Across the universe

Over the last week, I’ve received a number of inquiries from readers asking whether the material that was cut from Astounding will ever see the light of day. (As I mentioned in a recent post, the original draft of the book was twice as long as what eventually saw print, with the vast majority of the deleted sections relating to the career of John W. Campbell.) I hope to eventually release much of this information in one form or another, but a lot of it has already been published right here on this blog. With that in mind, I’ve expanded my page for science fiction studies—which hadn’t been updated in over a year—with eighty more posts, all of which cover aspects of the genre that I wasn’t able to fit into the book. Some of my personal favorites include my original research on the illustration from Gilbert and Sullivan that inspired the Foundation series; the identity of the mysterious “Empress” who appears repeatedly in the writings of L. Ron Hubbard; Hubbard’s belief that he was the reincarnation of Captain Kidd; the role of the mystic John Cooke in the early days of Scientology and the attempt to levitate the Pentagon; the fact that Steven Spielberg’s father may be the oldest living subscriber to Analog; Isaac Asimov’s lost review of Dianetics; Scientology’s efforts to target people suffering from Lyme disease, Gulf War syndrome, and chronic fatigue syndrome; my discovery of the original draft of Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”; the homoerotic science fiction art of Alejandro Cañedo; the legacy of Nostradamus from Unknown to Orson Welles; the sad case of William H. Sheldon, Walter H. Breen, and Marion Zimmer Bradley; the touch football game that never happened between the FBI and the Church of Scientology; and much more. Happy reading, and I’ll see you again in the new year!

The greatest game never played

When I was writing Astounding, I was constantly mindful of the need to cut down the manuscript as much as possible. I had contracted to write a book of a certain length, and it came in much longer than expected—the first draft was twice the length of what eventually saw print, which in itself was significantly larger than what my publisher had anticipated. As a result, I had to remove a lot of material that I would have loved to include. This was especially hard for the period after John W. Campbell’s death. Campbell was clearly my central figure, so I couldn’t continue the book for long after he was gone, but I also didn’t want to leave my other primary subjects hanging. This meant that I had to compress the final acts of three incredibly eventful lives into a relatively short epilogue, which led to certain compromises. In his memoirs, Isaac Asimov devotes hundreds of thousands of words to the last two decades of his life, and in my book, I cover them in about six pages. Much the same holds true for Robert A. Heinlein, whose authorized biographer spends a substantial chunk of the second of two huge volumes on the period that I recount in a brief summary. But perhaps the most regrettable case of all was that of L. Ron Hubbard. In the popular imagination, Hubbard is associated with the era of the Sea Org, in which he served as the commodore of a private navy that wandered the oceans for years. This is perhaps the most colorful, outwardly fascinating phase in Hubbard’s life, and it serves as the centerpiece of most treatments of his career. I had just a couple of pages to hit the hight points, and while this was the right choice for the book as a whole, I also regret the loss of a lot of interesting stories that I didn’t have room to discuss.

For instance, there’s the curious story of the touch football game that never happened between the Church of Scientology and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (The details can be found in Hubbard’s FBI file, which is available in its entirety online.) On October 23, 1978, Jerry Velona, the minister of public affairs for the Church of Scientology of Boston, wrote under the church’s official letterhead to Richard Bates, the special agent in charge of the local branch of the FBI. The letter began: “The Church of Scientology of Boston puts together a touch football game each year with which to play various other teams and groups. We play the games in the Boston area and charge an admission fee which is then donated to charity.” Velona continued:

This year instead of playing local fraternities and colleges as we usually do, we decided it would be more fun to play teams comprised of groups with which we have dealings in other areas. This will afford us an opportunity to get to know you personally and will also be used as a gimmick to attract more attendance which will play off in turn toward the charity. The charity we have chosen this year is the Jimmy Fund.

The Jimmy Fund, which was founded in 1948, raises money for cancer care and research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and it was a surprising charity for the church to support, given Hubbard’s past statements on the subject. (“Cancer is not caused…It always requires a second-dynamic or sexual upset, such as the loose of children or some other mechanism to bring about a condition known as cancer. This is cancer at the outset.”) But that isn’t really the point.

Velona’s coy reference to groups “with which we have dealings in other areas” wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by the letter’s recipients, as we’ll see shortly. But he was just coming to the point:

We hereby challenge you to a game to be played sometime over the next 4-6 weeks. We are currently putting together a schedule so we have some open time to play with. Our team is comprised solely of members of the Church but I must warn you that we are very good and have never lost. Our softball team played the New England Patriots a couple of years ago and beat them soundly.

It probably isn’t worth unpacking any of this too closely, but the last two sentences seem particularly typical of the language of Scientology, with its claim that the church has “never lost” bolstered by the irrelevant detail that it once beat a professional football team at softball, followed immediately by a line that contradicts the previous statement: “Please let me know as soon as you can if you’re game. We don’t practice much so don’t think you have to put together a professional team.” Velona seems to anticipate some of his correspondent’s potential objections, and he writes reassuringly: “There is no ulterior motive behind this. It is simply a way to get out from behind our desks and have some fun and raise some money for a worthy cause at the same time.” (The phrase “there is no ulterior motive behind this” would sound ominous coming from anyone, and especially when you consider the source.) And Velona closed cordially: “I look forward to hearing from you soon. If you accept our challenge I will contact you to make specific arrangements.”

The FBI’s only response was to forward the letter to Washington, D.C. with a note attached: “Boston will not acknowledge the enclosed letter in that due to investigative commitments, personnel of the Boston Division are not available for such frivolity.” That seems reasonable enough. And while this whole incident might seem like a sideshow, I think it gets at something meaningful about the culture of the church in the late seventies. Hubbard doesn’t seem to have been directly involved with this episode, but it reflects an important aspect of the mindset that he instilled in his followers, even in his absence. This was the decade of the Snow White Program, in which the church—acting on Hubbard’s orders—planted spies throughout the federal government, including the Internal Revenue Service. On July 8, 1977, FBI agents raided branches in three cities to seize documents pertaining to the case, as well as to the church’s plans to discredit or frame its critics. Two months before Velona’s invitation, eleven members of the church, including Hubbard’s wife Mary Sue, were indicted on conspiracy charges. And the letter is just one example of how the prankish side of Hubbard’s personality, as expressed through the institutions that he created, could insidiously shade into illegality and abuse, as well as the other way around. (Another good illustration is the practice of overboarding, in which offenders in the Sea Org were tossed without warning into the sea. From a distance, it might have seemed like fun and games. But some of them nearly drowned.) As we’ve all learned in the last few years, the line between mere trolling and outright criminality can be faint indeed, especially when such impulses are paradoxically driven by a stark sense of loyalty to an authoritarian leader. On some level, the invitation to the FBI may have been meant in earnest, but on another, it was the act of an unrepentant bunch of trolls. And like their successors in other areas of life, they had studied at the feet of the master.

The creeps of the cosmos

Note: I’m taking the day off, so I’m republishing a piece from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on August 16, 2017.

“Of course Scientology attracts all the creeps of the cosmos,” the novelist William S. Burroughs wrote to the poet Allen Ginsberg on October 30, 1959. “You see it works.” Burroughs had just been introduced to the ideas of L. Ron Hubbard through the mystics John and Mary Cooke, whom he had met through their mutual friend Brion Gysin in Tangiers. Gysin, who is probably best remembered today for his development of the cut-up technique, had recently built the Dream Machine, a flicker gadget made of a light bulb placed on a record turntable. The device, which Gysin assembled with the help of an electronics engineer named Ian Sommerville, was designed to stimulate the brain’s alpha rhythms when viewed with the eyes closed. It was inspired by a discussion of “the flicker effect” in W. Grey Walter’s book The Living Brain, and it hints at the remarkable extent to which the counterculture was venturing into territory that science fiction had previously colonized. John W. Campbell had utilized a similar setup while working with Hubbard himself to access his buried memories in 1949, and after reading Walter’s book, he built what he described as a “panic generator” with a fluorescent bulb in his basement. And the fact that Hubbard’s work was circulating among the Beats at the same time reflects how both communities—which seemed so different on the surface—were looking for new approaches to the mind. (Science fiction, like Scientology or beatnik culture, has a way of attracting “all the creeps of cosmos,” and for similar reasons.)

I’m not an expert on Burroughs, so I can’t speak directly about the influence of Scientology on his work, but there’s no question that he remained actively interested in Hubbard’s ideas for the better part of a decade, even as he came to question and finally reject the authoritarian tendencies of the church itself. (This article from io9 is the best discussion I’ve found of the subject online, although it makes one factual misstatement, which I’ll mention in a moment.) In a letter to Ginsberg dated shortly before the one quoted above, Burroughs explained: “The method of directed recall is the method of Scientology. You will recall I wrote urging you to contact [a] local chapter and find an auditor. They do the job without hypnosis or drugs, simply run the tape back and forth until the trauma is wiped off. It works. I have used the method—partially responsible for recent changes.” And soon afterward: “I have a new method of writing and do not want to publish anything that has not been inspected and processed. I cannot explain this method to you until you have necessary training. So once again and most urgently…I tell you: ‘Find a Scientology auditor and have yourself run.’” Burroughs’s letters over the next twelve years, which have been collected in the volume Rub Out the Words, are liberally sprinkled with terms drawn from Hubbard’s writings, and when you read them all in one sitting, as I once did, you can’t help but be struck by how long Burroughs circled around Scientology, alternately intrigued and repulsed by the man of whom he insightfully wrote: “I would not expect Mr. Hubbard’s system to crack mazes the existence of which it does not allow.”

And Burroughs went remarkably far. In 1968, he participated in a two-month training session at Saint Hill Manor, the headquarters of Scientology in the United Kingdom, and he appears to have achieved the level of OT III, or The Wall of Fire, in which members pay to learn the story of Xenu. In the article from io9 that I mentioned above, the author writes: “Absent from Burroughs’s writing are any references to body thetans, Xenu, the Galactic Confederacy, Douglas DC-8 airliners, volcanic hydrogen bombs, or other beliefs more recently associated with Scientology.” Another recent book on Burroughs and Scientology calls this material “conspicuously absent” from his writings. In fact, it clearly appears at several points in his correspondence. In a letter to John Cooke on October 25, 1971, for instance, Burroughs wrote:

So leaving aside galactic federations and Zmus [sic] there may be some validity in Hubbard’s procedure and I would be interested to make a systematic test on the E-Meter…Exactly how are these body thetans contacted and run? Are they addressed directly and if so in what terms? Do they have names? Do they have dates? Are they run through the alleged shooting freezing and bombing incidents as if you are an auditor running an internal parasite through these incidents?

These are unquestionably references to the Xenu material, as is a letter that Burroughs wrote to Gysin a few days later, in which he casually refers to “Teegeeack”—Hubbard’s word for earth millions of years ago—and “Teegeeack hitchhikers.”

I don’t know how much the Church of Scientology was charging for this information in 1968, but it must have amounted to hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s hard to imagine how Burroughs would have avoided paying for it in full, and he evidently believed in aspects of it long after he had become aware of Hubbard’s shortcomings. On October 4, 1967, he wrote to his son:

Point about Scientology is that it works. In fact it works so well as to be highly dangerous in the wrong hands. The curious thing about L. Ron Hubbard who devised this system is that he is very uneven as a writer and a thinker. This tends to put people off. You find very profound and original thinking together with very shallow and banal thinking, so you have to read every word very carefully.

Burroughs was expelled in 1968 after publishing articles that were critical of the church, and he later said of its founder: “Hubbard has the satisfied look of a man who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard, but he is engaged in something much more pernicious than old style con tricks…His real specialty is spiritual theft.” If Burroughs stuck with it for so long, it was for much the same reason that Campbell once gave to Eric Frank Russell: “Why, for God’s sake, do you think I thought dianetics was so important? Hell, man, because I knew it was, because I tried it, and it helped.” Burroughs might have said much the same thing, even as his suspicions of its methods and origins continued to grow. As he wrote to Barry Miles in 1970: “I feel sure that there is an undisclosed source for this material. Probably science fiction.”

Levitating the Pentagon

On October 21, 1967, over fifty thousand activists marched on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam. The participants included Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Ed Sanders, and Norman Mailer, who describes one of the day’s most memorable episodes in The Armies of the Night:

This was the beginning of the exorcism of the Pentagon, yes the papers had made much of the permit requested by a hippie leader named Abbie Hoffman to encircle the Pentagon with twelve hundred men in order to form a ring of exorcism sufficiently powerful to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet. In the air the Pentagon would then, went the presumption, turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point the war in Vietnam would end.

The notion of levitating the Pentagon—an occult symbol that had been corrupted into an emblem of war—was the brainchild of Michael Bowen, a San Francisco artist and political organizer whose friends included Timothy Leary and Gary Snyder. As the ceremony proceeded, a flyer was circulated that encouraged the attendees to concentrate their minds on casting out evil: “A billion stars in a billion galaxies of space and time is the form of your power, and limitless is your name.” Rubin and Ginsberg led the crowd in invocations and mantras, and Bowen distributed flowers to the protesters, who inserted daisies into the gun barrels of the military police. Watching the scene unfold, Mailer marveled: “On which acidic journeys had the hippies met the witches and the devils and the cutting edge of all primitive awe?”

