The Dangerous Dimension
Page 4
and his photographs of China’s
Great Wall long graced American
geography texts.
L. Ron Hubbard,
Upon his return to the United States and a hasty
left, at Congressional
Airport, Washington,
completion of his interrupted high school education,
DC, 1931, with
the young Ron Hubbard entered George Washington
members of George
Washington
University. There, as fans of his aerial adventures
University flying
club.
may have heard, he earned his wings as a pioneering barnstormer at the dawn of American aviation. He also earned a place in free-flight record books for the longest sustained flight above Chicago. Moreover, as a roving reporter for Sportsman Pilot (featuring his first professionally penned articles), he further helped inspire a generation of pilots who would take America to world airpower.
Immediately beyond his sophomore year, Ron embarked on the first of his famed ethnological expeditions, initially to then untrammeled Caribbean shores (descriptions of which would later fill a whole series of West Indies mystery-thrillers).
That the Puerto Rican interior would also figure into the future of Ron Hubbard stories was likewise no accident.
For in addition to cultural studies of the island, a 1932–33
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LRH expedition is rightly remembered as conducting the first complete mineralogical survey of a Puerto Rico under United States jurisdiction.
There was many another adventure along this vein: As a lifetime member of the famed Explorers Club, L. Ron Hubbard charted North Pacific waters with the first shipboard radio direction finder, and so pioneered a long-range navigation system universally employed until the late twentieth century. While not to put too fine an edge on it, he also held a rare Master Mariner’s license to pilot any vessel, of any tonnage in any ocean.
Yet lest we stray too far afield,
there is an LRH note at this juncture
in his saga, and it reads in part:
“I started out writing for the pulps, writing the best I knew, writing for
every mag on the stands, slanting as
well as I could.”
To which one might add: His
earliest submissions date from the
summer of 1934, and included tales drawn from Capt. L. Ron Hubbard
in Ketchikan, Alaska,
true-to-life Asian adventures, with characters roughly 1940, on his Alaskan
modeled on British/American intelligence operatives
Radio Experimental
Expedition, the first
he had known in Shanghai. His early Westerns were
of three voyages
conducted under the
similarly peppered with details drawn from personal
Explorers Club flag.
experience. Although therein lay a first hard lesson from the often cruel world of the pulps. His first Westerns were soundly rejected as lacking the authenticity of a Max Brand yarn 39
♦ L . R O N H U B B A R D ♦
(a particularly frustrating comment given L. Ron Hubbard’s Westerns came straight from his Montana homeland, while Max Brand was a mediocre New York poet named Frederick Schiller Faust, who turned out implausible six-shooter tales from the terrace of an Italian villa).
Nevertheless, and needless to say, L. Ron Hubbard persevered and soon earned a reputation as among the most publishable names in pulp fiction, with a ninety percent placement rate of first-draft manuscripts. He was also among the most prolific, averaging between seventy and a hundred thousand words a month. Hence the rumors that L. Ron Hubbard had redesigned a typewriter for faster keyboard action and pounded
A Man of Many Names
Between 1934 and 1950,
out manuscripts on a continuous
L. Ron Hubbard authored more than
roll of butcher paper to save the
fifteen million words of fiction in more
than two hundred classic publications.
precious seconds it took to insert a
To supply his fans and editors with
stories across an array of genres and
single sheet of paper into manual
pulp titles, he adopted fifteen pseudonyms
typewriters of the day.
in addition to his already renowned
L. Ron Hubbard byline.
That all L. Ron Hubbard
Winchester Remington Colt
stories did not run beneath said
Lt. Jonathan Daly
byline is yet another aspect of
Capt. Charles Gordon
Capt. L. Ron Hubbard
pulp fiction lore. That is, as
Bernard Hubbel
publishers periodically rejected
Michael Keith
Rene Lafayette
manuscripts from top-drawer
Legionnaire 148
Legionnaire 14830
authors if only to avoid paying
Ken Martin
top dollar, L. Ron Hubbard and
Scott Morgan
Lt. Scott Morgan
company just as frequently replied
Kurt von Rachen
Barry Randolph
with submissions under various
Capt. Humbert Reynolds
pseudonyms. In Ron’s case, the
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list included: Rene Lafayette,
Captain Charles Gordon, Lt. Scott
Morgan and the notorious Kurt von
Rachen—supposedly on the lam
for a murder rap, while hammering
out two-fisted prose in Argentina.
