$ciebtology Reprinting LR Hubbrads Pulp SciFi (from 1930's)? WTF?

[Voyager]

@CalMeacham

Look at the Speculative Fiction Internet Database on Elron:

Summary Bibliography: L. Ron Hubbard
Look at how few of his works were reprinted after the mid-1950s. If you look at most other authors you’ll find quite a few printings during SF/fantasy boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

This listing can’t be complete, though – as I say, I’ve seen Slaves of Slep (and Masters of Sleep), Fear, Typewriter in the Sky, and The Final Blackout in paperback published in the 1960s, and Beyond the Black Nebula was in an Ace collection from the late 1950s. Even so, it’s slim pickins. If Elron really had been a beloved author, there would have been more collections of his stuff – maybe even one of the Ballantine/Del Rey “The Best of…” collections.

Don Wollheim also reprinted the Ole Doc Methusaleh stories, which were not Hubbards best by any means.

But I agree - if not for Dianetics, I suspect a lot more of Hubbard would have been reprinted. I read all the Golden Age Astoundings from the MITSFS collection, and IIRC Hubbard got pretty good AnLab scores and lots of covers. I have most of the run of Unknown. Those who criticize his writing really should read him in the context of the writers of the day. I’d say he was far better than average. Final Blackout was a very dark after the Bomb story written before the bomb. I think it couldn’t have been published after we joined the war for being too much of a downer. (No, there was no bomb in it - Europe destroyed themselves with non-nuclear weapons.) It wasn’t the first such story - the sequence in “Things to Come” was similar, but it was pretty powerful.

[jackdavinci]

@Smeghead

I’ve posted about this before, but I once voluntarily exposed myself to his Mission: Earth series. The whole thing. It was probably the most masochistic thing I’ve ever done. Words fail. There just simply are not words sufficient to express how awful that series is.

LOL I read all ten books as part of a library contest in high school (I won, and got a gift certificate, which I spent on an even longer book series (Robotech). I however, being probably the only person on Earth who can say this, actually rather enjoyed them.

[Ahasuerus]

@CalMeacham

Yeah, but it doesn’t even list all of those. I have Slaves of Sleep from Lancer from circa 1970, and it’s not listed. Nor are Final Blackout, Fear, Typewriter in the Sky, nor the anthology with Beyond the Black Nebula. That’s why I said it was incomplete – it doesn’t even list all the genre work that ought to be there.

The page you referenced, Summary Bibliography: L. Ron Hubbard , lists what we call “titles”, i.e. novels, collections, stories and other SF&F and SF&F-related texts. If you want to see all editions (or “publications”, as we call them) for a particular title, you have to follow that title’s link. For Slaves of Sleep it’s Title: Slaves of Sleep and it shows the Lancer reprint (Publication: Slaves of Sleep) that you mentioned.