About L. Ron Hubbard

About L. Ron Hubbard

L. Ron Hubbard appeared on the SF scene in 1938 at the age of twenty-seven and immediately became a legend. By then he was already in his eighth year as a professional writer. His ability to consistently produce great numbers of grippingly told stories had swiftly made him a fabulous figure with readers and with his fellow writers.

He appeared at a critical juncture in the development of speculative fiction, and was one of the major factors in synergizing its evolution, which was taking place with blinding speed and mounting excitement on America’s newsstands. The 1920s “science wonder” stories of Hugo Gernsback and the 1930s “super-science” machine-adventure sagas of E. E. Smith and his followers were being transformed into what came to be known as “Modern Science Fiction.” Simultaneously, the same forces were creating a “newsstand fantasy” literature of a kind never seen before. To the history of these twinned developments, the career of the young L. Ron Hubbard was crucial.

Edited by former super science star John W. Campbell,  Jr.,  the magazine called Astounding Stories of Super Science became its fields leader as Astounding Science Fiction magazine, with the “Astounding” de-emphasized and shrinking away and the editorial tone shifting ever farther from mighty machines and toward the philosophical bases of human societal problems and human nature. New ways of writing, new writers, new readers, appeared with every issue, wave after wave. Around Astounding—and around Campbell’s now-legendary fantasy magazine, Unknown—flourished a fabulous Golden Age of creativity that swiftly redefined not only the newsstand media but, by its impact, all of twentieth-century speculative literature.

In this creative ferment, Hubbard not only found his favorite kind of fiction, he was in the forefront of inventing it. Producing at a pace none of his contemporaries could match, creating now-famous books such as Final Blackout, Death’s Deputy, Slaves of Sleep, Typewriter in the Sky and Fear, writing under his own name and under pseudonyms, Hubbard was the sort of intensive phenomenon who appears once in a lifetime, in effect makes his own rules, and transforms everything around him. Among those in SF who knew him, and even among those too young to have met him then, stories about Hubbard—fabulous stories about a man who fountained major ideas and memorable characters at an unbelievable pace—abounded even years later. No one in those days could discuss SF without discussing him.

Larger than life, Hubbard was impressive not only for his snowballing popularity but for his actual adventures as an aviator, seafarer and technologist. Pyramiding these various attributes, he became the figure everyone depended on to produce one major exciting work after another, and who delivered. In the Golden Age, he towered over the magazine field as few others had.

His writing career interrupted by service in World War II, he returned to his beloved SF for a few years, successful as ever but increasingly busy with his development of Dianetics. Decades of time passed; succeeding generations of fiction readers knew him only through reprints, losing awareness of his role in SF history. Hubbard meanwhile was prodigiously writing in other fields.

In celebration of his fiftieth anniversary as a professional writer, however, Hubbard returned to SF with the publication of Battlefield Earth, a massive best-selling adventure novel, that was his first new SF in thirty years. Nineteen eighty-five will also see the beginning of the publication of Mission Earth, an incredible ten-volume SF adventure. There are many more works to come as he reestablishes himself in a field whose literary evolution cannot be effectively understood unless the nature and roots of his Golden Age popularity are put back into proper perspective and understood.

Even during the Golden Age, however, few general readers knew of his impressive output of advice and encouragement to new writers. Publishing how-to-do-it articles and features in a wide variety of writers’ magazines, L. Ron Hubbard in the 1930s was a respected elder statesman and role model among novices who probably had no idea their mentor was barely a quarter-century old. More advanced in years now, but no less prodigious a producer, Hubbard has returned not only to SF writing but to the encouragement and support of new talent. To this endeavor he has brought both his creative enthusiasm and his characteristic manner of proceeding, as this book demonstrates and as the following introduction sets forth.…