It was a rhetorical question, but the real answer is genuinely surprising. Bowen credited the basic idea for the ceremony to his guru, an occultist living in Mexico named John Starr Cooke. As a recent article in Smithsonian recounts:

Cooke had sent his protégé as a missionary of sorts in search of fellow travelers in New York, London, and most recently San Francisco, where he had found his greatest success rallying people to the cause…Following the Be-In [in January 1967]…Bowen returned to Mexico to be with his teacher. They worked on extrasensory perception, ancient Mayan shamanic rituals, and the metaphysical symbology that informed the artist’s paintings. Then the guru dispatched his student back to the United States—arming him this time with an outlandish idea that found a surprisingly receptive audience.

Attentive readers of this blog might remember that Cooke was also an associate of L. Ron Hubbard, an early proponent of dianetics, and allegedly the first “clear” in America. As I’ve noted here before, Cooke spent time with Hubbard in London and Tangier, and it was through him that Byron Gysin and William S. Burroughs were introduced to Scientology. But if the idea of levitating the Pentagon truly came from Cooke, it may well have been influenced in turn by Hubbard, who described the individual who has reached the stage beyond clear: “A thetan who is completely rehabilitated and can do everything a thetan should do, such as move MEST [matter, energy, space, and time] and control others from a distance, or create his own universe; a person who is able to create his own universe or, living in the MEST universe is able to create illusions perceivable by others at will, to handle MEST universe objects without mechanical means.” And Hubbard himself was rumored to be able to move objects with his mind, as one of his former followers later recalled: “People thought he could levitate things.”

In my original post on the subject, I wrote of Cooke: “It may have been through him that aspects of dianetics entered the counterculture—another important story that has yet to be told.” When I wrote those words, I didn’t know the half of it. For now, though, I’d like to focus on the mysterious way in which one of Hubbard’s wild promises was transmuted, as in a game of telephone, into something genuinely moving and memorable. It didn’t succeed in levitating the Pentagon, but only in the sense that Sgt. Pepper didn’t end the Vietnam War. As none other than Daniel Ellsberg notes in an oral history of the event by Arthur magazine:

I was working on the Pentagon Papers that fall in a room which happened to be right next to MacNamara’s office. I’d come back from Vietnam very anxious to see the war end and to do whatever I could to help that. So I was very sympathetic to the anti-war movement, what I knew of it. The idea of levitating the Pentagon struck me as a great idea because the idea of removing deference from any of these institutions is very, very important, and this is of course the kind of thing that Abbie understood very instinctively. It was not just a matter of clowning and a way to get the attention of the media, or to make people smile. And the idea that you would jointly piss on the Pentagon as part of a pagan ceremony raises so many associations. One might think of the Pentagon as pagan in itself, but that’s a slander of pagan religion.

Or as Ginsberg says in the same article: “The levitation of the Pentagon was a happening that demystified the authority of the military. The Pentagon was symbolically levitated in people’s minds in the sense that it lost its authority which had been unquestioned and unchallenged until then…Once the kid put his flower in the barrel of the kid looking just like himself but tense and nervous, the authority of the Pentagon psychologically was dissolved.”

And this kind of demystification is exactly the kind of thing that the confidence trickster is born to do. It’s a vital form of protest, and the fact that it may have indirectly drawn inspiration from Hubbard, of all people, is revealing in itself. These impulses can go in any number of directions. Abbie Hoffman himself had a lot in common with the denizens of the pool halls that also filled David Mamet with nostalgia, as John Escow told Arthur: “Abbie’s political program was just a hastily thrown together amalgamation of some things he had read, certain life lessons that he had picked up in pool halls and on the street.” Writing in his introduction to Hoffman’s autobiography, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, Mailer intuitively makes the connection to an even older archetype:

Abbie was one of the most incredible-looking people I ever met. In fact, he wasn’t twentieth century, but nineteenth. Might just as well have emerged out of Oliver Twist. You could say he used to look like a chimney sweep. In fact, I don’t know what chimney sweeps looked like, but I always imagined them as having a manic integrity that glared out of their eyes through all the soot and darked-up skin. It was the knowledge that they were doing an essential job that no one else would do. Without them, everybody in the house would slowly, over the years, suffocate from the smoke.

These skills are far older than modern politics, and they’re ideologically neutral, which can frustrate more “serious” activists—but which also makes them even more effective at certain kinds of mobilization. (As Paul Krassner recalls in the same oral history: “[Abbie] saw that people who could be organized to go to a smoke-in, could be organized to go to an antiwar rally.) Jerry Rubin once pointed out in the Berkeley Barb: “The worst thing you can say about a demonstration is that it is boring, and one of the reasons that the peace movement has not grown into a mass movement is that the peace movement—its literature and its events—is a bore. Good theatre is needed to communicate revolutionary content.” That’s as true today as it ever was. And the show is just getting started.

The confidence tricksters

When I look back at my life, I find that I’ve always been fascinated by a certain type of personality, at least when observed from a safe distance. I may as well start with Orson Welles, who has been on my mind a lot recently. As David Thomson writes in Rosebud: “Yes, he was a trickster, a rather nasty operator, a credit thief, a bully, a manipulator, a shallow genius…a less than wholesome great man…oh, very well, a habitual liar, a liar of genius.” But in his discussion of the late masterwork F for Fake, Thomson also hints at the essence of Welles’s appeal:

The happiness in F for Fake, the exhilaration, comes from the discovery and the jubilation that knows there is no higher calling than being a magician, a storyteller, a fake who passes the time. This is the work in which Welles finally reconciled the lofty, European, intellectual aspect of himself and the tent show demon who sawed cute dames and wild dreams in half. For it can be very hard to live with the belief that nothing matters in life, that nothing is solid or real, that everything is a show in the egotist’s head. It loses friends, trust, children, home, money, security, and maybe reason. So it is comforting indeed, late in life, to come upon a proof that the emptiness and the trickery are valid and sufficient.

Welles claimed afterward that he had been “faking” his confession of being a charlatan, as if it were somehow incompatible with being an artist—although the great lesson of his life is that it can be possible and necessary to be both at the same time.

This is the kind of figure to whom I’m helplessly drawn—the genius who is also a con artist. You could even make much the same case, with strong reservations, for L. Ron Hubbard. I don’t like him or most of his work, and he caused more pain to other people than anyone else in Astounding. Yet the best clue I’ve ever found to figuring out his character is a passage by Lawrence Wright, who writes shrewdly in Going Clear:

The many discrepancies between Hubbard’s legend and his life have overshadowed the fact that he genuinely was a fascinating man…The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s biography has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard himself seemed to revolve on this same axis…But to label him a pure fraud is to ignore the complex, charming, delusional, and visionary features of his character that made him so compelling.

I’ve spent more time thinking about this than I ever wanted, and I’ve grudgingly concluded that Wright has a point. Hubbard was frankly more interesting than most of his detractors, and he couldn’t have accomplished half of what he did if it weren’t for his enormous, slippery gifts for storytelling, in person if not on the page. (On some level, he also seems to have believed in his own work, which complicates our picture of him as a con artist—although he certainly wasn’t averse to squeezing as much money out of his followers as possible.) I’ve often compared Welles to Campbell, but he has equally profound affinities with Hubbard, whose favorite film was Citizen Kane, and who perpetuated a science fiction hoax that dwarfed The War of the Worlds.

But I’m also attracted by such examples because they get at something crucial about the life of any artist, in which genius and trickery are often entwined. I don’t think of myself as a particularly devious person, but I’ve had to develop certain survival skills just to keep working, and a lot of writers come to think of themselves in the fond terms that W.H. Auden uses in The Dyer’s Hand:

All those whose success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer’s, nor, like a surgeon’s, upon some craft which he can be taught by others and improve by practice, but upon “inspiration,” the lucky hazard of ideas, live by their wits, a phrase which carries a slightly pejorative meaning. Every “original” genius, be he an artist or a scientist, has something a bit shady about him, like a gambler or madman.

The similarities between the artist and the confidence man tend to appeal to authors with a high degree of technical facility, like David Mamet, who returns to the subject obsessively. In the lovely essay “Pool Halls,” Mamet writes: “The point of the pool hall was the intersection of two American Loves: the Game of Skill and the Short Con…Well, I guess that America is gone. We no longer revere skill, and the short con of the pool hustle and the Murphy Man and the Fuller Brush Man. The short con, which flourished in a life lived on the street and among strangers, has been supplanted by the Big Con of a life with no excitement in it at all.”

As Mamet implies, there’s something undeniably American about these figures. The confidence man has been part of this country’s mythology from the beginning, undoubtedly because it was a society that was inventing itself as it went along. There’s even an element of nostalgia at work. But I also don’t want to romanticize it. Most of our trickster heroes are white and male, which tells us something about the privilege that underlies successful fakery. A con man, like a startup founder, has to evade questions for just long enough to get away with it. That’s true of most artists, too, and the quintessentially American advice to fake it till you make it applies mostly to those who have the cultural security to pull it off. (If we’re so fascinated by confidence tricksters who were women, it might be because they weren’t held back by impostor syndrome.) Of course, the dark side of this tradition, which is where laughter dies in the throat, can be seen in the White House, which is currently occupied by the greatest con artist in American history. I don’t even mean this as an insult, but as a fundamental observation. If we’re going to venerate the con man as an American archetype, we have to acknowledge that Trump has consistently outplayed us all, even when the trick, or troll, was unfolding in plain sight. This also says something about our national character, and if Trump reminds me of Hubbard, he’s also forced me to rethink Citizen Kane. But there’s another side to the coin. During times of oppression and reaction, a different kind of deviousness can emerge, one that channels these old impulses toward ingenuity, inventiveness, resourcefulness, humor, and trickery, which are usually used to further the confidence man’s private interests, toward very different goals. If we’re going to make it through the next two years, we need to draw deeply on this tradition of genius. I’ll be talking about this more tomorrow.

The happy golden years

A few months ago, the American Library Association announced that it was renaming the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, which has been awarded annually for over six decades for merit in children’s literature. (The decision was reached at the association’s summer conference in New Orleans, which I attended, although I was only vaguely aware of the discussion at the time.) In a joint statement explaining the move, which was primarily motivated by the “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in [Wilder’s] work,” the presidents of the ALA and the Association for Library Service to Children were careful to distinguish between the value of her legacy and the message sent by institutionalizing it in this particular form:

Although Wilder’s work holds a significant place in the history of children’s literature and continues to be read today, ALSC has had to grapple with the inconsistency between Wilder’s legacy and its core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness through an award that bears Wilder’s name…This change should not be viewed as a call for readers to change their personal relationship with or feelings about Wilder’s books. Updating the award’s name should not be construed as censorship, as we are not demanding that anyone stop reading Wilder’s books, talking about them, or making them available to children. We hope adults think critically about Wilder’s books and the discussions that can take place around them.

This seems reasonable enough, although Wilder’s biographer, Caroline Fraser, argues in an opinion piece for the Washington Post that the decision evokes “the anodyne view of literature” that the ALA has elsewhere tried to overcome. Fraser concludes: “Whether we love Wilder or hate her, we should know her. “

For reasons of my own, I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot recently. Last week at Worldcon, a critic who had recently finished reading Astounding commented that he wasn’t sure he would have wanted to meet any of its subjects, and I know what he means. (If I had the chance to spend time with a single person from the book, I might well choose Doña Campbell, or possibly Leslyn Heinlein, if only because I’d learn more from them than I would from any of the others.) I didn’t go into this project with any preexisting agenda in mind, but I emerged with a picture of these four writers that is often highly critical. John W. Campbell’s importance to the history of science fiction is indisputable, and I wrote this biography largely to bring his achievements to the attention of a wider audience. He also expressed views that were unforgivably racist, both in private conversation and in print, and he bears part of the blame for limiting the genre’s diversity, which is an issue that we’re still struggling to address today. I think that Robert A. Heinlein is the best and most significant writer that the genre ever produced, but I’m not sure I would have wanted to be the the same room with him for very long. Hubbard, obviously, is a special case. And perhaps the most difficult reckoning involves Isaac Asimov, a writer who meant a lot to me—and to countless others—growing up, but whose treatment of women looks increasingly awful over time. It was hard for me to write about this, and I expect that it will be hard for many others to read it. It’s safe to say that many fans made up their minds about Heinlein and Hubbard years ago, while this book will introduce Campbell to a larger readership for the first time in what I hope will be his full complexity. With Asimov, however, I suspect that many readers will need to revise their understanding of a man they admired and thought they knew, and that might be the hardest part of all.

At the convention, I conducted what I saw as a trial run for discussing these issues in public, and the results were often enlightening. (Among other things, I found that whenever I brought up Asimov’s behavior, many fans would start to silently nod. It’s common knowledge within fandom—it just hasn’t been extensively discussed in print.) At my roundtable, an attendee raised the question of how we can separate an artist’s life from the work, which prompted someone else to respond: “Well, we choose to separate it.” And third person nervously hoped that no one was suggesting that we stop reading these authors altogether. On the individual level, this is clearly a matter of conscience, as long as we each take the trouble of engaging with it honestly. Collectively speaking, it isn’t always clear. Occasionally, the community will reach a consensus without too much trouble, as it did with Hubbard, which is about as easy as this sort of decision gets. More often, it’s closer to what we’ve seen with Wilder. As Fraser notes: “While the answer to racism is not to impose purity retroactively or to disappear titles from shelves, no eight-year-old Dakota child should have to listen to an uncritical reading of Little House on the Prairie. But no white American should be able to avoid the history it has to tell.” In a New York Times article on the controversy, the scholar Debbie Reese makes a similar point more forcefully: “People are trying to use [these books] and say, ‘Well, we can explain them,’ and I say: ‘Okay, you’re trying to explain racism to white people. Good for those white kids.’ But what about the Native and the black kids in the classroom who have to bear with the moment when they’re being denigrated for the benefit of the white kids?” If nothing else, renaming the award sends a clear message that this conversation needs to take place. It’s manifestly the first step, not the last.

