I don’t believe for a minute that Harlan ever told such a story. It would have occurred in the late 1940s when Harlan was still a teenager in Ohio. The timing is ridiculous. I never heard Harlan ever make an anachronistic reference like that.
I knew an old-time fan who says he was present that Hubbard talked about founding a religion to make money. But that was someone who was an adult in the 1940s. And almost certainly Hubbard didn’t need somebody to suggest such a thing to him. It would have been obvious to anybody living in California at the time. The place was rife was charlatans and quasi-mystics starting profitable cults and had been for decades.
Anthony Boucher, who wrote Rocket to the Morgue, a thinly disguised version of the Manana Literary Society, the pro sf group in LA in the 1940s which Hubbard was a member of, also wrote Nine Times Nine, about such a cult and the money it made. I’d bet that the every get together of the just-getting-by authors in the MLS had a suggestion that one of them start a cult to get rich.
Since nobody beat me to it, Sharyn McCrumb’s Bimbos of the Death Star is a 1988 mystery set at an sf convention, in which the obnoxious guest of honor is murdered. The murderee is obviously Harlan, at least to every f&sf reader who picked it up. It won the Edgar for best original paperback
Harlan was indeed a teenager(16) when it happened, and the story can be found here. As a young science fiction writer he apparently visiting the Hydra Club in New Yorkwhen the conversation supposedly took place.
Hubbard talked about the idea constantly, as I said. But there’s no way he was talking about Dianetics as an idea to come in 1950. The book was published on May 9. An article about it was in the May 1950 Astounding, and deadline would be two months before cover date at minimum. Newspaper articles clearly working off of press releases start mentioning Dianetics on Feb. 1. The first full article on the forthcoming book I’ve found is March 28. The book was clearly written and submitted to Heritage House in 1949.
Both of Harlan’s 1949 stories were in the Cleveland News. Printing stories by high schoolers in sections geared to them was fairly common in newspapers back then and I suspect that’s all these were, especially since his first professional publications didn’t occur until 1956. Earlier stories appeared only in fanzines. Maybe if somebody has The Essential Ellison, they could look these up.
Harlan may have visited New York in 1950 or even 1949. But he almost certainly didn’t. In Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever, the trip to New York is talked about in the 1952-3 time span, much more likely for many reasons. Ellison would have been at least 18 and by that time had entered the world of sf fandom, which he hadn’t done at 16. Even so, Hubbard is not mentioned in the list of writers Ellison met at the Hydra Club. You can say that allows for an earlier visit. I say the memories he talked about were at best conflated and most likely never occurred.
I can’t remember if it was women’s groups or one in particular who a few months earlier had a story in the campus newspaper with the headline “XYZ is a witch!”. Actually a wiccan is probably more accurate according to a later story about a talk she gave: she was no devil worshipper. But I think Ellison debated several people about the film’s merits.
Phyllis Schafly had a number of people who didn’t like her or agree with her but she definitely gave a talk and lengthy Q and A period. Don’t know if they tried to prevent her from appearing.
I don’t have any contact with anyone I went to school there with. Besides, taking night courses meant a lot of classmates had day jobs. Whether the U of R has backs issues of the student newspaper on microfilm or if the local Rochester papers covered it is beyond my knowledge.
Hubbard planned this before the book was published. There is not the slightest doubt about that. He told the entire science fiction community of his hopes. John W. Campbell actively aided and abetted him from the beginning. The cult appeared two minutes after publication, not two years.
Weird. I was at a University film program in the northeast and LQ Jones came by and showed it to our class and chatted. I don’t remember any sexist claims, but:
We had a huge screening of The Thing which was attended by someone from the production. He was explainng the movie and mentioned that there were no women basically because everyone would be wondering who she was f***ing. It didn’t go over well.
I wonder if Ms. Willis or his other victims know nothing about him (except that he assaulted them). Yeah, he sexually molested a woman, on stage, and there’s video and pictures of it, (plus more than one report of other women similarly assaulted by him), but once he helped a guy in a wheelchair get into a crowded elevator so that…that’s a “Get out of a sexual assault charge” free card? Huzzah. :rolleyes:
You’re really not helping your “Aaaaw, he’s not such a bad guy” cause when you attack his victims.
Did Connie ever say - at the time or thenafter - that she felt sexually assaulted? This is a serious question. I don’t know of Connie ever making a public statement about it, but it’s been 12 years and a lot of Internet has passed without my being aware of the latest gossip. Nor has she said a word since Harlan’s death, despite the myriads using her name to attack him. I’d really like to hear what Connie has to say now, and what passed between them afterward.
Will Shetterlyhas both the video and some context on his site.
I’ve never done anything which even misinterpreted could be construed as sexual assault. But what I said above that every famous person can be attacked for faults can be applied to me. And to you, Fenris, and to everyone else in this thread. As I also said, I don’t know where to draw the line or for what actions or who I cast out when. If you deem Harlan one to cast out, I can’t be holier-than-thou.
But I sure don’t need you to decide for me. Or to attack me for ambivalence as I try to sort the person I encountered from the person others did.
This is so strange, as I was at the debate. Once it was announced that “A Boy and His Dog” would be shown, a movement started to ban the movie. This led to a letters war breaking out in the Campus Times (student newspaper) between both on and off campus woman’s rights groups and the campus science fiction society (IIRC they were the ones that had suggested the movie) calling out that kind of censorship. Someone wrote to Harlan and sent him the clippings and asked him to comment. Instead, he offered to pay his own way to Rochester if someone could set up a debate. It ended up being as acrimonious as you would expect.
The two things I remember:
He mentioned that there had been a time when he had committed to attend a convention or awards show in Las Vegas. He then realized that Nevada had not supported the ERA, and he had vowed not to spend a penny in any state that had not voted to ratify the ERA. He ended up spending the night in a tent outside of town in order to not break the commitment or his vow.
It kept being said at the debate that “people” did not want the movie being shown. A student stood up during the Q&A section and asked exactly who had tried to initially block the movie, which caused a bit of an uproar because it had been done via anonymous letters. In an after event, Harlan ended up offering the kid a job. I have wondered how long that lasted.