Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  On October 28, 1976, Quentin was found behind the wheel of a white Pontiac parked outside McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. The engine was running, and a vacuum cleaner hose ran from the exhaust pipe to one of the windows. Quentin was alive, but he never regained consciousness, and he died in the hospital two weeks later. He was twenty-two years old. When his parents heard the news, Mary Sue screamed for ten minutes, while Hubbard was furious: “That stupid fucking kid!”

  After Quentin’s suicide, the mood grew darker. Mary Sue’s dogs, which were said to be clear, allegedly snarled at anyone who had negative thoughts about their owners, while Hubbard became obsessed with a system for cleansing the body of drugs, hinting that only those who underwent it would survive the coming nuclear holocaust: “And that poses the interesting probability that only Scientologists will be functioning in areas experiencing heavy fallout in an atomic war.”

  On July 8, 1977, federal agents with sledgehammers conducted raids on the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., in a clear act of retaliation for the Snow White Program. Hubbard saw that he had to put distance between himself and his wife. A week later, he snuck out of La Quinta by night, accompanied by three messengers, and ended up in Sparks, Nevada. As he had with Polly and Sara, Hubbard was ready to cast off Mary Sue as soon as she became inconvenient, and he no longer had to wait for a replacement.

  In his isolation, he returned for the first time in years to fiction. A key factor was the release of Star Wars, which became one of his favorite movies. It was the ultimate invasion of the genre into the mainstream—even if it owed more to Joseph Campbell than to John—and Hubbard felt that he was in a better position than anyone to supply the culture with the material that it wanted. He commenced work on a novella, later adapted into a screenplay, titled Revolt in the Stars, which combined the Xenu story with a blatant attempt to capitalize on George Lucas’s space opera.

  After Hubbard tried unsuccessfully to shop the script around to studios, it occurred to him to make it himself. In early 1978, he returned to La Quinta, where he shot a series of training films. They allowed him to indulge in his fondness for gore—the actors were so covered in fake blood that their clothes had to be cut off after filming—but he always found something wrong with the result, and few of the movies were screened. One of the camera operators was a teenager named David Miscavige, who became one of the only men whom Hubbard trusted.

  On August 15, 1978, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted Mary Sue and eight other Scientologists on twenty-eight counts relating to the Snow White Program. Shortly afterward, Hubbard suffered a pulmonary embolism, collapsing while filming in the desert. A senior case supervisor was brought out to treat him, and during their auditing sessions, Hubbard confessed that he had been driven by “an insatiable lust for power and money.”

  Hubbard began to improve, but after another agent of the church went to the FBI, he disappeared again. Under cover of darkness, he traveled with a small staff to a town in the San Jacinto Mountains, where he settled in March 1979. At his new house, he audited himself every morning and regaled his followers with accounts of his past lives, some of which were drawn from his old stories.

  In October, the defendants pled guilty to a single charge each, and Mary Sue was sentenced to five years in prison and a fine of ten thousand dollars. Hubbard moved into an expensive Blue Bird mobile home, living on the road until 1983, when he bought a ranch in Creston, California, that had once belonged to the actor Robert Mitchum. He seemed outwardly detached from the church, restricting himself to statements on his birthday and at the beginning of each year.

  Yet he maintained control from a distance. On his orders, Miscavige, who had risen rapidly in the ranks, embarked on a vast restructuring, deposing Mary Sue, expelling her children, and overseeing a mass expulsion of offenders. The church, which had once consisted of fifty thousand members, saw its numbers reduced by half. Miscavige had studied Hubbard closely, and it was through him that the Sea Org’s culture of paranoia grew into something that would outlive its founder.

  Incredibly, many of those who were driven out refused to blame Hubbard, whom they thought was either dead or imprisoned. In fact, he was “deeply involved” with Miscavige’s actions, dispatching weekly orders designed primarily to increase the flow of money into his private accounts. But he was still effectively isolated, and he responded by focusing on his writing, much as Asimov had dealt with his troubles by plunging into solitary work. Both men defined themselves as monsters of productivity, and Hubbard returned to fiction with a vengeance.