Which brings me to John W. Campbell. In 1973, two years after the editor’s death, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer—which is given out annually at the Hugo Awards—was inaugurated by the World Science Fiction Society, along with the Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. I don’t know how this biography will be received, but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if it led to a wider debate about Campbell, his views on race, and whether his name ought to be attached to an award whose list of recent recipients stands as a testament to the genre’s range of voices. For now, I’ll only say that if Laura Ingalls Wilder can inspire this sort of discussion, then Campbell absolutely should. If it happens, I don’t know what the outcome will be. But I will say that while Campbell absolutely deserves to be remembered, it may not need to be in this sort of institutionalized form. In the Post, Fraser writes:

If the books are to be read and taught today—and it’s hard to escape them given their popularity—then teachers, librarians and parents are going to have to proceed armed with facts and sensitivity…I’d like to think that what would matter to Wilder in this debate would be not the institutionalized glory of an award bearing her name but the needs of children. “I cannot bear to disappoint a child,” she once said.

Campbell, to be frank, might well have welcomed the “institutionalized glory” of such an award. But he also wanted to be taken seriously. As Fraser says about Wilder, we can love or hate him, but we should know him. And a discussion about the future of the Campbell Award may well end up being the price that has to be paid for restoring him—and the entire golden age—to something more than just a name.

The final blackout

When a reader sees the title of my upcoming book, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the first question is often what Hubbard is doing there. I’ve even seen or heard comments wondering whether I included Hubbard in the subtitle in order to sell more copies—which isn’t exactly wrong, although it gets at only part of the reason. When I initially pitched this project to publishers, it was solely as a biography of Campbell, although the other three writers would obviously have played an important role in the story. Campbell isn’t widely known outside the genre, however, and my editor brilliantly suggested that I expand the scope to encompass a few other writers with greater recognition among mainstream readers. Asimov, Heinlein, and Hubbard were the first names that came to mind, mostly because they were the closest to Campbell, which meant that there was an abundance of narrative material that I could organically include. (Campbell was always my central figure, which meant that I couldn’t devote as much space as I might have liked to such influential writers as Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, or Arthur C. Clarke, who didn’t have as much interaction with him on a personal level.) There’s no doubt in my mind that including Hubbard has vastly expanded the potential audience for this book. Yet it’s also true that his appearance on the cover seems slightly incongruous. It seems to make a claim about his importance and interest, perhaps even his ultimate value, and it may even raise suspicions about my motives. A glance at the contents of the book itself should make it clear that I’m no apologist for Hubbard, but even then, we’re left with two big questions. Does Hubbard deserve to appear in such exalted company? And was he any good as a writer?

My response to the first question is that he absolutely belongs here, less as a writer than on account of the earthquake that he caused within the genre by his presence and personality. If there’s one fact that emerges from memoirs and other accounts of the period, it’s that Hubbard made a huge impression on just about every writer he met in the thirties. Campbell, in particular, never got over him, and you could make a strong argument that Hubbard played a greater role in the editor’s inner life than any other writer except for Heinlein—and that includes Asimov. Heinlein was fascinated by him, and although their friendship had its ups and downs, he never ceased to regard Hubbard as anything less than a war hero. (This is especially extraordinary when you consider his own service record. Unlike Campbell, who had never been anywhere close to the military, Heinlein, an Annapolis graduate, wasn’t an easy man to fool, and he might not even have wanted to know the truth. Russell Miller’s biography Bare-Faced Messiah, which did a comprehensive job of debunking Hubbard’s claims about his naval career, was released the year before Heinlein’s death, but according to his widow, Virginia, he never read it.) Asimov was never as close to Hubbard, but he was a fan long before they met, and he was undoubtedly awed by him in person. You could assemble a long list of other writers, from Bradbury to de Camp, who were personally or professionally affected by Hubbard, and the evidence from letters columns and other sources indicate unequivocally that he was popular among fans, particularly in the fantasy magazine Unknown. And this doesn’t even get at the impact of the debut of dianetics, which was arguably the single most significant event in fandom up to that time. It’s frankly impossible to write the story of Campbell and Astounding without devoting significant space to Hubbard’s career.

As for Hubbard’s merits as an author, I’ve written an entire article on the subject, and my conclusions haven’t changed over the last year and a half. (I like to say that I’ve read more of Hubbard’s science fiction and fantasy than anyone who isn’t actually a Scientologist, and I’ve managed to work my way through nearly all of it, with one big exception: I was never able to finish all ten volumes of the Mission Earth dekalogy, and I can’t say that I much regret it.) In discussing his body of work as a fiction writer, I’ve learned to refer to Sturgeon’s Law, which famously states that ninety percent of anything is crud. That’s as true of Hubbard’s work as it is with the rest of the genre, and if anything, his percentage of decent material might even be a little lower. Yet the sheer volume of his output means that a few good stories must exist, and there are a handful that are worth checking out even by casual fans, although I wouldn’t dream of forcing anyone to read them. My personal favorite is Death’s Deputy, a shockingly good fantasy novel from Unknown that, weirdly, remains out of print, even as Galaxy Press cranks out glossy reissues of just about everything else that Hubbard ever wrote. Final Blackout is both historically important and a rare example of Hubbard taking pains with the writing and the plot. Fear hasn’t held up as well, but it remains an influential horror story in the careers of such writers as Bradbury. His fantasy novels and stories are mostly readable and engaging, and even if most of his science fiction is forgettable or worse, he isn’t alone. You could make a pretty strong case that Hubbard was a better pure writer, line for line, than Asimov was before the war. And if the second act of his career had unfolded differently, I suspect that he’d be fondly remembered in the same breath as such writers as van Vogt and de Camp—not quite of the first tier with Heinlein, Asimov, or Sturgeon, but with one or two novels that would still be read with enjoyment by fans today.

And there also seems to be an unsatisfied demand among readers of a certain age to talk about Hubbard’s writing. After my solo event last week in San Jose, I took questions for thirty minutes, and well over half were about Hubbard—and not about the more sordid aspects of his career, but about his writing. Many older fans evidently read him as they might have read, say, Lester del Rey or Eric Frank Russell, and they’ve rarely had a chance to discuss it. I noticed much the same response when I met a few months back with a group of former Scientologists, who were invariably critical of the church itself, but curious to hear my thoughts on Hubbard’s value as a fiction writer. In the past, I’ve pitched panels about Hubbard’s fiction at Worldcon, and I might try again next year in Dublin. (My dream would be to assemble some of the authors who have served as judges for the Writers of the Future competition, which includes a surprisingly large number of prominent names in the field.) I don’t have any interest in rehabilitating Hubbard, or even in returning him into the canon, and as I’ve mentioned before, there are literally dozens of other authors I’d recommend reading first. But his removal from the history of science fiction has left a hole that needs to be filled in order to make sense of how the genre evolved. This blackout is partly the result of embarrassment, or perhaps a reluctance to be mistaken for a supporter of his work in other ways, but it also goes deeper. Because the Church of Scientology persistently overstates Hubbard’s significance, it’s tempting for his critics to go the other way—to insist that he was a con man, a talentless hack, and a failure in human living. Yet he wouldn’t have been able to pull off what he did if he hadn’t managed to impress a lot of people, including Campbell and Heinlein, who weren’t easy to deceive. To make sense of Hubbard at all, it’s necessary to acknowledge and reckon with this uncomfortable fact. But first we need to let him back into the story.

The dianetics epidemic

Note: To celebrate the World Science Fiction Convention this week in San Jose, I’m republishing a few of my favorite pieces on various aspects of the genre. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on March 2, 2017.

In his bestselling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell devotes several pages to discussing the breakout success of Rebecca Wells’s novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. After its initial release in 1996, it sold reasonably well in hardcover, receiving “a smattering of reviews,” but it became a true phenomenon in paperback, thanks primarily to what Gladwell calls “the critical role that groups play in social epidemics.” He writes:

The first bestseller list on which Ya-Ya Sisterhood appeared was the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s list. Northern California…was where seven hundred and eight hundred people first began showing up at [Wells’s] readings. It was where the Ya-Ya epidemic began. Why? Because…the San Francisco area is home to one of the country’s strongest book club cultures, and from the beginning Ya-Ya was what publishers refer to as a “book club book.” It was the kind of emotionally sophisticated, character-driven, multilayered novel that invites reflection and discussion, and book groups were flocking to it. The groups of women who were coming to Wells’s readings were members of reading groups, and they were buying extra copies not just for family and friends but for other members of the group. And because Ya-Ya was being talked about and read in groups, the book itself became that much stickier. It’s easier to remember and appreciate something, after all, if you discuss it for two hours with your best friends. It becomes a social experience, an object of conversation. Ya-Ya’s roots in book group culture tipped it into a larger word-of-mouth epidemic.

And you could say much the same thing about a very different book that became popular in California nearly five decades earlier. Scientology has exhibited an unexpected degree of staying power among a relatively small number of followers, but Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the work that that made L. Ron Hubbard famous, was a textbook case of a viral phenomenon. Just three months elapsed between the book’s publication on May 9, 1950 and Hubbard’s climactic rally at the Shrine Auditorium on August 10, and its greatest impact on the wider culture occurred over a period of less than a year, in a dramatic spread and decline that had all the hallmarks of virality. In the definitive Hubbard biography Bare-Faced Messiah, Russell Miller writes:

For the first few days after publication of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, it appeared as if the publisher’s caution about the book’s prospects had been entirely justified. Early indications were that it had aroused little interest; certainly it was ignored by most reviewers. But suddenly, towards the end of May, the line on the sales graph at the New York offices of Hermitage House took a steep upturn.

By midsummer, it was selling a thousand copies a day, and by late fall, over seven hundred dianetics clubs had been established across the country. As Miller writes: “Dianetics became, virtually overnight, a national ‘craze’ somewhat akin to the canasta marathons and pyramid clubs that had briefly flourished in the hysteria of postwar America.”

The result was a quintessential social epidemic, and I’m a little surprised that Gladwell, who is so hungry for case studies, has never mentioned it. The book itself was “sticky,” with its promise of a new science of mental health that could be used by anyone and that got results every time. Like Ya-Ya, it took root in an existing group—in this case, the science fiction community, which was the natural audience for its debut in the pages of Astounding. Just as the ideal book club selection is one that inspires conversations, dianetics was a shared experience: in order to be audited, you needed to involve at least one other person. Auditing, as the therapy was originally presented, seemed so easy that anyone could try it, and many saw it as a kind of parlor game. (In his biography of Robert A. Heinlein, William H. Patterson shrewdly compares it to the “Freuding parties” that became popular in Greenwich Village in the twenties.) Even if you didn’t want to be audited yourself, dianetics became such a topic of discussion among fans that summer that you had to read the book to be a part of it. It also benefited from the presence of what Gladwell calls mavens, connectors, and salesmen. John W. Campbell was the ultimate maven, an information broker who, as one of Gladwell’s sources puts it, “wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own.” The connectors included prominent members of the fan community, notably A.E. van Vogt, who ended up running the Los Angeles foundation, and Forrest J Ackerman, Hubbard’s agent and “the number one fan.” And the salesman was Hubbard himself, who threw himself into the book’s promotion on the West Coast. As Campbell wrote admiringly to Heinlein: “When Ron wants to, he can put on a personality that would be a confidence man’s delight—persuasive, gentle, intimately friendly.”

In all epidemics, geography plays a pivotal role, and in the case of dianetics, it had profound consequences on individual careers. One of Campbell’s priorities was to sell the therapy to his top writers, much as the Church of Scientology later reached out to movie stars, and the single greatest predictor of how an author would respond was his proximity to the centers of fan culture. Two of the most important converts were van Vogt, who was in Los Angeles, and Theodore Sturgeon, who lived in New York, where he was audited by Campbell himself. Isaac Asimov, by contrast, had moved from Manhattan to Boston just the year before, and Heinlein, crucially, had left Hollywood, where he had been working on the film Destination Moon, in February of 1950. Heinlein was intrigued by dianetics, but because he was in Colorado Springs with his wife Ginny, who refused to have anything to do with it, he was unable to find an auditing partner, which makes me wonder what might have ensued if he had remained in Southern California for another six months. (Such accidents of place and time can have significant aftereffects. Van Vogt had moved from the Ottawa area to Los Angeles in 1944, and his involvement with dianetics took him out of writing for the better part of a decade, at the very moment when science fiction was breaking into the culture as a whole. His absence during this critical period, which made celebrities out of Heinlein and Asimov, feels like a big part of the reason why van Vogt has mostly disappeared from the popular consciousness. And it might never have happened if he had stayed in Canada.) The following year, dianetics as a movement fizzled out, due largely to Hubbard’s own behavior—although he might also have sensed that it wouldn’t last. But it soon mutated into another form. And before long, Hubbard would begin to spread a few divine secrets of his own.