The point: While L. Ron Hubbard
as Ken Martin spun stories of
Southeast Asian intrigue, LRH as
Barry Randolph authored tales of
romance on the Western range—which, stretching
L. Ron Hubbard,
circa 1930, at the
between a dozen genres is how he came to stand
outset of a literary
among the two hundred elite authors providing close
career that would
finally span half
to a million tales through the glory days of American
a century.
Pulp Fiction.
In evidence of exactly that, by 1936 L. Ron Hubbard was literally leading pulp fiction’s elite as president of New York’s American Fiction Guild. Members included a veritable pulp hall of fame: Lester “Doc Savage” Dent, Walter “The Shadow” Gibson, and the legendary Dashiell Hammett—to cite but a few.
Also in evidence of just where L. Ron Hubbard stood within his first two years on the American pulp circuit: By the spring of 1937, he was ensconced in Hollywood, adopting a Caribbean thriller for Columbia Pictures, remembered today as The Secret of Treasure Island. Comprising fifteen thirty-minute episodes, the L. Ron Hubbard screenplay led to the most profitable matinée serial in Hollywood history. In accord with Hollywood culture, he was thereafter continually called upon 41
♦ L . R O N H U B B A R D ♦
to rewrite/doctor scripts—most
famously for long-time friend and
fellow adventurer Clark Gable.
In the interim—and herein lies
another distinctive chapter of
the L. Ron Hubbard story—he
continually worked to open Pulp
Kingdom gates to up-and-coming
authors. Or, for that matter, anyone
who wished to write. It was a fairly
The 1937 Secret of
unconventional stance, as markets were already thin Treasure Island, a
fifteen-episode serial
and competit
ion razor sharp. But the fact remains, it
adapted for the screen
was an L. Ron Hubbard hallmark that he vehemently
by L. Ron Hubbard
from his novel,
lobbied on behalf of young authors—regularly Murder at Pirate
supplying instructional articles to trade journals, Castle.
guest-lecturing to short story classes at George Washington University and Harvard, and even founding his own creative writing competition. It was established in 1940, dubbed the Golden Pen, and guaranteed winners both New York representation and publication in Argosy.
But it was John W. Campbell Jr.’s Astounding Science Fiction that finally proved the most memorable LRH vehicle. While every fan of L. Ron Hubbard’s galactic epics undoubtedly knows the story, it nonetheless bears repeating: By late 1938, the pulp publishing magnate of Street & Smith was determined to revamp Astounding Science Fiction for broader readership.
In particular, senior editorial director F. Orlin Tremaine called for stories with a stronger human element. When acting editor John W. Campbell balked, preferring his spaceship-driven 42
A M E R I C A N ♦
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tales, Tremaine enlisted Hubbard. Hubbard, in turn, replied with the genre’s first truly character-driven works, wherein heroes are pitted not against bug-eyed monsters but the mystery and majesty of deep space itself—and thus was launched the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
The names alone are enough to quicken the pulse of any science fiction aficionado, including LRH friend and protégé, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and Ray Bradbury. Moreover, when coupled with LRH stories of fantasy, we further come to what’s rightly been described as the foundation of every modern tale of
horror: L. Ron Hubbard’s immortal
Fear. It was rightly proclaimed by Stephen King as one of the very
few works to genuinely warrant that
overworked term “classic”—as in:
“This is a classic tale of creeping, surreal menace and horror. . . . This is one of the really, really good ones.”
To accommodate the greater body
of L. Ron Hubbard fantasies, Street & Smith
L. Ron Hubbard,
1948, among fellow
inaugurated Unknown—a classic pulp if there ever
science fiction
was one, and wherein readers were soon thrilling to
luminaries at the
World Science
the likes of Typewriter in the Sky and Slaves of Sleep Fiction Convention
in Toronto.
of which Frederik Pohl would declare: “There are bits and pieces from Ron’s work that became part of the language in ways that very few other writers managed.”
And, indeed, at J. W. Campbell Jr.’s insistence, Ron was regularly drawing on themes from the Arabian Nights and 43
♦ L . R O N H U B B A R D ♦
so introducing readers to a world of genies, jinn, Aladdin and Sinbad—all of which, of course, continue to float through cultural mythology to this day.
At least as influential in terms of post-apocalypse stories was L. Ron Hubbard’s 1940 Final Blackout. Generally acclaimed as the finest anti-war novel of the decade and among the ten best works of the genre ever authored—here, too, was a tale that would live on in ways few other writers imagined.
Hence, the later Robert Heinlein
verdict: “ Final Blackout is as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written.”
Like many another who both
lived and wrote American pulp
adventure, the war proved a tragic
end to Ron’s sojourn in the pulps.