  He had continued to rework Revolt in the Stars, but after it became clear that a movie was unlikely to materialize, he channeled his energy in another direction. Over a period of eight months, he wrote a massive novel of close to half a million words, based on seven hundred pages of handwritten notes. Its title was announced as Man: The Endangered Species, but it was ultimately published by St. Martin’s Press as Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, with a muscular figure on its cover who bore a distinct resemblance to Hubbard himself.

  No less an authority than Mitt Romney would later call it his favorite novel, and although Hubbard’s reclusiveness and health problems have led to speculation about ghostwriters, any doubts that the book was written by him were dispelled by its first section, which was close to a straight rewrite of Buckskin Brigades. Its protagonist was the latest incarnation of Yellow Hair, living in leather and moccasins with the last vestiges of humanity, which had been devastated a millennium earlier in an invasion by greedy aliens called Psychlos. Their unseen rulers were the Catrists, making the real villains the “Psychlo Catrists.”

  In the introduction, Hubbard alternately built Campbell up and tore him down, often in the same sentence, and the entire book played like a frenzied exorcism of the editor’s influence. Van Vogt couldn’t finish it, but he provided a blurb calling it a “masterpiece,” while Heinlein wrote in a letter, “It’s a great story, Ron. I hope it sells a million copies in hardback.” St. Martin’s Press had similar hopes. The church pledged to buy fifty thousand copies, and after it hit the bestseller lists, John Travolta, a devoted Scientologist, expressed interest in starring in the movie.

  Hubbard wasn’t quite done yet. After finishing Battlefield Earth, he plunged immediately into an even more bloated novel, which Miscavige personally delivered in a banker’s box to Author Services, the affiliate of the church that handled the founder’s literary work. Mission Earth weighed in at more than a million words, and its editors were reluctant to touch it, aside from carving it up at random into a hideously distended “dekalogy” of ten books.

  Its first volume, The Invaders Plan, went on sale in October 1985. As before, Scientologists bought copies by the armful, which would be recycled back to stores, sometimes with their price tags still attached. Hubbard was never informed of these tactics, and he took genuine satisfaction in the knowledge that he had written another bestseller. Three months later, he was dead.

  ON FEBRUARY 13, 1970, ASIMOV HAD TAPED AN APPEARANCE ON THE DICK CAVETT SHOW. SEATED beside him on the couch was an attractive English actress, and Asimov was his usual self. When Cavett jokingly told him that he was a romantic, Asimov replied, “Yes, I am.” He turned to the starlet. “And talking of romantic, dear, what are you doing tonight after the show?”

  Cavett played along with the bit: “Come, come, Isaac, don’t get horny on my time.” There was laughter from the audience, but afterward, Asimov began to worry. After the taping, he phoned Gertrude about it, hoping that she wouldn’t be offended when it aired the following night, but it didn’t work. Before long, she was talking about leaving him again.

  The week after the telecast, Gertrude went on a visit to her mother, implying that she might not be coming back. She had made similar threats before—she was suffering from arthritis, which darkened her moods—but this time, he decided to take her seriously. Going to his lawyer, he prepared a formal letter stating his intention to seek a d
ivorce. The decision was seemingly abrupt, but it reflected a conviction that had been growing inside him for years, much like Heinlein’s break from Leslyn—except that it had taken Asimov the better part of a decade.

  It was no accident that he made his choice soon after publishing his hundredth book, a personal milestone that Gertrude had dismissed. Yet it was still a drastic move for a man who hated change. Asimov couldn’t obtain a divorce in Massachusetts without alleging wrongdoing, so he moved into a hotel in New York, where Janet Jeppson was waiting for him. As they unpacked, she said hesitantly, “You know, my apartment isn’t far away, and you’re perfectly welcome to spend time there over the weekend, if it gets too lonely for you out here.”

