Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [10]
By 1939, L. Ron Hubbard had tired of writing western and adventure stories, and his screenwriting efforts had failed. He was looking for a new challenge and found it in an unexpected genre: science fiction. Until the late 1930s, science fiction had been one of the more obscure areas of the pulp market, dominated by hackneyed stories of alien invaders and bug-eyed monsters. This changed, however, with the ascension of John W. Campbell to editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, the most popular science fiction magazine of the day. A fast-talking, chain-smoking, twenty-eight-year-old graduate of Duke University, Campbell saw science fiction as a metaphor, and under his exacting eye, the genre was radically transformed. Gone were the stock characters and formulaic plots. Campbell wanted fictional stories whose characters seemed human and whose plots reflected actual scientific discovery. He required that his writers gain a detailed knowledge of science and didn't hesitate to correct them if they were wrong.
Out of Campbell's vision came science fiction's golden age, during which some of the great technological advances of the future were first anticipated. Robert Heinlein, for example, wrote of waterbeds, moving sidewalks, moon landings, and the coming space race. Arthur C. Clarke predicted the birth of telecommunications satellites. Jack Williamson invented the term genetic engineering and, in the early 1940s, also explored the concept of anti-matter, a realm of physics that would not be fully realized until the advent of the particle accelerator in 1954. The moon landing, space shuttles, high-powered weapons, satellites, robotics, automated surveillance systems—all were predicted by science fiction writers informed by the scientific theories and developments of the day. Astounding brought these two worlds together. "We were all exploring possible human futures—most of them still seeming splendid in those years before the [atomic] bomb," said Jack Williamson, who began writing for Astounding in 1939. Though they still made only a penny a word, writing for Campbell meant membership in a "gifted crew as important as the money," said Williamson. "The best stories in the competing magazines were often his rejects."
L. Ron Hubbard did not fit Campbell's idea of a science fiction writer. He had a rudimentary understanding of science and engineering, but he lacked the rigorous scientific grounding possessed by writers such as Heinlein or Isaac Asimov, a Columbia University—educated biochemist. But Hubbard did have tremendous intellectual curiosity and research skills—"Given one slim fact for a background, I have found it easy to take off down the channel of research and canal-boat out a cargo of stories," he once wrote—and he was fascinated by such themes as psychic phenomena and psychological control, which Campbell also found intriguing.
After assigning Hubbard a story for Astounding's sister publication, Unknown, Campbell soon began to nurture Hubbard's talent as a fantasy writer. The heroes of his stories tended to reflect one of two distinct archetypes. One was the shy, wimpy, bookish sort who, through magic of his own or some other supernatural power, is transported to an alternate, somewhat parallel, universe, where he is transformed into a roguish adventurer. The other was the solitary loner type, hugely self-driven, often with autocratic leanings. "Some thought him a Fascist because of the authoritarian tone of certain stories," recalled the science fiction writer L. Sprague De Camp, who also remembered that Hubbard was careful not to admit to having any political ideology. "He gave wildly different impressions of himself ... One science fiction writer, then an idealistic left-liberal, was convinced that Hubbard had profound liberal convictions. To others, Hubbard expressed withering disdain for politics and politicians." When asked whether he would fight in World War II, Hubbard balked. "Me? Fight for