Fear Page 13
Cicero: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), a Roman statesman, lawyer, political theorist and philosopher. He is considered to have been one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists, and one of the most versatile minds of Roman culture. → to text
Colt .38: Colt .38 Super; a .38 caliber automatic pistol manufactured by the Colt Firearms Company of Hartford, Connecticut, and founded by Samuel Colt (1814–1862), who revolutionized the firearms industry. Introduced in 1929, it is one of the most powerful automatic pistols in the world. → to text
constable: (British) a police officer. → to text
Dumas: Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), a French writer best known for his swashbuckling historical tales including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask. → to text
ennui: a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from a lack of interest; boredom. → to text
Fates: the Fates, in classical mythology, were the three goddesses Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who control human destiny. → to text
Gibbon: Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), an English historian best known for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. → to text
Homer: (eighth century BC) Greek epic poet. Two of the greatest works in Western literature, the Illiad and the Odyssey, are attributed to him. → to text
ken: range of vision. → to text
Ketch, Jack: executioner; an English executioner in the 1600s, notorious for his barbarous inefficiency because he employed either very awkward or sadistic techniques and his victims were known to have suffered at their deaths. → to text
Khayyám: Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer best known for his poetry. → to text
Machiavellian: characterized by subtle or unscrupulous cunning, deception, expediency or dishonesty. This concept is named after the Renaissance diplomat and writer Nicolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), who described the principles of government in which political expediency is placed above morality, and craft and deceit are used to maintain the authority and carry out the policies of a ruler. → to text
Medusa: (Greek mythology) a monster with live venomous snakes for hair; people who looked at her would turn to stone. → to text
Parisian wit: a sense of humor that always finds something to laugh about, no matter how tragic a circumstance may be. → to text
pince-nez: a pair of glasses held on the face by a spring that grips the nose. → to text
rondure: a graceful curving or roundness. → to text
Shakespeare: William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English playwright and poet, recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all dramatists. → to text
sola topi: pith helmet; a lightweight hat made from the dried pith of sola, a plant that grows in southern India and the East Indies. Pith is a soft spongelike tissue in the stems of most flowering plants, and helmets made from this are worn for protection from the sun. → to text
Swift: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), an Irish satirist, essayist and poet, famous for works like Gulliver’s Travels, The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub. → to text
Tennyson: Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), a British poet whose works reflect Victorian sentiments and aesthetics. He was appointed poet laureate in 1850. → to text
top, old: a general form of address to a man that one knows. → to text
Verne: Jules Verne (1828–1905), a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for novels such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days. → to text
Yucatán: a peninsula mostly in southeastern Mexico between the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. → to text
About the Author
L. Ron Hubbard’s remarkable writing career spanned more than half-a-century of intense literary achievement and creative influence.
And though he was first and foremost a writer, his life experiences and travels in all corners of the globe were wide and diverse. His insatiable curiosity and personal belief that one should live life as a professional led to a lifetime of extraordinary accom-plishment. He was also an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician.
Growing up in the still-rugged frontier country of Montana, he broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled to a still remote Asia. The following year, to further satisfy his thirst for adventure and augment his growing knowledge of other cultures, he left school and returned to the Orient. On this trip, he worked as a supercargo and helmsman aboard a coastal trader which plied the seas between Japan and Java. He came to know old Shanghai, Beijing and the Western Hills at a time when few Westerners could enter China. He traveled more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land while still a teenager and before the advent of commercial aviation as we know it.
He returned to the United States in the autumn of 1929 to complete his formal education. He entered George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he studied engineering and took one of the earliest courses in atomic and molecular physics. In addition to his studies, he was the president of the Engineering Society and Flying Club, and wrote articles, stories and plays for the university news-paper. During the same period he also barnstormed across the American mid-West and was a national correspondent and photographer for the Sportsman Pilot magazine, the most distinguished aviation publication of its day.