  He gladly accepted, and he eventually moved in with her, using the hotel only as an office. Asimov had worried that he would have trouble writing, but Campbell, who was still alive, bought the first story that he finished in the city, offering him the same kind of encouragement at the end of their partnership that he had at the beginning. When Janet met the editor, who lectured her on her own field of psychiatry, she thought that he was “exasperating—but fascinating.”

  After Campbell’s death, Asimov made a triumphant return to science fiction with The Gods Themselves, a novel that gave him more pleasure in writing than he had felt in more than a decade. Mindful of his reputation for avoiding sexual content, he decided that the central section would be all about sex—but for a species with three sexes, not two. His experiences with Campbell had left him reluctant to deal with extraterrestrials, but now he resolved to create the best aliens that anyone had ever seen. When set alongside I Will Fear No Evil, it made a strong case that Asimov, after trailing Heinlein for most of his career, had finally pulled ahead.

  It also reflected his newfound personal contentment. By the summer of 1972, he was referring to Janet as his fiancée, and in November of the following year, shortly after his mother passed away, his divorce from Gertrude—which cost him a staggering fifty thousand dollars in legal fees—was finalized. He and Janet got married, moving into a luxurious apartment with a beautiful view of Central Park—although Asimov, with his fear of heights, rarely ventured onto the balcony.

  One of his finest stories, “The Bicentennial Man,” soon followed, and his career continued to flourish—he discussed projects with the likes of Woody Allen, Paul McCartney, and Steven Spielberg. In 1976, the publisher Joel Davis told him that he wanted to launch a science fiction magazine with a famous name. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, with his face prominently featured on the cover, was a success, and Davis later doubled down by buying Analog.

  Asimov remained close to his daughter, but not to his son, who was set up with a trust fund after he declined to go to college. They spoke only rarely on the phone, and Asimov devoted his attention to younger men to whom he could more comfortably serve as a mentor. As far as women were concerned, Janet was conscious of his behavior, which she tolerated. When he joked to her once that he had been caught kissing a woman by the New York Post—it was actually Janet herself—she simply said, “I keep telling you to be careful.”

  The only sore point was his health. In May 1977, he felt chest pains, but he insisted on walking to a medical checkup. Paul Esserman, his doctor, was furious, and an electrocardiogram revealed that he had suffered a coronary earlier that month. “If it hadn’t been a mild one,” Esserman said, “you would have died some time in this last week, probably as you ran up the stairs to my office.”

  Asimov was on the mend, but mortality was on his mind. When the novelist Martin Amis met him in 1980, he reported, “I expected cheerful volubility, but Asimov gives off an air of irritated preoccupation, as if silently completing a stint of mental arithmetic.” He was an institution by now. Gene Roddenberry asked for his advice on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which listed him as a special consultant. When Asimov saw his credit in the theater, he clapped wildly, prompting someone to remark in the aisle, “There’s Asimov, applauding his own name.”

  After the success of Star Wars, the studios had begun to look more seriously at science fiction. When the director John Carpenter was offered a chance to remake The Thing from Another World, he became enthusiastic about returning to the premise of “Who Goes There?,” and the makeup artist Rob Bottin devised unsurpassed practical effects to put its horrors on-screen. On its initial release in 1982, The Thing was poorly received—Harlan Ellison dismissed it as a “pointless, dehumanized freeway smashup of grisly special effects dreck”—but its reputation grew over time, and it became more responsible than any other work for keeping Campbell’s name alive.

  As for Asimov, it was his science fiction, not his nonfiction, that remained perpetually in print. His publishers wanted more, and he was offered a large advance for a new Foundation novel, which he had to tackle for the first time without Campbell. Foundation’s Edge, which played down the concept of psychohistory and emphasized his own ideas, was a comeback that gave him his first bestseller, as similar efforts had for Heinlein and Hubbard—and in his case, no one had to be ordered to buy it. Science fiction had always favored the young, and all three men wanted to prove that they still mattered.

  Over the next nine years, Asimov passed two hundred books through his word processor, including more Foundation and robot novels. His arteries had narrowed, forcing him to ask those around him to walk more slowly, which left him in more of a rush on the page. Years earlier, Barbara Walters had asked him what he would do if he had only six months left to live. He had replied, “Type faster.”

