Be honest: would you be more forgiving of Hubbard's work if Scientology didn't exist?

Cafe Society
1

Well, would you?

I think I probably would; I’m quite a consumer of SF books and yet I’ve never quite been able to bring myself to read one of his, even when I see them on sale for pennies in a charity shop. Likewise the movie Battlefield Earth - I watched it when it came to terrestrial TV, but I’m conscious that my conclusion that it is a pile of tripe is somewhat pre-ordained by my rather jaundiced view of Hubbard as founder of Scientology and Travolta as follower.

I’m sure I’ve read/watched and forgiven bad SF in the past, but I can’t find it in my heart to do the same for Hubbard. How about you?

2

I once read the book Battlefield Earth. It took me about 20 hours spread over a week to read the book, and I want that time back!!.

I love reading. But when it comes to Hubbard’s books, my recommendation is: Don’t.

3

But do you think you’d feel

4

Gaaah!

But do you think you’d feel quite so cheated if it were not the case that Hubbard had been quite such a fraudulent individual and had not spawned such the legacy of Scientology?

5

His book, Fear, was an entertaining read, although I had read it before I knew Scientology existed. His Mission Earth series is utter drek though. I got to book 4 of 10 before realizing what garbage it was and disowning myself of its existence.

6

AQbsolutely No Way.

I searched out and read some of Hubbard’s stuff before he made his way back into print with Battlefield Earth. You hear over and over that Hubbard was an extremely popular writer Back In The Day, but I have to admit that I don’t buy it. His stuff was rarely reprinted in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. It was easy to find Asimov, Heinlein, deCamp, and all those other Golden-Agers i editions from Ace and Ballantine and Signet, but the Hubbards were few and far between. I found a couple of Ace reprints of his stuff, one DAW press, and something by a publisher I never heard of – I suspect a pre-Bridge publications cientology group. I never saw his stuff new on any bookstands, only in the “used” stacks. I never saw his stuff published by Ballantine/Del Rey. In principle, as a Golden Ager whose stuff hadn’t seen a lot of later reprinting, he would’ve been ideal for the Ballantine “Best Science Fiction of …” series.

All of which suggests to me that he wasn’t generally thought to be as good as siome people made him out to be.

I find his writing style annoying. It doesn’t sweep me up and carry me along. I don’t find his ideas or characters interesting. he seems to have a pretty wide mean streak in him. And he doesn’t give the impression of knowing a lot of science. An awful lot of his stuff is fantasy (“Slaves of Sleep”, “Fear”, “Typewriter in the Sky”) rather than SF.
I love Science Fiction and Fantasy, and have been reading it since I was a kid, but I had to force my way through L. Ron’s works. Considered on its own merits, I can’t stand the stuff.

I “read” Battlefield Earth on audiocasette. I simply cannot believe that book. What the heck was he thinking? Johnny “Goodboy” Tyler? Exploding atmospheres? Fusible links in alien brains? The whole ludicrous setup with working jets and training machines after millenia? Suspension of Disbelief ought not to be abused this way.

7

I read several of El Ron’s dreck before I ever heard of Diuretics, uh, Dianetics.

Fear is the best Hubbard book in the same way that Moe was the most intelligent Stooge. Final Blackout read like it was written by somebody with a stiffy for fascism (it was). Buckskin Brigades has been audited from my reactive mind. The failings of Battlefield Earth have been covered already.

I did read the Mission Earth dreckology, but that was after I heard of the electrified soup cans. I can’t stop reading a series once I’ve started, which is also why I will hate John Norman until the day I die. Now there’s a man who can compete with El Ron in the less-than-special olympics.

Hubbard was popular, but not with readers so much as publishers. That was mostly because he could crank out the “penny per page” writings that pulp-era publishers required.

8

But isn’t much of that because of Scientologist propaganda? Seems that without his cult, Hubbard likely would’ve disappeared into obscurity, the type of SF writer that only die hard SF experts would even know about.

9

If it weren’t for scientiology, people might enjoy making fun of him a lot more. Bout it.

10

As it happens, I read (or in some cases, “attempted to read”) some of Hubbard’s writings before I knew anything about Scientology. I grew up out where owls hoot in the daytime, and had no interest in movie stars beyond watching them do entertaining things on the screen, so it never came up. Thus, my initial impression was uninfluenced by any of the disdain I would come to hold for L. Ron and Scientology.

My conclusion, at the time, was that he was an utter hack. I, too, am compulsive about finishing a series once I start it, but I had no hesitation in abandoning the Battlefield series. In fact, I dropped it in mid-book, which is quite out-of-character for me.

11

I doubt I ever would have heard of L. Ron Hubbard if Scientology didn’t exist. I’m a major SF fan and know a lot of obscure authors, but Hubbard never made much of a mark on the field.