Returning to his classroom of the world in 1932, he led two separate expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition; sailing on one of the last of America’s four-masted commercial ships, and the second, a mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico. His exploits earned him membership in the renowned Explorers Club and he subsequently carried their coveted flag on two more voyages of exploration and discovery. As a master mariner licensed to operate ships in any ocean, his lifelong love of the sea was reflected in the many ships he captained and the skill of the crews he trained. He also served with distinction as a U.S. naval officer during the Second World War.
All of this—and much more—found its way, into his writing and gave his stories a compelling sense of authenticity that has appealed to readers throughout the world. It started in 1934 with the publication of “The Green God” in Thrilling Adventure magazine, a story about an American naval intelligence officer caught up in the mystery and intrigues of pre-communist China. With his extensive knowledge of the world and its people and his ability to write in any style and genre, he rapidly achieved prominence as a writer of action adventure, western, mystery and suspense. Such was the respect of his fellow writers that he was only 25 when elected president of the New York Chapter of the American Fiction Guild.
In addition to his career as a leading writer of fiction, he worked as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood where he wrote the original story and script for Columbia’s 1937 hit serial, “The Secret of Treasure Island.” His work on numerous films for Columbia, Universal and other major studios involved writing, providing story lines and serving as a script consultant.
In 1938, he was approached by the venerable New York publishing house of Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction. Wanting to capitalize on the proven reader appeal of the
L. Ron Hubbard byline to capture more readers for this emerging genre, they essentially offered to buy all the science fiction he wrote. When he protested that he did not write about machines and machinery but that he wrote about people, they told him that was exactly what was wanted. The rest is history.
The impact and influence that his novels and stories had on the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror virtually amounted to the changing of a genre. It is the compelling human element that he originally brought to this new genre that remains today the basis of its growing international popularity.
L. Ron Hubbard consistently e
nabled readers to peer into the minds and emotions of characters in a way that sharply heightened the reading experience without slowing the pace of the story, a level of writ-ing rarely achieved.
Among the most celebrated examples of this are three stories he published in a single, phenomenally creative year (1940)—Final Blackout and its grimly possible future world of unremitting war and ultimate courage which Robert Heinlein called “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written”; the ingenious fantasy-adventure, Typewriter in the Sky described by Clive Cussler as “written in the great style adventure should be written in”; and the prototype novel of clutching psychological suspense and horror in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, Fear, studied by writers from Stephen King to Ray Bradbury.
It was Mr. Hubbard’s trendsetting work in the speculative fiction field from 1938 to 1950, particu-larly, that not only helped to expand the scope and imaginative boundaries of science fiction and fantasy but indelibly established him as one of the founders of what continues to be regarded as the genre’s Golden Age.
Widely honored—recipient of Italy’s Tetra-dramma D’Oro Award and a special Gutenberg Award, among other significant literary honors—Battlefield Earth has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in 23 languages and is the biggest single-volume science fiction novel in the history of the genre at 1050 pages. It was ranked number three out of the 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century in the Random House Modern Library Reader’s Poll.
The Mission Earth dekalogy has been equally acclaimed, winning the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the coveted Nova-Science Fiction Award from Italy’s National Committee for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The dekalogy has sold more than seven million copies in 6 languages, and each of its 10 volumes became New York Times and international bestsellers as they were released.
The first of L. Ron Hubbard’s original screenplays Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong, novelized by author Kevin J. Anderson, was released in 1998 and immediately appeared as a New York Times bestseller. This was followed in 1999 with the publication of A Very Strange Trip, an original L. Ron Hubbard story of time-traveling adventure, novelized by Dave Wolverton, that also became a New York Times bestseller directly following its release.
His literary output ultimately encompassed more than 250 published novels, novelettes, short stories and screenplays in every major genre.
For more information on L. Ron Hubbard and his many works of fiction visit
www.GalaxyPress.com and www.LRonHubbard.org