The science of survival

When I heard that Christopher McQuarrie had been hired to write and direct a second movie in the Mission: Impossible series, my initial reaction, curiously enough, was disappointment. I loved Rogue Nation, but I’ve always liked the way in which the franchise reinvents itself with every installment, and it was a little strange to contemplate a film that simply followed up on the characters and storylines from the previous chapter. (When I saw the trailer for Mission: Impossible—Fallout, my first thought was, “Oh, it’s a sequel.”) Now the reviews are in, and they indicate that Fallout might not just be the best of them all, but one of the greatest action movies of all time. This is a tribute to McQuarrie, of course, whom I’ve admired for decades, but the reaction also indicates that the rest of the world is catching up to a central fact about Tom Cruise himself. In the past, I’ve described him as a great producer who happens to occupy the body of a movie star—like a thetan occupying its host, perhaps—and Mission: Impossible is his unlikely masterpiece. Like one of the legendary moguls of old Hollywood, Cruise has treated it as a springboard for untapped talent (J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird), a showcase for memorable supporting performances (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paula Patton, Rebecca Ferguson), or a halfway house for gifted screenwriters who had spent years in the wilderness (Robert Towne, McQuarrie). It’s a secret studio that Cruise has built and run in plain sight, with far more skill and success than he displayed at the head of United Artists. Whether or not it’s a breakaway hit, Fallout seems to have awakened critics to the singular nature of his accomplishment. I can’t wait to see it.

Yet there’s a darker element to Cruise’s career, obviously, and I’ve never really addressed it here. There are countless possible approaches to the problem of his relationship to Scientology, but I may as well start with the video—which has been publicly available for over a decade—of Cruise accepting an award from David Miscavage. With a huge medal hanging from his neck, Cruise addresses the crowd at the podium, standing near a huge portrait of L. Ron Hubbard:

I’m really honored to be with you…Thank you for your confidence in me. I’ve personally been very privileged to see what you do to help, to protect, to serve all of us. I’ll tell you something—that I have never met a more competent, a more intelligent, a more tolerant or compassionate being outside of what I’ve experienced from LRH. And I’ve met the leaders of leaders, okay. I’ve met them all. So I say to you, sir, we are lucky to have you and thank you—and to you, L. Ron Hubbard, sir, I will take this as a half-ack. I will continue on my way. Okay, these are the times now, people. Okay, these are the times we will all remember. Were you there? What did you do? I think you know that I am there for you. And I do care so very, very, very much. So what do you say? We gonna clean this place up? Okay? Because we’re counting on you. Okay? All right? To LRH!

Apart from “half-ack,” a reference to a concept in Scientology that might count as the weirdest inside joke of all time, I’m struck the most by the offhand familiarity of “LRH.” It isn’t “Hubbard,” or “Ron,” or even “the Commodore,” but his initials. I use the same abbreviation in the notes in my book, because I need to repeat it so often, and its usage here makes it seem as if Hubbard is never far from the minds of his devotees. (In light of the upcoming movie, incidentally, it’s worth remembering that Hubbard once wrote: “Only Scientologists will be functioning in areas experiencing heavy fallout in an atomic war.”)

And given everything else that we know about Hubbard, it can seem incredible that a pulp writer from the thirties—a man who otherwise might be mentioned in the same breath, if he were lucky, as A.E. van Vogt and L. Sprague de Camp—dominates the inner life of the world’s last surviving movie star. Yet it isn’t entirely inexplicable. Aside from the details that Lawrence Wright exhaustively provides in Going Clear, I don’t have much insight into Cruise’s feelings toward Scientology, but I can venture a few observations. The first is that the church knew exactly what it had in Cruise. A desire to recruit celebrities, or their relatives, is visible in the earliest days of dianetics, starting with Hubbard’s assistants Greg Hemingway and Richard De Mille, and continuing all the way through the likes of Frank Stallone. Cruise, like John Travolta, was the real thing, and the church has spared no expense in earning and maintaining his favor. He may show a dismaying lack of interest in the welfare of the members who clean the ship on which he once celebrated his birthday, but his personal experience within the church can hardly have been anything but wonderful. The second point is a little trickier. When Cruise says that auditing changed his life, I don’t doubt it. I’ve spoken with a number of former Scientologists, and even those who are highly critical of the overall movement say that the therapy itself was frequently beneficial, which is probably true of any system that allows people to talk through their problems on a regular basis with an outwardly sympathetic listener. As John W. Campbell once wrote to the writer Eric Frank Russell: “Why, for God’s sake, do you think I thought dianetics was so important? Hell, man, because I knew it was, because I tried it, and it helped.” Or as William S. Burroughs said more succinctly: “Of course Scientology attracts all the creeps of the cosmos. You see it works.”

You could say much the same of psychoanalysis or behavioral therapy, but it certainly seems to have worked in Cruise’s case, which leads us to the most relevant point of all. If there’s one theme that I like to emphasize here, it’s that we rarely understand the reasons for our own success. We’re likely to attribute it to hard work or skill, when it might be the result of privilege or luck, and it’s easy to tell ourselves stories about cause and effect. Cruise has succeeded in life beyond all measure, and it’s no surprise that he credits it to Scientology, because this was exactly what he was told to expect. In Scientology: The Now Religion, which was published in 1970, the author George Malko recounts an interview that he had with a church member named Bob Thomas:

“When you’re clear,” Thomas said, “you’re free in the mental sense, but you want to extend your influence and power and so on.” Thus becoming an operating thetan is not merely being at cause mentally, but at cause over matter, energy, space, and time in the physical, total sense.” When I suggested that this implied that an operating thetan could levitate, rise right up into the air and hang there, Thomas sat forward in his chair and said, “Right. These are the ultimate goals that are envisioned. I’m saying that these are the ultimate things it is hoped man is capable of, if he really has those potentials, which we assume he has…That’s what’s happening in Scientology: people are finding out more and more about themselves, and the more they find out about themselves, the freer they are. And we envision no ultimate limitation on how free an individual can be. Beyond the state of clear, there are these grades of operating thetans. When you’re clear, you’re free in the mental sense, but you want to extend your influence and power as a spiritual being. And that road is a higher road which Mr. Hubbard is researching at this moment.”

When I read these words, and then watch Cruise hanging off an airplane or scaling the Burj Khalifa, they take on another resonance. Cruise may be our greatest movie star and producer—but he also acts like a man who thinks that he can fly.

Tales from the pulp jungle

In 1934, a young man named Frank Gruber moved from Illinois to New York City, where he took up residence at the Forty-Fourth Street Hotel in Times Square. In his memoir The Pulp Jungle, Gruber described the hotel’s usual clientele as consisting of “broken-down actors, starving actors, hungry vaudevillians, wrestlers, poor opera singers, touts, bookies, sharpies, hungry actors, no, I said that before, and all around no-goods and deadbeats. And one hungry, would be writer.” Like Robert A. Heinlein, his slightly younger contemporary, Gruber had grown up entranced by the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger, although he later said that he had come away from those novels with the wrong message:

Virtually all of the Horatio Alger, Jr. books have the same theme—they tell how poor boys became rich. The theme inspired three generations of Americans. Alas! The reading of the Alger books did not instill in me the ambition to become a rich businessman. No, the books inspired me to become a writer, to write books like those of Horatio Alger, Jr.

Gruber, like Heinlein, had been impressed by the example of pulp legend Jack Woodford, and by the age of twenty-three, he had accumulated a stack of rejection slips from dozens of publications, ranging from The Saturday Evening Post to what Gruber considered “the lowest form of writing”—the Sunday School papers. Finally, after a period in which he had as many as forty submissions out for consideration at any one time, he sold a story, “The Two-Dollar Raise,” for three dollars and fifty cents. Gruber recalled his sense of elation: “I had made it.”

After a stint as an editor for a series of farm papers in the Midwest, Gruber moved to New York to try breaking into the pulps. He estimated that the trip would take two or three weeks, but it lasted for seven months. Soon after his arrival, he met the prolific Arthur J. Burks, who offered him some useful advice: “The life of a pulp writer is seven years. At the end of seven years you’ve got to go on to better writing, or go downhill.” Gruber took his words to heart, and he soon learned the everyday survival skills that most aspiring writers are forced to master. As he wrote decades later:

I had “tomato soup” at the Automat on Broadway at least once a day. The Automat restaurants, which are peculiar to the East, are just what the name implies. You get a flock of nickels from the cashier, then go down the battery of little cubicles, inside of which repose the articles of food that appeal to you…So this is how the famous Automat tomato soup came into being. You got a bowl intended for soup, went over to the hot water nozzle and filled up your own. You sidled along to where you got the soup and picked up a couple of glassine bags of crackers (free), supposedly to go with the soup. You now went to one of the tables, sat down and crumbled the crackers into the hot water. Every table had a bottle of ketchup. You emptied about half of the ketchup into the hot water and cracker mixture. Presto—tomato soup!

Gruber continued: “Cost? Nothing. I sometimes had tomato soup four or five times a day.” And he admitted elsewhere that there were stretches when he ate nothing else for three days at a time.

At last, Gruber got his break, after writing five thousand words overnight to fill a gap in the pulp magazine Operator #5, and he became a reliable contributor to the detective and mystery titles, as well as a member of an association of pulp writers called the American Fiction Guild. He wrote a few stories for Weird Tales, along with a much later effort for Fantasy & Science Fiction, but he was never particularly close to the science fiction crowd, with whom he claimed to have waged “a cold war…that exists, to a degree, to this very day.” Gruber was friends with Mort Weisinger, the editor who would later play a significant role in the development of Superman. One day, Gruber got into an argument with Weisinger and the agent Julius Schwartz about what was then known as “pseudoscience fiction,” which encompassed science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Gruber remembered:

In the heat of the discussion I made the statement that all pseudoscience writers were weirdies [sic]. I was roundly denounced by both Mort and Julius and in the ensuing melee I came out with the flat declaration that I could pick out a pseudoscience writer in a roomful of people. Mort promptly challenged me. J. Hamilton Edwards was in New York from his home upstate and would be at the American Fiction Guild. Mort had ten dollars that said I could not pick J. Hamilton Edwards out of the crowd on sight.

Gruber took him up on the bet, which he reduced from ten dollars to two, and they went to lunch. Looking around the room, Gruber saw a writer “with buck teeth as big as those of Clement Attlee’s son-in-law.” He confidently identified him as J. Hamilton Edwards—and he was right. (“Edwards” was really the writer Edmond Hamilton, and he eventually got his teeth fixed.) Gruber recalled: “The story got around and the science fiction writers still hate me.”

The anecdote hints at the divide, which may have been more apparent than real, between the different circles of pulp writers, of whom Gruber wrote elsewhere: “A writer spends so many hours inventing adventures for his fictional characters that he sometimes confuses fiction and fact. He begins to think that he has lived some of the adventures of which he has written.” (Much later, S.I. Hayakawa made a similar observation: “If the writer of science-fiction writes too much of it too fast and too glibly…he may eventually succeed in concealing the distinction between his facts and his imaginings from himself.”) As an example, he mentions another aspiring author at the Fourth-Fourth Street Hotel, who often spent time in Gruber’s room with Weisinger and the writers Jack Reardon and Steve Fisher. One evening, this writer was bragging about his own exploits: “He had been in the United States Marines for seven years, he had been an explorer on the upper Amazon for four years, he’d been a white hunter in Africa for three years.” Gruber quietly took a few notes, and later in the conversation, he asked his friend: “You’re eighty-four years old, aren’t you?” When the writer protested that he was only twenty-six, Gruber showed his work:

I read from my notes. “Well, you were in the Marines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six years, you spent four years in Brazil, three in Africa, you barnstormed with your own flying circus for six years…I’ve just added up all the years you did this and that and it comes to eighty-four years.”

Gruber concluded: “The writer blew his stack. I will say this, his extremely vivid imagination earned him a fortune, some years later. He wrote one book that directly and indirectly earned him around half a million dollars in a single year.” It was called Dianetics.

The casualty contact

In early 1956, writing in a confidential memo intended to be seen only by members of the inner circle of the Church of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard laid out three methods for finding new recruits. The first, which he claimed to have successfully tested in Washington, D.C., was to place a newspaper ad that began: “Personal counseling. I will talk to anyone for you about anything.” Any respondents could be screened over the phone—although Hubbard cautioned against “talk[ing] to the person in such a way as to ease the problem”—and encouraged to join a weekly group therapy session. Another approach was based on a similar advertisement that was allegedly placed by Hubbard and his wife Mary Sue in Wichita toward the end of 1951. As Hubbard described it:

The exact wording of the ad was as follows: “Polio victims. A research foundation, investigating polio desires volunteers suffering from the after effects of that illness to call for examination at address.” When the people arrived usually with a phone interview first, they were immediately given about three hours of auditing…We did this for polio victims, arthritics and were about to do it for asthmatics when the surging success of the project frightened various individuals who had other plans for dianetics…The interesting hooker [sic] in this ad is that anyone suffering from a lasting illness is suffering from it so as to attract attention and bring about an examination of it. These people will go on being examined endlessly.

He concluded: “If I merely wanted a fortune out of Scientology…[I] would have continued to run this ad and run a clinic and school to care for its resultant callers.”

But perhaps the most striking—and morally questionable—proposal was one that Hubbard called “Casualty Contact,” which involved going actively after potential patients, or preclears, rather than waiting for them to take the initiative. The center of activity was again the local newspaper:

Every day in the daily papers one discovers people who have been victimized one way or the other by life. It does not much matter whether that victimizing is in the manner of mental or physical injury. It does matter that the newspapers have a full parade of oddities in terms of accident, illness and bereavement occurring at a constant parade before the eyes. The essence of “Casualty Contact” is good filing…One takes every daily paper he can get his hands on and cuts from it every story whereby he might have a preclear. He either has the address in the story itself or he gets the address as a minister from the newspaper. As speedily as possible he makes a personal call on the bereaved or injured person…He should represent himself to the person or the person’s family as a minister whose compassion was compelled by the newspaper story concerning the person. He should then enter the presence of the person and give a nominal assist, leave his card which states exactly where church services are held every Sunday.