12

I read Battlefield Earth before I knew who Hubbard was and before I heard of Scientology. I thought the book was Okay. It started strong, but got worse as it went along. I then made the mistake of reading the first of the Mission Earth books. This putrid crap convince me he was a hack writer.

Then I found out about Scientology…

and really learned to despise him.

Jim

13

Basically what **BrainGlutton ** said. He’s a hack, first and foremost.

14

Like others, I tried to read his books in middle school, before I’d heard of Scientology. The books were poorly written even by Golden Age standards, with non-compelling characters and huge blocks of boring exposition. He’d be totally forgotten today if not for Scientology.

15

If reading the Mission Earth series doesn’t blight your soul and leave you with a bitter, searing hatred for the man who produced it, you’re just not human.

16

Generally, “Fear” and “Typewriter in the Sky” are well regarded minor stories. The rest of his output is hackwork.

I suspect his stuff wasn’t reprinted in the 50s because he wanted to obscure his past and wished only to be known for Dianetics and later Scientology.

Very few authors of his time knew a lot of science. And you don’t have to know a lot to write successful SF. I’d point to Harlan Ellision, Philip K. Dick, Anne McCaffrey, and Ray Bradbury as good SF writers for whom the science was not that important.

17

I agree that not all science fiction authors know a lot of science, and some excellent ones didn’t know very much – Fredric Brown wrote excellent SF, but didn’t know all that much. I wouldn’t say that Bradbury, Ellison, and Dick don’t know much about science – which is very different from saying that “science was not that important”. Ellison in particular knows science without having to be obeessive about it. (I don’t mention McCaffrey here maunly because of that boron nonsense in the Dragon books)

My point is that for someone they keep calling a “science fiction” author, there ain’t much science in his works, and he seems not to have gone out of his way to find out about any. Even works that look superficially like science fiction (“Beyond the Black Nebula”) are really hack fantasy, without any attempt to convince you otherwise. One book (The title is something like “Journey Beyond Tomorrow”) has, as its sole bit of science, Lorentzian Time Contraction. And it doesn’t even use that well.
McCaffrety, Brown, Sheckley, Tenn, and others came up with interesting ideas and extrapolations. Even if they weren’t hardcore science, you could see them working within the broad concepts. I never really got that impression from Hubbard’s stuff. It always felt like he just didn’t want to bother to look things up.

18

I read *Battlefield Earth * when I was young and liked it. It’s too long ago to remember why I liked it. I didn’t know about the cult at the time. Couldn’t finish the first book of Mission Earth. I don’t know if you can consider them Hubbard books. Most if not all of them came out after his death. I have my doubts about if he wrote all ten books first before he decided to publish them.

19

I think some of the posters have things backward. Hubbard was a well-regarded and much-reprinted writer until he came up with Scientology.

And specifically Scientology, which he started in 1952 after he broke with the Dianetics people.

Science fiction was in one of its cyclical periods of striving for respectability. It was bad enough that John W. Campbell was pushing Dianetics in the pages of Astounding, but Campbell was too powerful a nutcase to buck. After he and Hubbard had their falling out, though, Hubbard was considered as embarrassing to the field as the Shaver mysteries (UFO stories portrayed as true accounts) in Amazing.

As for whether he was a science fiction writer or not, that’s another historic bias problem. In those days the distinction between science fiction writer and fantasy writer mostly did not exist within the field.* Every magazine in the genre, including pure fantasy magazines like Unknown, also edited by Campbell and in which Hubbard was often published, was considered to be science fiction. Hubbard was also well known for his Old Doc Methuselah stories, all of which appeared in Astounding, along with “Final Blackout”, another Astounding piece. Whether he rigorously extrapolated current technology into the future or not, he was considered a core example of a popular and successful science fiction writer.

Hubbard could write. In some ways, at least on the sentence level, he was a better writer than Heinlein and Asimov. His problem was that he didn’t have their vision or story sense, and he was too steeped in the old pulp tradition to make the transition to “modern” science fiction.

His later books, like Battlefield Earth and his ten-volume “drekology” are what really sunk any reputation he once might have had. I can’t say that I finished any of them to give the books a fair shake, but reading any single page was enough to make me fall on the floor in hysterical laughter, so there’s not much chance I will ever get through them.

Even so, that Hubbard and the Hubbard who was a working pulp writer in the 40s and earlier are two separate creatures.
*There were fantasy writers considered as such, but they tended to be British and publish at novel length. The modern distinction doesn’t come about until after Tolkien’s mid-60s success and the launching of the Del Rey imprint at Ballantine in the late 1970s. Even Lovecraft and Howard were considered to be science fiction writers back in the day. The term covered everybody who wrote for the pulps.

20

You don’t need a bias against Scientology to realize that having uneducated primitive humans flying millenia-old Harriers outshooting alien invaders (who earlier conquered the Earth in nine minutes!) is as implausible as having Michael Jackson star in a remake of “Sunset Boulevard.”