A Funny Thing Happened...
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Review
Sane Thoughts on L. Ron Hubbard's The Invader's Plan
After the galleys of The Invader's Plan had sat on my shelf for several weeks, insinuating guilt about the edges of my mind as only the work of one of my childhood's favorite authors is capable of doing, I decided to read and review it. A simple decision, really.
I had been aware for some time that Hubbard was an intermittent source of controversy within the SF community, but had never taken it too seriously. Upon making a decision to review The Invader's Plan, I went to my mainstream editors to ask if they'd be interested in running such a review (for financial reasons, I do almost nothing on spec these days: four mainstream editors of long acquaintance turned me down after long interrogations of my motives for doing such a review. ("What are you. anyway? A Scientologist or something?")
My only contact with Scientology came in 1968 when, as an insatiably curious thirteen-year-old, I sent off for a free pamphlet on the subject A year of receiving nagging, hand-written letters followed the arrival of that slender booklet I was finally forced to write them a "leave my child alone" letter, to which I forged my grandmother's name. But then one should never judge an author by his "fans", and I doubt that the person writing those letters to me knew that I was a snot-nosed kid, not an adult
But I've always felt that a book, especially a work of fiction, should be judged on its own merits, not by what its author did away from his or her typewriter. As any student of Western literature can tell you, fiction writing has long been the domain of social mavericks, moral degenerates, and dangerous dreamers, not to mention just plain bad dudes. Going back to the very roots of Western literature, we find Chaucer, dear to the hearts of librarians everywhere, was a convicted rapist who escaped the noose by claiming "benefit of clergy" (meaning, in that illiterate age, that he would read and write and was therefore too valuable to waste). Christopher Marlowe, a quasi-contemporary of William Shakespeare (and one who the Bard is said to have plagiarized) may, if the rumor-mongers of the day are to be believed these four hundred years later, have been a murderer; he certainly seemed to delight in drawn-sword quarrels, and met his death in a dispute over a tavern bill. A great many writers seem to have tried to live up to the reputations of Chaucer and Marlowe, in deeds if not in talent In much more recent memory in the science fiction field, there was the small matter of wife-stealing that opened a serious breech between one of SF's most illustrious editors of the 1950s and one of the field's most seminal writers.
I would have to say that so trifling a matter as founding a religious / philosophical movement (a practice which has become fairly commonplace since the 1960s) just isn't in the same league as rape, murder and wife-stealing.
A long time ago, when the subtleties of fiction and the nuances of language were more sharply defined, the term satire was limited to work whose humor derived from irony and sarcasm. To be satire, it has to have a bite to it The shallow slapstick humor of Robert Asprin and L Sprague de Camp isnt really satire, although some may be quick to apply the title to such light, humorous work.
The Invader's Plan has a delightfully sharp set of teeth which Hubbard sinks into a good number of science fiction literature's favorite objects of derision: intelligence agencies, bureaucrats; and Dudley Do-Right heroes, as well as one not so favorite current mystique (though it ought to be), feminist machismo.
It seems that Earth has been marked for potential exploitation ("acquisition") by a ruthless galactic empire. But their advance scout gets a bad case of financial indigestion upon discovering that pollution and the threat of nuclear warfare is jeopardizing the empire's investment in time and research on what promised to be a very lucrative project In order to enslave the Earth, they first must rescue it from corporate polluters and trigger-happy politicians.
The Invader's Plan is definitely worth the price of admission. As I begin reading the second book in what is promised to be a ten-book series, Black Genesis, it looks like the writing will hold up through the series.
Postscript
Shortly after writing this review I learned, along with the rest of the world, that L Ron Hubbard had died. I can only wish that he had come back to science fiction sooner. It is small consolation that the ten volumes of Mission: Earth are reported to have already been completed, and I therefore will not be left dangling in the middle as has happened with other of my favorite authors.
As Hank Stine said recently about another deceased author (we've lost too many in recent months, Sturgeon, Herbert and Hubbard among them), If he had written a hundred books, it still wouldn't have been enough.
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