And the part that really catches my eye is the statement that “it does not much matter” whether the target’s suffering is mental or physical. As long as it leaves a person vulnerable to an approach from the church, it can and should be exploited.

I was reminded of this after reading an excerpt from the novelist Porochista Khakpour’s new memoir Sick, which chronicles her experiences with Lyme disease. At one point, after her family and friends continue to doubt that she’s suffering from anything at all, she contacts a drug treatment program on the advice of a friend:

I called them and I got the founder, who immediately looked me up and treated me as a VIP. She kept assuring me, “You know, we handle quite a lot of celebrities here so you’ll fit right in with us.” They sent me their supplements—whey powder and sour cherry juice and all sorts of other natural products that were said to have superpowers, at very high prices—and gave me a daily schedule and told me I needed to call them all the time and stay in close touch for support and medial monitoring. I was suddenly talking to a network of doctors all over the country, who were giving me all sorts of advice without seeing me…They also sent me their book, their founder’s self-published memoir. I read through it, inspired, but I started to find some things familiar. It reminded me of snippets I’d heard about Scientology and all the emphasis on purity and detox and drug-free lifestyles started to click for me. I realized that they might all be Scientologists—that all through it were codes and analogies that pointed to Scientology and that certainly an anti-meds group might be linked to Scientology.

Khakpour finally confronted the founder, who responded over the phone: “It’s really inappropriate to ask about this. I want you to think about why you are asking, why you’d bother me with this.” The founder hung up, and Khakpour never heard from her again—although she still can’t get off the group’s mailing list.

Based on publicly available information, it isn’t whether the organization in question is truly affiliated with Scientology, but their methods certainly seem familiar, along with the needs that they subtly aim to fulfill. Just before she contacts them, Khakpour finds herself wondering: “Where to find community, my people?” The need for human contact, or simply to be believed, can render us vulnerable to what the critic Lidija Haas calls “quack treatments,” or to even more insidious approaches. As I read Khakpour’s account, I reflected that if Hubbard were still alive today, he might recommend that the church actively seek out patients who had been diagnosed with Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other poorly understood medical conditions—and I may have been on to something. In a post at The Underground Bunker, the journalist Rod Keller profiles one of the few known medical doctors who is also openly a member of the church, noting that his practice is apparently “devoted to the treatment of Lyme disease, or more specifically, chronic Lyme disease.” Even more remarkable is a recent study at the University of Albany that examined the effect of Hubbard’s “detoxification” treatment on Gulf War Syndrome, which shares many characteristics with the conditions that I’ve listed above. (It’s associated with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and it was long the object of skepticism as to whether it existed at all. The treatment, which consists of saunas, exercise, and doses of niacin, seems to be a simple repackaging of Hubbard’s earlier programs for drug addiction and radiation poisoning. And at least one of the doctors associated with the study is a prominent Scientologist who has also done work on chronic fatigue syndrome.) These amount to just a handful of data points, and further investigation is undoubtedly needed. But the pattern that they evoke is suggestive. If the Church of Scientology were proactively seeking a large and potentially lucrative group of patients, this is exactly what it would be doing. As Hubbard wrote back in 1956: “I can tell you the wrong thing to do about a practice—do nothing. These will work, and success is ahead of you.”

The doctor’s dilemma

In 1949, when John W. Campbell and L. Ron Hubbard prepared to reveal dianetics to the world, one of their first orders of business was to recruit their fellow writers to the cause. Numerous authors—most famously Alfred Bester—have provided accounts of their efforts, and occasionally, they worked, most notably in the cases of Theodore Sturgeon and A.E. van Vogt. Another obvious prize was Isaac Asimov, with whom Campbell had perhaps the closest working relationship of any author of the time, although Asimov was arguably the writer least inclined to be sympathetic to Hubbard’s theories. He had written disparagingly in his diary of “Hubbard’s dabblings in amateur psychiatry,” and when he and L. Sprague de Camp finally read the first article on dianetics in Astounding, he was no more convinced than before: “Neither Sprague nor I were in the least impressed. I considered it gibberish.” Yet he remained unwilling to confront his old friend and mentor about it directly. After Campbell made one last attempt at a hard sell, Asimov resisted, leading the editor to complain about his “built-in doubter.” But Asimov never seems to have revealed the full extent of his contempt for dianetics, perhaps because he was afraid of risking a valued friendship, or at least an important market for his fiction. (His fears on that front may not have been justified. After Lester del Rey criticized dianetics openly in print, he was told that he would never be able to sell to the magazine again. He responded by writing up a submission and delivering it to Campbell in person. On his arrival, the editor greeted him warmly: “I guess we’re not going to talk about dianetics, are we?” And he bought the story.)

Recently, I came across a fascinating piece of evidence about Asimov’s state of mind at the time, in the form of an actual review that he wrote of the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. (The exact provenance of this article remains a mystery to me, and I’m happy to throw it out to any readers here for help. I found the original manuscript in the Asimov collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University, dated June 19, 1950, and a clipping of the piece is available online. Unfortunately, neither source indicates where the item first appeared, apart from the fact that it was evidently a newspaper in New York. As far as I can tell, Asimov doesn’t mention it in his memoirs, and I haven’t seen it in bibliographies of his work. My very rudimentary attempts to track it down haven’t gone anywhere, and I’ll try again when I have time, but anyone out there who cares is welcome to give it a shot.) It was published after Asimov claimed to have already dismissed Hubbard’s work as “gibberish,” but anyone looking for a similar takedown here will be disappointed. Here’s how it opens:

L. Ron Hubbard is an optimist. He believes the human being to be essentially sane and good, and the human mind to be, potentially, a perfect thinking machine. Furthermore, he proposes a new technique of mental therapy which, he claims, is so simple that it can be supervised by almost anyone who reads the book and so effective that, properly handled, it can eradicate all neuroses and most diseases.

Asimov continues with a concise but accurate description of Hubbard’s ideas, including the assertion that the patient’s memory can be brought back to “a pre-natal state,” and his treatment of it leaves little doubt that he read the book carefully.

Yet in stark contrast to his private statements and his later characterization of his response in his memoirs, Asimov bends over backward to avoid criticizing the book in any meaningful way. After a brief summary, he writes:

That the book is startling is evident, I believe, even from the short description of its contents here. It might even be dismissed out of hand as incredible were it not for the fact that Freud’s theories (to say nothing of Einstein’s and Galileo’s) must have seemed equally startling and even incredible to their contemporaries…What can one say…except that these days it is a brave man indeed who would dismiss any theory as unbelievable. The author invites investigation of his claims by psychiatrists and medical men, and it would be interesting to see what they say.

Asimov is careful to hedge his language—the article is full of phrases like “he believes,” “he proposes,” “he claims”—but the overall tone is one of studied neutrality. Every now and then, there’s a hint of his underlying skepticism, although you have to look hard to see it:

Of course, if what Hubbard claims for dianetics is true, there will be no stopping it. One man will “clear” another, until within the lifetime of those living today, all the world will be free or almost free of disease, insanity, and evil. On the other hand, if Hubbard is mistaken, we are led to the melancholy conclusion that the world will continue as is.

At first, it doesn’t seem hard to understand why Asimov was reluctant to come out against dianetics in print. He knew that Campbell was all but certain to see the review, and he appears to have written it with precisely one reader in mind. Yet there’s also a deeper tension here. The year before, Asimov had accepted a position as an instructor at the medical school at Boston University, and he would spend much of the next decade worried about his job security, as well as how his work in science fiction would be perceived. (When the dust jacket of his first novel, Pebble in the Sky, mentioned the school by name, he was nervous enough about it to speak to the dean, James Faulkner. Faulkner asked if it was a good book, and when Asimov said that his publishers thought so, the dean responded: “In that case, the medical school will be glad to be identified with it.”) Yet even at this delicate moment, he allowed his byline to appear on a review in which an instructor in biochemistry failed to express any reservations over such elements as “memories at the cellular level.” The only possible conclusion is that Asimov, remarkably, was still more concerned about what Campbell would think than about his colleagues in Boston, and it led him to remain neutral at a time in which such writers as Lester del Rey were publicly attacking dianetics. Frankly, I’m surprised that he even agreed to write the review, which could hardly have benefited him in any meaningful way. To the best of my knowledge, Asimov never explained his reasoning, or even mentioned writing it at all. For obvious reasons, it was never reprinted, and Asimov clearly preferred to forget about it. But its last lines were undeniably prescient: “It will be interesting to wait and see. It shouldn’t take more than a few years to check up on dianetics.”

The Magic People

As I wrap up work on Astounding, I’m more aware than ever of the book that I didn’t write, and all the great stories that I was forced to leave out of the finished version for reasons of time or space. One figure whom I wasn’t able to mention was John Cooke, an occultist whose fascinating life brought him into contact with many of the players about whom I’ve written here in the past. Cooke, who was born into an affluent family in Hawaii in 1920, developed an interest at an early age in tarot cards and the Ouija board. His first wife, Millen Cooke, wrote for such magazines as Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Other Worlds Science Stories, and along with many other authors and fans in the early fifties, she was fascinated by dianetics, to the extent that she impulsively flew from California to New York to visit the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. (This was evidently in 1951, when the foundation relocated from New Jersey to a new headquarters on 55 East 82nd Street in Manhattan to head off potential legal trouble, as early collaborator Don Rogers reveals in the letters that were recently posted on Tony Ortega’s blog.) Cooke was annoyed by her abrupt departure, but after driving across the country, he became equally involved. In the book Acid Dreams, the authors Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain claim that Cooke became “the first ‘clear’ in America,” which seems unlikely—although it speaks to the intensity of his connection to Hubbard’s ideas, as well as the way in which dianetics tended to take root in existing communities where science fiction and the occult intersected.

After his divorce from Millen, Cooke married a woman named Mary Oser, whom he met through their mutual interest in dianetics. In One Nation, Under Gods, Peter Manseau writes of the couple, who settled in England:

While in London, they were known to wear flowing African robes they had acquired throughout their travels, and passed the days often in the company of L. Ron Hubbard himself. During their meetings, they discussed John’s magical abilities and memories of past life experiences, and Hubbard’s “science of the mind” began to take on a cosmic dimension.

From there, they moved to Morocco, where they served, in Manseu’s account, as “missionaries of Hubbard’s increasingly supernatural notions.” What happened next is a matter of dispute. According to an article by Mark Walker, who hopes to write a biography of Cooke in collaboration with the occultist’s son Chamba:

L. Ron Hubbard reportedly tracked down Cooke in Tangier. Hubbard made a trip to London in 1952 to set up a dianetics center, and it may have been on this trip that he met with Cooke. The meeting was not propitious and in the space of a single afternoon, Cooke grew disillusioned with Hubbard and his teachings. According to Michael Bowen, Hubbard came to Cooke with a tale of woe at how the dianetics business had failed, and Cooke advised him to relaunch it as a religion. This was precisely what Hubbard did after moving to Phoenix, Arizona in March 1952.

The notion that Cooke advised Hubbard to convert Scientology into a religion is undoubtedly apocryphal—John W. Campbell, among others, also took credit for the idea, which was really the product of a complex confluence of factors. And there are competing accounts of Cooke’s “disillusionment.” In Tangier, after the alleged meeting with Hubbard took place, Cooke developed a case of polio that cost him the use of his legs, which he claimed was the result of a magical attack. Manseau writes:

When news of the diagnosis—paralytic poliomyelitis—reached London, L. Ron Hubbard likely supposed that an engram must have been the true cause of Cooke’s affliction…The Cookes hoped the top Scientologist himself would materialize in Tangier to tend to his friend, but Hubbard instead dispatched one of his highest-ranking auditors to see what “the process” could do for one of its earliest adherents.

The auditor was an Australian named Jim Skelton, who, according to Chamba Cooke, “was able to push the polio paralysis back down John’s trunk from his heart, but was unable to make it go any further. Skelton told Hubbard that the method Hubbard taught him was not fully effective; Hubbard countered that Skelton was not performing the method correctly. This contributed to Skelton splitting from Hubbard.” Manseau states that this incident was the real reason that Cooke fell out with Hubbard, although he continued to practice certain aspects of dianetics on his own.

So far, this story resembles many other anecdotes from this period, with unusual personalities—like A.E. van Vogt—being drawn into Hubbard’s circle and then becoming disillusioned or worse. Yet it’s the sequel that intrigues me the most. While in Morocco, the Cookes met Brion Gysin, who was running a restaurant in Tangier. In the biography Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted, John Geiger writes of their first meeting:

[John and Mary Cooke] were early adherents of the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard…Cooke had shaved his head and wore a closely cropped beard. His first words to Gysin were “Guess where we came from and guess who we are?” Gysin could not possibly have guessed. The couple had traveled from Algeria, and claimed they were directed to him by their Ouija board. “They just came flooding in giving me the impression that they were really Magic People, and they had all of these things at their fingertips…most particularly money.”

