The Invaders Plan by L. Ron Hubbard. Bridge Publications, Inc. 603 pages. $18.95.L. Ron Hubbard should be a fictional character. The man's life seems drawn from the pages of the pulp magazines in which he started his writing career. Hubbard is many things to many people: Messiah, cynic, millionaire recluse, myth -- in recent years there has been doubt as to whether the man is even alive.
Hubbard began his career as a writer of pulp adventure stories in 1930. His first science fiction story appeared in 1938. In the next dozen years he became a fairly popular figure in science fiction's so-called Golden Age, producing a few stories and novels that are read with enjoyment even today.
Final Blackout, his most regarded work, is a dark and powerful novel of Europe completely decimated by a generation of total war. The bleak life of the survivors, as they travel to England to re-establish order, is shown in despairing detail. This cautionary tale became something of a legend in science fiction.
Hubbard's life changed in 1950, when he became the first (and so far only) sf writer to found a serious religion. Others -- Heinlein, Herbert, Zelazny -- have their cult followings, but none can match Hubbard's accomplishments. Beginning with a series of articles in 1950, Hubbard laid out the tenants of his science Dianetics, which became gospel to the religion of Scientology. There are over a million Scientologists worldwide, and Hubbard is Pope, guru, and High Priest of the church.
Following Dianetics, Hubbard fell away from the science fiction world. His name became something of a standing joke in science fiction fandom, and apocryphal stories hold that he spent his last years in the field cynically telling other authors that they could make more money by "applying their ideas to the real world."
Hubbard, meanwhile, laughed all the way to the bank. Rumor makes him a multi-millionaire; certainly he no longer had to write to keep himself comfortable.
In 1980 Hubbard burst on the science fiction scene in a most dramatic fashion -- with the publication of the massive and highly-successful bestseller Battlefield Earth. The book owes much to Hubbard's pulp background, but it is a fast-paced and surprisingly readable story of alien invasion in the year 3000. Hubbard's return to writing was explained as a celebration of his fiftieth anniversary as a professional writer.
Rumor and controversy continued to dog Hubbard's heels, though. Despite the publication of Battlefield Earth, many began to believe that Hubbard was dead. He had not appeared in public nor granted interviews since 1966; finally, Hubbard's own son started court action to have his father declared either dead or mentally incompetent.
The court eventually settled the question of Hubbard's status through written documents and the testimony of his associates. To the popular imagination, though, the question still nags: is Hubbard indeed dead?
Now this mythic, almost fictional character has produced another science fiction book, probably destined to become as much a bestseller as its predecessor. It's just a pity that the book doesn't live up to its promise.
The Invaders Plan may be the finest science fiction novel of 1933. Certainly it has nothing -- in ideas, plot, characterization, or writing -- to commend it to an audience in the 1980s.
This book, itself almost as long as Battlefield Earth, is the first volume in a promised (or threatened?) series of ten billed as "the biggest science fiction dekalogy ever written." No one can deny that the book is big; even promotional literature from the publisher does not claim that it is good.
The plot is simplistic. The 110-planet Volatrian Confederacy is involved in an endless interstellar war of conquest -- but the nefarious Lombar Hisst has plans of his own. Hisst heads the Apparatus: a division of the Confederacy government that seems devoted to torture, espionage, and other dreadful doings. Hisst sends the narrator, one Soltan Gris, to the planet Blito-P3 (Earth) in the company of a virtuous Space Patrol agent named Jettero Heller. Gris and Heller are supposed to infiltrate Earth's society and turn our world into a weapon for Hisst's dastardly schemes.
The rest of the story is as pathetic as it is predictable. Noble Heller defeats the scheming Gris at every turn, remaining perfectly loyal to the Confederacy and derailing the Apparatus plans.
Whatever its other flaws, Battlefield Earth was written in a fast-paced adventure style. The writing in this present novel is worthy of a talented ten-year-old. Hubbard's paragraphs are sprinkled with childish outcries, exclamation points, and clumsy sentences that outdo the worst excesses of early pulp writers like E. E. Smith and Edmond Hamilton. Hubbard uses a number of devices that will drive the modern reader to distraction: the worst of these is the "(Bleep)" behind which he conceals his expletives.
The writing is fit for the nineteen-thirties; today it is helplessly dated and pathetically funny.
There is no real characterization -- the actors in Hubbard's interminable drama are cardboard cutouts of Virtue, Vice, Cruelty, and others that would be at home in a medieval morality play.
Hubbard's sense for scientific plausibility -- usually rather keen although understated -- went on vacation while he was writing The Invaders Plan. It is clear early on that he doesn't understand quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the other staples of modern physics; soon enough it becomes painfully obvious that he doesn't bother to understand nineteenth-century physics or biology or psychology, and is hazy on such matters as meteorology and elementary astronomy. A science fiction writer does not have to be a scientist, but he must be able to speak the language of science convincingly. Hubbard couldn't convince a bright high-school Freshman.
The flaws of the book -- its primitive language, lack of characterization, simplistic plot and total disregard of modern science -- are flaws appropriate to the novels of the thirties. The same criticisms can be levelled against any number of books that are classics of the field. The Invaders Plan may be the best sf book of 1933, but in 1985 it is almost unreadable. This might almost be a manuscript that Hubbard completed in the thirties and never sold.
Which brings us back to the question of Hubbard's current existence. On the basis of Battlefield Earth, many concluded that Hubbard was alive and well. The Invaders Plan may cause people to change their minds -- what living author with a shred of self-respect would allow this trash to be published without massive revision? It might be persuasively argued that this book could only have been released by people who did not know the field, and had not done any reading of contemporary science fiction at all.
Hubbard's life has been one of surprise after surprise, of applying science fiction's sense of wonder to real life. Might he not have more surprises waiting for us? L. Ron Hubbard has been laughing for a long, long time -- living or dead, he may have the last laugh yet.
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