  In 1983, he was advised to undergo a triple bypass. On the day of the operation, he told Paul Esserman, “Listen, I must have plenty of oxygen for my brain. I don’t care what happens to my body, within reason, but my brain mustn’t be in any way disadvantaged. You’ll have to explain to everybody involved in the operation that I have an unusual brain that must be protected.”

  The doctor reassured him, and the bypass, he was later told, had been perfect. When Asimov opened his eyes in the recovery room, Esserman asked him to recite a limerick to test his faculties. Asimov began:

  There was an old doctor named Paul

  With a penis exceedingly small—

  Esserman broke in to say that he seemed fine. The following day, however, Asimov came down with a fever, and it seemed that he might not survive. Within a few days, it passed. His doctors, who thought that it was postsurgical inflammation, didn’t realize that it was a symptom of something worse. Asimov had received a blood transfusion during his operation, and he was infected with HIV.

  IN 1973, THE INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL UNION APPROVED A PROPOSAL TO NAME A CRATER on Mars after John W. Campbell. By honoring such figures as Campbell, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Stanley Weinbaum, Carl Sagan said, they were acknowledging “a debt to science fiction that scientists have now in part repaid.” The Campbell Award for Best New Writer was inaugurated by the World Science Fiction Society, along with the Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.

  A year later, George O. Smith retired after decades of work in the electronics industry. He was looking forward to spending more time with Doña, but twelve days after their shared retirement began, she underwent a sudden decline and was hospitalized. She died on May 25, 1974.

  After Campbell’s death, Peg sold her crewel business and the house in Mountainside, moving to Alabama to be close to Jane. She passed away in her sleep, of cardiac arrest, at their vacation home in Maine on August 16, 1979.

  Kay Tarrant left Analog in 1973 and retired to Hoboken. She died on March 1, 1980. A few years before her retirement, she reportedly said to a startled group of writers at lunch, “Personally, I don’t give a fuck what you write, but we have teenagers who read the magazine.”

  ON JANUARY 19, 1986, HUBBARD SENT A FINAL MESSAGE TO HIS FOLLOWERS. HE PROMISED THAT the Sea Org would always exist, “no matter that we may leave the surface of this planet,”
and concluded, “I’ll be scouting the way and doing the first port survey missions. I expect your continuing backup. You’ve got a little under a billion left on your current hitch, and it is hoped you will sign up again—veterans are valuable!” It was signed “L. Ron Hubbard, Admiral.”

  Hubbard had suffered a stroke three days earlier. Knowing that he was dying, he had revised his will, muttering in his nightgown, “Let’s get this over with! My head is hurting!” He died in his Blue Bird mobile home on January 24, attended by a few followers, with the cause of death given as a cerebral vascular accident. His ashes were scattered at sea, in accordance with his teachings, which stated that the dispersal of remains in water would liberate the thetan from its host.

  On January 27, before a crowd at the Hollywood Palladium, Miscavige delivered the news in front of a portrait of Hubbard: “L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime for seventy-four years, ten months, and eleven days. The body he had used to facilitate his existence in this universe had ceased to be useful and in fact had become an impediment to the work he now must do outside its confines. The being we knew as L. Ron Hubbard still exists. Although you may feel grief, understand that he did not, and does not now. He simply moved on to his next step.”

  Hubbard’s obituary ran on January 28, 1986, on the day of the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, which delivered a devastating blow to the American space program. In his will, he left millions of dollars to the church, with smaller amounts for Mary Sue and some of his children. L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., and Alexis got nothing, although they later settled with the estate.

  His true legacy lay elsewhere. At three remote compounds, plans were made to preserve his writings—including his fiction—in underground vaults designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Written on steel plates or archival paper and encased in titanium capsules, they might conceivably outlast most of the works that human civilization has produced. Future generations may well read Hubbard, assuming that he is all that survives. But they might be the only ones who will.