Through Gysin, they met William S. Burroughs, whom the Cookes introduced to Scientology. In Rub Out the Words, a collection of the author’s correspondence, there are several fascinating letters between Burroughs and Cooke, including one in which the latter writes: “It would seem that Hubbard is putting down his third-rate science fiction as the one and only cosmos.” (This is the same letter that reveals that Burroughs was familiar with the OT III material, complete with a reference to “galactic federations and Zmus [sic].”) After Cooke returned to America, he became involved with such countercultural icons as Bowen and Timothy Leary, who referred to him as “the great crippled wizard.” Cooke was one of those indispensable connectors who pass ideas between communities of outsiders, and it may have been through him that aspects of dianetics entered the counterculture—another important story that has yet to be told. As Cooke allegedly once said to Burroughs: “I hope I am there to help [Hubbard] over the hump, even though he failed me when I needed him.”

Hubbard and the Little Its

In his very peculiar memoir Monitors, the pulp writer and occultist Arthur J. Burks shares three significant stories about his friend L. Ron Hubbard. One is the discussion of Hubbard’s supernatural protector, whom I’ve identified elsewhere with Saint Helena; the second is the anecdote about his supposed past life as a pirate; and the third is an incident so strange that I’m frankly not quite sure what to do with it. It all started in the early forties, while Burks, his wife, and their spiritual partner, whom he calls the Dominicana, were staying with some friends on Long Island. One evening, the Dominicana awoke to hear a noise like “a ball being bounced in the sitting room,” along with “big shoes being dragged about the floor.” When they asked their monitor, or spirit guide, what it was, he responded through automatic writing that they were being visited by “kobalds” [sic], or earth spirits:

They are to be attached to you, if you do not object—you always have free will—for some education…Whenever people think, feel, talk, or do anything, there are always invisibles waiting to learn something. They assemble with the speed of thought, as to a great class in school. The difference here is that you know it, and that your pupils are not human…They are of Mongol derivation.

The monitor informed them that the kobalds were “thousands of years, many thousands of years” old; that they would go by the nicknames Blackie and Whitie; and that they were “very small.”

After Burks and the two women returned to New York, the kobalds, who were also known as “the Little Its,” came with them as well, and they had allegedly had an encounter there with Hubbard, whom Burks calls the Redhead:

One afternoon the Redhead walked in on us. We hadn’t seen him since the “appearance” of the kobalds. He was in uniform. He sat on the couch. We waited to see whether he would be aware of The Little Its. Suddenly something in the middle of the bare floor caught his attention. He began to laugh. “What are they?” asked the Redhead. “Little men?”

The fact that Hubbard was “in uniform” points to a period sometime after July 1941, after he had returned from Alaska and succeeded in obtaining a commission in the Navy. Burks continues:

We tried to explain, but he wasn’t listening. He was holding out two forefingers, pointing at each other, but a foot or two apart. We gathered from him that the “little men” were using [his] forefingers as parallel bars. Redhead chucked over The Little Its with great delight, and since he could “understand” them, they sometimes served him as messengers to us.

Hubbard’s involvement in the story ends here, leaving a number of intriguing implications. Jon Atack, the author of the excellent biography A Piece of Blue Sky, has suggested that the Little Its were precursors to the “body thetans” who appear later in Hubbard’s teachings. Their first known appearance is a recording of an auditing session that Hubbard underwent with his new wife, Mary Sue, in April 1952, in which he describes them as invisible entities who have been sent to earth for reeducation: “These things have mutinied, so let’s put ‘em all in one place and lock ‘em on to earth. They gotta stay on earth till we get ‘em straightened out.” (He describes them later as “body holders, horse holders, boot polishers.”) Eventually, he redefined them as the disembodied beings who were blown up in a volcano during the Xenu incident, of which Hubbard wrote:

One’s body is a mass of individual thetans stuck to oneself or to the body. One has to clean them off by running incident II and Incident I. It is a long job, requiring care, patience and good auditing. You are running beings. They respond like any preclear. Some large, some small.

Hubbard went on to explain: “Body thetans are just thetans. When you get rid of one he goes off and possibly squares around, picks up a body or admires daisies.” And while they aren’t exactly the same as the Little Its, the concepts are similar enough that it’s tempting to draw a line from one to the other.

Yet I think that the real takeaway here is less about the specific arrow of influence—which would be hard to demonstrate in any case—than about the general shape of Hubbard’s development. It’s a theme that I don’t emphasize in Astounding, mostly because I got to thinking about it fairly late in the process, but I think it’s helpful for making sense of his career. Hubbard’s life can seem episodic and disorganized, but it had a hidden continuity that even his most diligent biographers have difficulty bringing forward. From the beginning, he was interested in such esoteric figures as Saint Helena and Sir Richard Francis Burton, and regardless of the accuracy of Burks’s recollections, there seems to be little doubt that the two men explored the occult together at length, and that Burks provided Hubbard with much of his mystical vocabulary. (In the “Affirmations,” Hubbard refers repeatedly to the “All Powerful,” which is a term that appears frequently in Monitors.) In this light, Hubbard’s sojourn in Pasadena with the magician and rocket scientist Jack Parsons, which can otherwise seem like a bizarre detour, only represents a return to a line of experimentation that he had explored half a decade earlier. During the development of dianetics, these elements retreated into the background, possibly because of John W. Campbell’s presence, but they returned to the forefront as soon as Hubbard went off on his own, with the addition of space opera themes that he took from his initial circle of followers. The Little Its can best be understood as part of the reservoir of ideas on which Hubbard drew whenever he was running low on inspiration. If the kobalds eventually returned in another form, it was simply because they never left.

The Rotary Club Booster

L. Ron Hubbard was unquestionably one of the more incredible figures of the twentieth century, but popular culture, which hasn’t been shy about going after Scientology itself, has tended to steer clear of his life and personality as a source for stories. One exception is Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, which is less about Hubbard than an electrifying mediation on the nature of dianetic auditing. Another is Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which features a villain, whom we glimpse only briefly, with the evocative name of L. Bob Rife. Hubbard isn’t the only inspiration here—there are equally obvious affinities to Ted Turner—but many of the parallels are intriguing. Rife is a seafaring media mogul who starts a religion using a form of mind control based on the phenomenon of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. It perpetuates itself through a franchise of churches called Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates, as the lead character, Hiro, explains:

[Rife] constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands…L. Bob Rife has taken xenoglossia and perfected it, turned it into a science…[His followers] will act out L. Bob Rife’s instructions as though they have been programmed to. And right now, he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.

And Hiro concludes darkly: “L. Bob Rife’s glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam.”

A big chunk of Snow Crash is devoted to a reinterpretation of Sumerian religion as a form of neurolinguistic programming, most of which is delivered in the form of long conversations between the characters. (This is actually the least successful part of the novel—it seems to be trying to pull off what Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea did in The Illuminatus Trilogy, but it ends up sounding more like an anticipation of Dan Brown, complete with people who say things like “Bear with me.”) The central figure is the mythological hero Enki, who developed a linguistic virus that led to the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. After stumbling across this fact, another character in the novel, Lagos, begins to look for additional information in the remains of cuneiform tablets:

The surviving Sumerian myths exist in fragments and have a bizarre quality. Lagos compared them to the imaginings of a febrile two-year-old. Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated—the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind…There is a great deal of monotonous repetition. There is also a fair amount of what Lagos described as “Rotary Club Boosterism”—scribes extolling the superior virtue of their city over some other city.

Eventually, Lagos manages to reconstruct the original virus, which Rife then steals for his own benefit. To stretch the analogy a bit, you could say that the Enki myth plays much the same role for Rife that the Xenu material does for Hubbard, except that within the plot of Snow Crash, it happens to be real.

But the part that really catches my eye is the odd reference to religion as a form of “Rotary Club Boosterism.” If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that this is remarkably close to what the journalist William Bolitho says of Muhammad in his book Twelve Against the Gods:

The start of Mahomet’s adventure, or in its more usual synonym, the basis of the Mahomedan religion, is this preoccupation of his with the fortunes of his native town. Squeamish pedantry may object to the triviality of the phrase which fits nevertheless with a precision no other can give: Mahomet was a “home-town booster,” and this conception will unlock the many obscurities of his life and his doctrine, with which the most subtle theological speculations and the most careful minutiae of history are incapable of coping with. The door by which he enters is this: “How can we attract the whole world, at least the whole of Arabia, yearly to the Ka’ba?” And the vision of One God, greatest common denominator of religion, is the solution, not the prime inspiration. In fact Mahomedanism is a religion, because Mecca’s problem, as a religious town, was religious. The rhapsodies, the epilepsies of the man while he is still struggling toward his invention, are the symptoms of a process which they sometimes assist and sometimes retard; if they were taken as analogous to the painful mental straining of a Rotarian enthusiast racking his brain for a world-beating slogan for the town of his heart it might be irreverent…but it would not be a joke; nor a mistake.

The italics are mine. And one of Bolitho’s fans was none other than L. Ron Hubbard, who once described Muhammad in a lecture as “a good small-town booster.”

The use of the phrase “Rotary Club Boosterism” in this context is so peculiar that I can hardly help concluding that Stephenson is quoting Bolitho. As far as I can tell, he’s never made this connection in public, although it isn’t hard to believe that he would have read Twelve Against the Gods, since his appetite for this kind of material seems limitless. (The fact that Elon Musk is also a big fan of the book makes me want to trace its subterranean passage from the hand of one futurist to another, which would be an adventure in itself.) I don’t know Stephenson’s work well enough to talk about it further, so I’m just going to throw it out here in case someone else finds it useful—which brings us, in a way, back to Snow Crash. Hiro’s job, as described by Stephenson, is that of a “freelance stringer” who assembles and distributes information like this for its own sake:

The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. He uploads it to the CIC database—the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore…Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC’s clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put in it, Hiro gets paid.

Stephenson finishes: “[Hiro] has been learning the hard way that 99 percent of the information in the library never gets used at all.” Which is probably true of this blog, too. But here’s one more piece.

Captain Kidd and the Redhead

If there was one constant in the very complicated life of L. Ron Hubbard, it’s that he was fascinated by piracy. As a teenager in Helena, Montana, he and his friends dressed up as pirates for the town’s annual Vigilante Day Parade, with earrings made out of brass hoops from his aunt’s curtains, and won the prize for “Most Original Cast”—an award that is still mentioned in his official biographies. In college, he organized the notoriously unsuccessful Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition, an attempt to sail a hired schooner from Baltimore to the West Indies to film pirate scenes for newsreels: “Scenarios will be written on the spot in accordance with the legends of the particular island, and after a thorough research through the ship’s library, which is to include many authoritative books on pirates.” Hubbard’s output as a writer included such stories as Under the Black Ensign, the satirical Typewriter in the Sky, and Murder at Pirate Castle, the latter of which he turned into the Columbia Pictures serial The Secret of Treasure Island, and his fantasies persisted into World War II. After Hubbard was given command of a patrol vessel in Massachusetts, in an assignment that was terminated under unpleasant circumstances, John W. Campbell wrote of his friend and colleague: “He’s got two stripes now, and was soon going somewhere to pick up some command, so he’s back on sea duty, and evidently going to get somewhere near what would really suit his mentality—a chance to be a privateer.” And a few years earlier, in an article titled “Yesterday, You Might Have Been a Pirate,” Hubbard had written:

I am sure that if I had followed the sea two centuries ago I would have drifted into freebooting. Not for the romance of it, nor for the wild life, nor even for the fighting. I am one of the radical rabble who likes a little personal freedom, a fairly good meal and who dislikes punishment. Yes, I would have undoubtedly fallen in with pirates and my heels would have swung, most likely, from some execution dock.

But Hubbard’s identification with the figure of the pirate may have gone even deeper. In Monitors, the very strange memoir that I mentioned here last week, the pulp writer Arthur J. Burks recounts an incident in which a monitor, or spirit guide, told Hubbard—whom Burks calls “Redhead”—about one of his past lives:

“You were once…” Redhead was informed, and the name of a famous pirate of some centuries previous was given to him. To this his first response was a gasp, followed by: “Since I can remember that guy has been my hero. I’ve dug up chanteys that were sung in his time. I’ve assembled material about him. I’ve read books and stories about him, have even prepared radio skits about him. If this is true, I wonder if such self-worship is justified?”

The monitor added: “In the rare books department of the Public Library, in this particular book, is an ancient oil painting of your former self, done by the Big Hero’s painter friend, which you may scan with interest.” On hearing this, Hubbard promptly went to the library, and Burks writes of his response:

He was paler than is normal even for a Redhead when he returned. “I found the rare book,” he said, “and its title is as we have been given. I found the portrait of my former self too. And listen, folks, if I wore the same costume I could pose for that picture myself! It’s my portrait.”

As far as I know, Hubbard never spoke publicly about this past life in particular—although he didn’t hold back from claiming elsewhere to be the reincarnation of Cecil Rhodes. But it’s tempting to identify this pirate with Captain William Kidd. Hubbard alludes to him briefly in an article on the Caribbean Motion Picture expedition that was published by his college newspaper: “According to Hubbard, the strongholds and bivouacs of the Spanish Main have lain neglected and forgotten for centuries, and there has never been a concerted attempt to tear apart the jungles to find the castles of Teach, Morgan, Bonnet, Bluebeard, Kidd, Sharp, Ringrose and l’Olonnais, to name a few.” In the officially sanctioned book The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard, William J. Widder mentions an unpublished manuscript titled “Shades of Captain Kidd,” in which “a map to Captain Kidd’s legendary treasure on Mona Island leads two U.S. engineers in Puerto Rico to a hidden cache of a vastly different—but dangerously valuable—kind.” As for the painting that Burks mentions, his description matches the portrait of Kidd pictured above by Sir James Thornhill, who, according to the writer Harold T. Wilkins, “either visited the cell in which Captain Kidd was confined in Old Newgate, or drew a sketch when the prisoner was on trial for his life in the Old Bailey court.” (It appears as a plate in Wilkins’s book Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island, which was published in 1937, or just a few years before Hubbard’s alleged exchange with Burks’s monitor. Wilkins was the author of several books on pirate treasure, as well as the occult, and he certainly seems like an author that Hubbard might have read.) And to my eyes, the Kidd in the portrait does look a little like Hubbard.