He served with distinction in four
theaters and was highly decorated
Portland,
for commanding corvettes in the North Pacific. He
Oregon, 1943;
L. Ron Hubbard,
was also grievously wounded in combat, lost many a
captain of the
close friend and colleague and thus resolved to say
US Navy subchaser
PC 815.
farewell to pulp fiction and devote himself to what it had supported these many years—namely, his serious research.
But in no way was the LRH literary saga at an end, for as he wrote some thirty years later, in 1980:
“Recently there came a period when I had little to do. This was novel in a life so crammed with busy years, and I decided to amuse myself by writing a novel that was pure science fiction.”
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That work was Battlefield Earth:
A Saga of the Year 3000. It was an Final Blackout
immediate New York Times bestseller is as perfect
and, in fact, the first international
a piece of
science fiction blockbuster in
science fiction
decades. It was not, however,
as has ever
L. Ron Hubbard’s magnum opus, as
been written.
that distinction is generally reserved
for his next and final work: The 1.2
—Robert Heinlein
million word Mission Earth.
How he managed those 1.2 million words in just over twelve months is yet another piece of the L. Ron Hubbard legend.
But the fact remains, he did indeed author a ten-volume dekalogy that lives in publishing history for the fact that each and every volume of the series was also a New York Times bestseller.
Moreover, as subsequent generations discovered L. Ron Hubbard through republished works and novelizations of his screenplays, the mere fact of his name on a cover signaled an international bestseller. . . . Until, to date, sales of his works exceed hundreds of millions, and he otherwise remains among the most enduring and widely read authors in literary history. Although as a final word on the tales of L. Ron Hubbard, perhaps it’s enough to simply reiterate what editors told readers in the glory days of American Pulp Fiction: He writes the way he does, brothers, because he’s been there, seen it and done it!
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The Stories from the Golden
♦
♦
T H E S T O R I E S F R O M T H E
G O L D E N A G E
Your ticket to adventure starts here with the Stories from the Golden Age collection by master storyteller L. Ron Hubbard.
These gripping tales are set in a kaleidoscope of exotic locales and brim with fascinating characters, including some of the most vile villains, dangerous dames and brazen heroes you’ll ever get to meet.
The entire collection of over one hundred and fifty stories is being released in a series of eighty books and audiobooks.
For an up-to-date listing of available titles, go to www.goldenagestories.com.
A I R A D V E N T U R E
Arctic Wings
Man-Killers of the Air
The Battling Pilot
On Blazing Wings
Boomerang Bomber
Red Death Over China
The Crate Killer
Sabotage in the Sky
The Dive Bomber
Sky Birds Dare!
Forbidden Gold
The Sky-Crasher
Hurtling Wings
Trouble on His Wings
The Lieutenant Takes the Sky
Wings Over Ethiopia
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F A R - F L U N G A D V E N T U R E
The Adventure of “X”
Hurricane
All Frontiers Are Jealous
The Iron Duke
The Barbarians
; Machine Gun 21,000
The Black Sultan
Medals for Mahoney
Black Towers to Danger
Price of a Hat
The Bold Dare All
Red Sand
Buckley Plays a Hunch
The Sky Devil
The Cossack
The Small Boss of Nunaloha
Destiny’s Drum
The Squad That Never Came Back
Escape for Three
Starch and Stripes
Fifty-Fifty O’Brien
Tomb of the Ten Thousand Dead
The Headhunters
Trick Soldier
Hell’s Legionnaire
While Bugles Blow!
He Walked to War
Yukon Madness
Hostage to Death
S E A A D V E N T U R E
Cargo of Co ns
The Phantom Patrol
The Drowned City
Sea Fangs
False Cargo
Submarine
Grounded
Twenty Fathoms Down
Loot of the Shanung
Under the Black Ensign
Mister Tidwell, Gunner
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H E G O L D E N A G E
T A L E S F R O M T H E O R I E N T
The Devil— With Wings
Pearl Pirate
The Falcon Killer
The Red Dragon
Five Mex for a Million
Spy Killer
Golden Hell
Tah
The Green God
The Trail of the Red Diamonds
Hurricane’s Roar
Wind-Gone-Mad
Inky Odds
Yellow Loot
Orders Is Orders
M Y S T E R Y
The Blow Torch Murder
The Grease Spot
Brass Keys to Murder
Killer Ape
Calling Squad Cars!
Killer’s Law
The Carnival of Death
The Mad Dog Murder
The Chee-Chalker
Mouthpiece
Dead Men Kill
Murder Afloat
The Death Flyer
The Slickers
Flame City
They Killed Him Dead
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