A Funny Thing Happened...

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In 1986 I sold first North American print rights to an article called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Review. It came out in a Hugo Award-winning semi-prozine entitled Thrust: Science Fiction in Review. The article can speak for itself. What I want to bring to people's attention is the reaction of the Scientologists to the article.

I had two guest pieces in the Washington Post Bookworld a few months before Happened was published. I used a mail drop in Hollywood as my address for doing business. It had kept me safe from irate people connected with some of the articles I wrote for Cinefantastique and other publications on more than one occasion. I have no idea how they found my home address, but find it they did.

A well-dressed blond woman, Simone, and a male whose name I no longer remember knocked on my door one afternoon. They introduced themselves as being PR people for Scientology and they were very concerned about the nature of the article I had in Thrust. They wanted me to take back several statements that I had made in the piece. I received a long lecture and a copy of Dianetics.

Over the next several weeks I received a minimum of one visit a week from Simone. She asked me what I thought of Dianetics and I tactfully sidestepped the fact that I had glanced through it and tossed the book in the fireplace. When it became clear that I was not going to retract certain sections of the article, Simone offered a compromise. She wanted me to make up for my misdeeds by writing another article about Hubbard's novels, they would then approve it, and place it somewhere. I would receive a very large sum of money for doing it. I refused.

Gradually she shifted from cajoling and offering bribes to threats of ending my career as a journalist. They investigated me and Simone hauled out my dirty laundry. (Which is one of the reasons for my current policy of "I have no skeletons in my closet, they're all hanging from the yardarm." You can't blackmail someone who has no secrets.)

I never budged and a few times I threw her out of my home. I will probably never know if they were behind the markets that suddenly closed their doors to me or not. What I do know is that my ability to sell articles was impaired in some mysterious fashion and I moved from writing to New Age editorial work.

I reinvented myself (to steal a phrase from Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan) as an editor. I reinvented myself again when I became an ebook author.

Now go on and read the article and see if you can figure out why they were so upset with me.

GODWAR CENTRAL

A Funny Thing Happened...