And it isn’t hard to see what might have drawn Hubbard to Kidd. Just as he was fascinated by the figure of Saint Helena, who had searched for relics in the Holy Land, he would have been justifiably interested in the only pirate known to have actually buried any treasure. Hubbard returned obsessively to this idea throughout his career, and after founding the Church of Scientology, he reached the point where he could pull others into his delusions. He claimed to have buried gold and diamonds in Africa in his past life as Rhodes, and as Russell Miller writes in Bare-Faced Messiah:

On the south-east coast of Sardinia…Hubbard mustered the crew on the well deck for a briefing. Standing on a hatch cover so that he could be seen, he told them he was on the threshold of achieving an ambition he had cherished for centuries in earlier lives. This was the first lifetime he had been able to build an organization with sufficient resources, money and manpower to tackle the project they were about to undertake. He had accumulated vast wealth in previous lives, he explained, and had buried it in strategic places. The purpose of their present mission was to locate this buried treasure and retrieve it, either with, or without, the cooperation of the authorities.

It led to a treasure hunt throughout the Mediterranean, where members of the Sea Org were deployed to various sites to search with metal detectors. Nothing was ever found, but for Hubbard, the quest may have been its own reward. As he wrote in “Yesterday, You Might Have Been a Pirate”: “I believe the pirate had a reason for existence. I know that if I were sent back into those centuries I would have followed the more comfortable profession. I know the Caribbean to be soft and glamorous and kind, and if I had had to turn pirate to enjoy it, I would have run a Skull and Bones up the truck. And to hell with the Navy!”

The Worlds of If

As I prepare for my upcoming presentation this weekend at the Grappling With the Futures conference, I’ve been thinking a lot about the evolution of psychohistory, the fictional science that figures prominently in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. When it comes to describing how psychohistory is actually supposed to work in practice, however, the original stories aren’t much help. At first, the definition of the field might seem clear enough. If you initially encountered the trilogy in book form, it’s right there in the text, in an entry from the Encyclopedia Galactica:

Psychohistory: …Gal Dornick, using nonmathematical concepts, has defined psychohistory to be that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli…Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment.

This seems fairly straightforward. But it wasn’t added to the series until the hardcover edition published by Gnome Press in 1951, for which Asimov wrote a new opening chapter called “The Psychohistorians.” When the novelette “Foundation” originally appeared in the May 1942 issue of Astounding, the word “psychohistory” was used only once. We’re informed that Hari Seldon is “the greatest psychologist of all time,” and that he has the ability “to unravel human emotions sufficiently to be able to predict broadly the historical sweep of the future” using “simple psychological technique.” But we aren’t told how—just what. Psychohistory isn’t a method here, but a claim about results.

It’s also possible that Asimov himself had only a vague idea about it. As I’ve noted elsewhere, psychohistory seems to have been largely the brainchild of John W. Campbell, who was more interested in what it could do than in how it would work. The year before, in the nonfiction article “The Science of Whithering,” L. Sprague de Camp had written in the magazine:

If there were such a science, what would it be like? It would have a body of observable facts, and would overlap with history, anthropology, sociology, economics, vital statistics, and perhaps one or two other sciences. Students of the science should be able to observe uniformities among these facts, deduce laws from these uniformities, and from the laws make predictions that are later borne out by observation.

And the method didn’t even need to be scientific. At the time, Campbell was also editing the fantasy magazine Unknown, and on May 6, 1942, he told one of his most valued contributors, Anthony Boucher, that he was considering a standalone issue devoted to prophecy: “The philosophy of prophecy, the record, through the past, of the various classes of prophecy, and the problems of the prophet.” He continued:

Second, there would be the main section consisting of prophecy. This would be devoted to several different types of prophecy concerning the present world situation and, specifically, the war. Who’ll win (and if the prophets have the sense God gave little green apples, the answer to that one’s going to be easy for them to figure out) and, more important, how, by what route, by licking who first, and when. When will Japan be knocked out? When will Italy fold? When’s Hitler going down to defeat?

This last statement is remarkably revealing. What Campbell wanted were predictions, specifically ones related to the war. As Hitler rewrote the map of Europe, the anxiety to knew what would come next—which is one to which I think we can all relate these days—became overwhelming, and the source didn’t matter, as long as it was “borne out by observation.” At this moment of global crisis, Campbell was willing to seek answers from astrology, numerology, and the prophecies of Nostradamus. (The prophecy issue, notably, never appeared, thanks largely to what Campbell characterized as an inability to find “competent fanatics”: “Nobody with any reputation or ability in the fields I wanted was willing to name names and date dates.” The italics are mine.) Psychohistory was simply a way to express these impulses in language that would feel at home in a science fiction magazine. Even Asimov, who never seems to have been altogether comfortable with Campbell’s ideas, was driven by much the same motivation. Decades later, he had a revealing exchange about the origins of the Foundation series in an interview with James Gunn:

Asimov: Mind you, this was also a time when I’d been living through the Hitler era in the 1930s, where no matter what anyone did, Hitler kept winning victories, and the only way that I could possibly find life bearable at the time was to convince myself that no matter what he did, he was doomed to defeat in the end. That he couldn’t win.
Gunn: Psychohistory is against it.
Asimov: That’s right…I suppose that was my literary response to my own feelings, which have no basis, I suppose, except that it made me feel better.

It was a longing that expressed itself equally well as psychohistory or prophecy, and it was about to assume its most convincing form. Not surprisingly, the science fiction magazines of the period often published stories that presented alternative outcomes for the war, including some that ended with victory for the Axis. Anthony Boucher justified this in a letter to Campbell that was published in Astounding in June 1943:

We are not, thank God, prophets. We don’t write what we feel sure is going to happen, but what, under certain circumstances, might happen…Now we aren’t expecting an Axis victory, any more than we are expecting worldwide tidal waves or planetary collisions or the invasion of little green men from Alpha Centauri. These disasters are all, with varying probabilities, present in one or more of the possible Worlds-of-If. And the more we write about ingenious ruses by which the Axis secures victory…the less apt those ruses are to succeed, and the more certain we can be that my sons and your daughter will inherit, in deepest truth, the best of all Possible Worlds.

Science fiction, in other words, was a way of generating models of potential outcomes and working through their implications. The real psychohistorians were the science fiction writers and fans, and psychohistory was a veiled way for the genre to talk about itself and its claims for foreseeing the future. Campbell might have been content to leave it there—but he was unable to leave well enough alone. In 1950, the year before the Foundation series appeared in hardcover, another author wrote: “The social organisms which we call states and nations behave and react in every respect as though they were individual organisms…The social organism behaves in a manner which can be graphed on the tone scale.” It was L. Ron Hubbard, who called the concept “political dianetics.” And he and Campbell were about to start a foundation of their own.

Hubbard and the Empress

One afternoon in the early forties, the pulp writer Arthur J. Burks was seated in the lobby of a publishing firm in New York when he ran into his friend L. Ron Hubbard. The two authors had been close for years—Burks had seen Hubbard’s unpublished manuscript Excalibur, a work on the mind that he later called “the strangest book I ever read”—and their interests ran along similar lines. With the help of his wife and a second woman, Burks had been experimenting with spiritualism, and the three enthusiasts believed that they were in contact with a number of “monitors,” or spirit guides, who spoke by rapping on a table or through automatic writing. When Burks brought Hubbard home that day, it soon became clear that he was a promising addition to their group. In his occult memoir Monitors, Burks recalls of the man whom he calls “Redhead”:

Almost before we were able to explain anything that was happening to us, [Hubbard] told us this: “I was the first flier in the United States to gain a glider pilot’s license. I loved gliders. But sometimes I took too great chances and found myself in difficulties. I shortly learned, though, that when I was in danger, ‘someone’ looked after me. If I was trying to find the ground through the heart of a thunderstorm, and feared a fatal crash, and looked out to see a smiling woman sitting on one of my wings, I knew I would come through. She was always there, and visible, when I knew myself in great trouble.”

The others exchanged meaningful looks, and one of their “monitors” indicated that he had something to say. When Burks’s spiritual partner finished writing the message, it read: “His monitor is a saint. She was a woman. Tell him what has happened so far.”

According to Burks, they spoke with the spirit world for hours, with another guide providing “the name of Redhead’s monitor, together with historical data about her.” When they were unable to find the name in a dictionary, the monitor told one of the women to leaf through the volume with a pencil, which led to this dramatic moment:

Suddenly she stabbed down the pencil, holding several pages. The topmost page told the story. But the name indicated was an entirely different one! It was indeed the name of a saint, about whom much appeared in the big book. And at the very end of the biographical material appeared this line: “Also called…” And that name was that which had been given us, its middle letter holed by the lead pencil point.

Even if we don’t take Burks’s account at face value, we can add it to our limited stock of information about Hubbard’s guardian spirit. Years later, in the secret autobiographical document known as the “Affirmations,” Hubbard provided a few other details, including her name:

The most thrilling thing in your life is your love and consciousness of your Guardian. She materializes for you. You have no doubts of her. She is real. She is always with you. You love her very much. You trust her. You see and hear her. She is not your master. You have a mighty spiritual will of your own. She is an advisor and as such is respected by you. She is wise and worthy and never changes shape…She has copper red hair, long braids, a lovely Venusian face, a white gown belted with jade squares. She wears gold slippers. Thus you see her…Only Flavia Julia and then the All Powerful have opinions worth inclining toward.

Who was Flavia Julia, and what did she mean to Hubbard? There have been a number of efforts to fill in the blanks, beginning with a letter that the author’s friend Jack Parsons wrote to Aleister Crowley: “[Hubbard] describes his Angel as a beautiful winged woman with red hair whom he calls the Empress and who has guided him through his life and saved him many times.” Hubbard’s estranged son later claimed that his father referred to her as Hathor, while the biographer Jon Atack shrewdly associates her with the goddess Diana, whose name had a special significance to Hubbard. (He named his daughter after her, along with one of his yachts, and Atack even suggests that she also inspired the term “dianetics,” which was officially derived from the Greek roots meaning “through the mind.”) But I think that the one who comes the closest is the journalist Lawrence Wright, who writes in a note in Going Clear:

In the “Affirmations,” Hubbard explicitly names his Guardian Flavia Julia. He may have been referring to Flavia Julia Titi, daughter of the Roman Emperor Titus; or, perhaps more likely, to the Empress Flavia Julia Helena Augustus, also known as Saint Helen, mother of Constantine the Great, who is credited with finding the “True Cross.”

In fact, the association with Saint Helena seems exceptionally convincing. Her full name includes “Flavia Julia”; she’s often depicted in art as a beautiful young woman, although she was at an advanced age when her son converted to Christinaity; and she’s one of the few Roman Catholic saints who could be accurately described as an Empress.

And the clincher is hiding in plain sight. Hubbard spent much of his childhood in Helena, Montana, of which Russell Miller writes in the biography Bare-Faced Messiah:

Helena in 1913 was a pleasant city of Victorian brick and stone buildings encircled by the Rocky Mountains, whose snow-dusted peaks stippled with pines provided a scenic backdrop in every direction. The Capital Building, with its massive copper dome and fluted doric columns, eloquently proclaimed its status as the first city of Montana, as did the construction of the neo-Gothic St. Helena Cathedral, which was nearing completion on Warren Street.

The italics are mine. A few pages later, Miller adds: “Ron was enrolled at the kindergarten at Central School on Warren Street, just across from the new cathedral which, with its twin spires and gray stone facade, towered reprovingly over the city. Most days he was walked to school by his aunts, Marnie and June, who were at Helena High, opposite Central School.” A glance at Google Street View reveals that, even today, if you stand at the entrance of the old Central School and look northeast, you’ll be facing the cathedral’s twin spires, and the most direct route between Hubbard’s house and school would have taken him right by it. Hubbard, in short, spent much of his boyhood—from 1914 to 1921—in the shadow of a cathedral named for Saint Helena. He would have walked past it nearly every day, and if he ever ventured inside, he would have seen the Empress herself depicted in the stained glass window in the north transept. We don’t know why he was so drawn to her, but Saint Helena was best known for her search for relics in the Holy Land, and the story of the vision that led her to the True Cross may well have appealed to a man who would spend years looking for treasure that he had buried in past lives. Hubbard seems to have genuinely believed that she was his guide and protector, and from his point of view, he was perfectly right. She was the patron saint of new discoveries.

The moon is a harsh fortress

Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite pieces from earlier in this blog’s run. This is a significantly expanded version of a post that first appeared on February 27, 2017.

In the May 1947 issue of the nonfiction magazine Air Trails and Science Frontiers, which was edited at the time by John W. Campbell, the cover story was an article titled “Fortress in the Sky.” Its author, credited as “Capt. B. A. Northrop,” argued that the existence of the atomic bomb had rendered the notion of a defensible land or naval base obsolete. The only truly impregnable military position, he wrote, was the moon, which would soon be “conquered” by mankind: “It will probably be reached in five years and completed in ten. Its possessor will be supreme over all nations and peoples of Earth.” Northrop went on to discuss the possible technologies that could be used for a moon landing, but he also made a very peculiar claim:

Here and there throughout the world many men have been thinking about rockets for some time. I recall that in 1930, L. Ron Hubbard, a writer and engineer, developed and tested—but without fanfare—a rocket motor considerably superior to the V-2 instrument of propulsion and rather less complicated.

