounted to the changing of a genre. It is the compelling human element that he originally brought to this new genre that remains today the basis of its growing international popularity.
L. Ron Hubbard consistently enabled readers to peer into the minds and emotions of characters in a way that sharply heightened the reading experience without slowing the pace of the story, a level of writing rarely achieved.
Among the most celebrated examples of this are three stories he published in a single, phenomenally creative year (1940)—Final Blackout and its grimly possible future world of unremitting war and ultimate courage which Robert Heinlein called “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written”; the ingenious fantasy-adventure, Typewriter in the Sky described by Clive Cussler as “written in the great style adventure should be written in”; and the prototype novel of clutching psychological suspense and horror in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, Fear, studied by writers from Stephen King to Ray Bradbury.
It was Mr. Hubbard’s trendsetting work in the speculative fiction field from 1938 to 1950, particularly, that not only helped to expand the scope and imaginative boundaries of science fiction and fantasy but indelibly established him as one of the founders of what continues to be regarded as the genre’s Golden Age.
Widely honored—recipient of Italy’s Tetradramma D’Oro Award and a special Gutenberg Award, among other significant literary honors—Battlefield Earth has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in 23 languages and is the biggest single-volume science fiction novel in the history of the genre at 1050 pages. It was ranked number three out of the 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century in the Random House Modern Library Reader’s Poll.
The Mission Earth dekalogy has been equally acclaimed, winning the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the coveted Nova-Science Fiction Award from Italy’s National Committee for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The dekalogy has sold more than seven million copies in 6 languages, and each of its 10 volumes became New York Times and international bestsellers as they were released.
The first of L. Ron Hubbard’s original screenplays Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong, novelized by author Kevin J. Anderson, was released in 1998 and immediately appeared as a New York Times bestseller. This was followed in 1999 with the publication of A Very Strange Trip, an original L. Ron Hubbard story of time-traveling adventure, novelized by Dave Wolverton, that also became a New York Times bestseller directly following its release.
His literary output ultimately encompassed more than 250 published novels, novelettes, short stories and screenplays in every major genre.
For more information on L. Ron Hubbard and his many acclaimed works of fiction visit www.galaxypress.com.
Mission Earth Volume 10: The Doomed Planet Page 32