In fact, “Northrop” was none other than Hubbard himself, who was nineteen years old in 1930, when he was allegedly conducting his rocket research. (I used to believe that his pseudonym, which is spelled “Northorp” elsewhere in the issue, was inspired by Northrop Aircraft, a frequent presence in the magazine’s pages, but it seems more likely to me now that it was a nod to Sara Northrup, Hubbard’s wife. Campbell himself may have suggested it—he had written his most famous stories as Don A. Stuart and encouraged Robert A. Heinlein to use the pen name Anson MacDonald, both of which were based on their wives’ maiden names.) “Fortress in the Sky” was Hubbard’s first major publication after the war. He had been suffering from depression and writer’s block, and before Campbell give him the assignment, he had contributed just a few poems and short articles to the Catalina Islander. As such, the piece was a turning point in his career, but as far as I know, it has never been reprinted in its entirety. Last year, however, I got my hands on a copy of the original issue of Air Trails in which it appeared, and I was able to read the whole thing. Aside from Hubbard’s gratuitous reference to himself, which Campbell either believed or was willing to let slide, it’s a surprisingly plausible piece of futuristic speculation. Campbell appears to have provided much of the science, and a lot of the material relating to a future moon colony seems to have been drawn directly from the editor’s unpublished novel The Moon is Hell.

If you’re a science fiction fan, however, the most fascinating section comes about a third of the way through. While listing the moon’s strategic advantages as an atomic missile base, Hubbard notes:

The first [factor] might be termed the “gravity gauge” comparable to the weather gauge so desirable in the days of sailing ships of the line…The gravity gauge is important in the ratio of six to one, in that a missile would have to travel with an initial velocity of six miles per second to leave Earth, but would only have to travel with a velocity of one mile per second to leave the Moon. Such a missile, leaving Earth, would have to go nine-tenths of the way to the Moon on power before the latter body would begin to pull it in by its own gravity, whereas it would only have to travel one-tenth of the distance to escape the Moon and begin to ride down on Earth gravity.

On the next page, a diagram by the artist Frank Tinsley is provided to illustrate this point, with a caption that was presumably written by Campbell:

Skippers of old-time men-o’-war early learned the advantage of the “weather gauge,” which meant being up-wind from the enemy. The Moon affords a similar “gravity gauge” over the Earth by reason of its weaker pull. A missile shot from Earth to Moon must work against the stronger Earth gravity to the point where the pulls balance, nine-tenths of the way out. Missiles fired from the Moon work against one-sixth the pull through one-tenth the total distance, and ride free the rest of the way. Also, the moon has no retarding blanket of atmosphere to slow the take-off.

If I had to guess, I’d say the concept itself probably came from Campbell, while the term “gravity gauge” sounds more like Hubbard, a nautical enthusiast who casually uses the term “weather gauge” in one of his later novels, Masters of Sleep. But this is pure speculation. (A few years later, incidentally, Hubbard would work on the script for the film Rocketship X-M, which includes the line: “Today, there is even the possibility that an unassailable base could be established on the moon to control world peace.”)

Yet if this all sounds a little familiar, it might be because you’ve read Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which was first published in 1966. The novel recounts the revolt of a lunar colony much like the one that Hubbard describes, and in a crucial plot point, its narrator quickly figures out the advantage that gravity provides, with the help of a computer named Mike: “Luna…has energy of position; she sits at top of gravity well eleven kilometers per second deep and kept from falling in by curb only two and a half km/s high. Mike knew that curb; daily he tossed grain freighters over it, let them slide downhill to Terra.” And they don’t need to use missiles at all. A hundred tons of anything, falling to earth from the moon, would generate six trillion joules of kinetic energy, or the equivalent of two-kiloton atomic bomb. All they have to do is throw rocks: “That terrible speed results from gravity well shaped by Terra’s mass, eighty times that of Luna, and made no real difference whether Mike pushed a missile gently over well curb or flipped it briskly. Was not muscle that counted but great depth of that well.” Heinlein had also mentioned this concept before—although, revealingly, not in Rocket Ship Galileo, which is actually about a Nazi military base on the moon, but was written before Hubbard’s piece was published. In late 1947, a few months after the article appeared, Heinlein began work on the juvenile novel Hayworth Hall, later retitled Space Cadet, in which we find the exchange:

“The spaceship is the perfect answer in a military sense to the atom bomb, and to germ warfare and weather warfare. It can deliver an attack that can’t be stopped—and it is utterly impossible to attack that spaceship from the surface of a planet.”

Matt nodded. “The gravity gauge.”

“Yes, the gravity gauge. Men on the surface of a planet are as helpless against men in spaceships as a man would be trying to conduct a rock-throwing fight from the bottom of a well. The man at the top of the well has gravity working for him.”

Heinlein first publicly made the connection to the moon at a meeting of the County Librarians’ Association in Los Angeles on May 5, 1948. (One of the other writers in attendance was Theodor Geisel, who would later become famous as Dr. Seuss.) A writeup in the Los Angeles Times quoted Heinlein as saying that the moon would make an ideal military base: “A power on the moon would have the gravity gauge. The moon has one-sixth the normal earth gravity. It would be like throwing rocks downhill.”

Over a decade and a half later, on February 24, 1965, Heinlein wrote in his typewritten notes for “a Luna-Terra novel,” which later became The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: “Granite costs nothing and the power for a catapult [on the moon] is almost free….But the key point is that rocks are cheap and it’s downhill all the way.” Later that year, he returned to this point in a comment on his earlier essay “Pandora’s Box,” which was published in the collection Expanded Universe:

The disadvantage in being at the bottom of a deep “gravity well” is very great; gravity gauge will be as crucial in the coming years as wind gauge was in the days when sailing ships controlled empires. The nation that controls the Moon will control the Earth—but no one seems willing these days to speak that nasty fact out loud.

The italics are mine. Given the timing of its appearance in Space Cadet, Heinlein’s remarks on the subject in 1948, and his use of the term “wind gauge” in 1965, it seems clear that he read Hubbard’s “Fortress in the Sky” and was influenced by it while writing The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. (The clincher, at least for me, is that Heinlein alludes to this concept in his screenplay for the film Destination Moon, which was based in part on Rocket Ship Galileo, but which includes an observation that isn’t in the original novel at all: “Shooting a rocket from the moon to the Earth is a great deal easier than shooting from the Earth to the moon, because it’s downhill almost all the way.”) We know for a fact that Heinlein read Air Trails. Campbell had approached him about writing an article for the magazine, and Heinlein wrote back to the editor on November 11, 1946: “Air Trails shows distinct improvement under your editing.” He was also friends with Hubbard, and there’s no question that he would have found this article interesting. The fact that the three men had all spent time together over the previous couple of years means that we can’t rule out the possibility that Heinlein came up with the notion first and passed it along to one or both of the others. But I think that the simplest explanation—that Heinlein borrowed the concept from Hubbard’s article—is the most likely one. It’s also worth noting that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Hubbard or Campbell that the gravity well could be used to deliver anything other than missiles, and utilizing it to “throw rocks” is, frankly, a much better idea. This implies that Heinlein read the article, mentioned it in passing in Space Cadet, thought up a distinct improvement, and then set it aside until he was ready to use it. Hubbard’s official biographies refer to Heinlein as his “protégé,” which is a stretch even by their uncritical standards, but this is one case in which the arrow of influence genuinely appears to have run the other way—although it also speaks to Heinlein’s unique gifts. When it came to other writers, he usually had the weather gauge. And it’s a testament to his genius that even when he found himself downwind, he was still able to seize the advantage.

The men who sold the movies

Yesterday, I noted that although Isaac Asimov achieved worldwide fame as a science fiction writer, his stories have inspired surprisingly few cinematic adaptations, despite the endless attempts to do something with the Foundation series. But there’s a more general point to be made here, which is the relative dearth of movies based on the works of the four writers whom I discuss in Astounding. Asimov has a cheap version of Nightfall, Bicentennial Man, and I, Robot. John W. Campbell has three versions of The Thing and nothing else. L. Ron Hubbard, who admittedly is a special case, just has Battlefield Earth, while Robert A. Heinlein has The Puppet Masters, Starship Troopers and its sequels, and the recent Predestination. Obviously, this isn’t bad, and most writers, even successful ones, never see their work onscreen at all. But when you look at someone like Philip K. Dick, whose stories have been adapted into something like three television series and ten feature films, this scarcity starts to seem odd, even when you account for other factors. Hubbard is presumably off the table, and the value of Campbell’s estate, to be honest, consists entirely of “Who Goes There?” It’s also possible that much of Asimov’s work just isn’t very cinematic. But if you’re a Heinlein fan, it’s easy to imagine an alternate reality in which we can watch adaptations of “If This Goes On—,” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Universe,” “Gulf,” Tunnel in the Sky, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Glory Road, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and three different versions of Stranger in a Strange Land—the corny one from the seventies, the slick but empty remake from the late nineties, and the prestige television adaptation that at least looked great on Netflix.

That isn’t how it turned out, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Various works by Heinlein and Asimov have been continuously under option for decades, and three out of these four authors made repeated efforts to break into movies or television. Hubbard, notably, was the first, with a sale to Columbia Pictures of a unpublished story that he adapted into the serial The Secret of Treasure Island in 1938. He spent ten weeks on the studio lot, doing uncredited rewrites on the likes of The Adventures of the Mysterious Pilot and The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, and he would later claim, without any evidence, that he had worked on the scripts for Stagecoach, Dive Bomber, and The Plainsman. Decades later, Hubbard actively shopped around the screenplay for Revolt in the Stars, an obvious Star Wars knockoff, and among his last works were the scripts Ai! Pedrito! and A Very Strange Trip. Campbell, in turn, hosted the radio series Exploring Tomorrow; corresponded with the producer Clement Fuller about the television series The Unknown, with an eye to adapting his own stories or writing originals; and worked briefly as a freelance story editor for the syndicated radio series The Planet Man. Heinlein had by far the most success—he wrote Rocket Ship Galileo with one eye toward the movies, and he developed a related project with Fritz Lang before partnering with George Pal on Destination Moon. As I mentioned last week, he worked on the film Project Moon Base and an unproduced teleplay for a television show called Century XXII, and he even had the dubious privilege of suing Roger Corman for plagiarism over The Brain Eaters. And Asimov seethed with jealousy:

[Destination Moon] was the first motion picture involving one of us, and while I said not a word, I was secretly unhappy. Bob had left our group and become famous in the land of the infidels…I don’t know whether I simply mourned his loss, because I thought that now he would never come back to us; or whether I was simply and greenly envious. All I knew was that I felt more and more uncomfortable. It was like having a stomachache in the mind, and it seemed to spoil all my fun in being a science fiction writer.

But Asimov remained outwardly uninterested in the movies, writing of one mildly unpleasant experience: “It showed me again what Hollywood was like and how fortunate I was to steer as clear of it as possible.” It’s also hard to imagine him moving to Los Angeles. Yet he was at least open to the possibility of writing a story for Paul McCartney, and his work was often in development. In Nat Segaloff’s recent biography A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, we learn that the television producer John Mantley had held an option on I, Robot “for some twenty years” when Ellison was brought on board in 1978. (This isn’t exactly right—Asimov states in his memoirs that Mantley first contacted him on August 11, 1967, and it took a while for a contract to be signed. But it was still a long time.) Asimov expressed hope that the adaptation would be “the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made,” which incidentally sheds light on his opinion of 2001, but it wasn’t meant to be. As Segaloff writes:

For a year from December 1977 Ellison was, as he has put it, “consumed with the project.” He used Asimov’s framework of a reporter, Robert Bratenahl, doing a story about Susan Calvin’s former lover, Stephen Byerly, and presented four of Calvin’s stories as flashbacks, making her the central figure, even in events that she could not have witnessed. It was a bold and admittedly expensive adaptation…When no response was forthcoming, Ellison arranged an in-person meeting with [Warner executive Bob] Shapiro on October 25, 1978, during which he realized that the executive had not read the script.

Ellison allegedly told Shapiro: “You’ve got the intellectual capacity of an artichoke.” He was fired from the project a few months later.

And the case of I, Robot hints at why these authors have had only limited success in Hollywood. As Segaloff notes, the burst of interest in such properties was due mostly to the success of Star Wars, and after Ellison left, a few familiar names showed up:

Around June 1980, director Irvin Kershner, who had made a success with The Empire Strikes Back, expressed interest, but when he was told that Ellison would not be rehired to make changes, according to Ellison his interest vanished…In 1985, Gary Kurtz, who produced the Star Wars films, made inquiries but was told that the project would cost too much to shoot, both because of its actual budget and the past expenses that had been charged against it.

At various points, in other words, many of the same pieces were lined up for I, Robot that had been there just a few years earlier for Star Wars. (It’s worth noting that less time separates Star Wars from these abortive attempts than lies between us and Inception, which testifies to how vivid its impact still was.) But it didn’t happen a second time, and I can think of at least one good reason. In conceiving his masterpiece, George Lucas effectively skipped the golden age entirely to go back to an earlier pulp era, which spoke more urgently to him and his contemporaries—which may be why we had a television show called Amazing Stories and not Astounding. Science fiction in the movies often comes down to an attempt to recreate Star Wars, and if that’s your objective, these writers might as well not exist.