"Is L. Ron Hubbard worth reading?" Topic

"Aside from "Dianetics" and "Scientology" (I know not sci-fi"

Really how so…I thought it was his best fiction yet

I bought Battlefield Earth second hand in the eighties and before I probably had heard of Scientology but certainly not the authors connection. So I wasn't biased against it. I didn't mind the story but it read like a school reader. You know, very simplistic writing.

Edit I meant to say I didn't know of the authors connection to Scientology. Somehow came out a double negative and other confusion. :oP

I enjoyed reading BE – just re-read it recently. no idea about anything else from the author or about his private life, and cannot understand the hatred towards scientology anyhow. I find those who believe in creationism to be just as wacky (if not more so) so each to their own.

I read BE years ago and thought it was ok. Nothing really good or bad. It wasn't until much later I learned about scientology and thought they were just strange. Then a year ago I read Hubbard's biography. It would be hard for to read anything from him again. Wacky doesn't begin to describe it.

If you "collect" off-beat, near stream of consciousness, 'rant and dirty scum id pulp' style cornball hack fiction from people that " might not have been quite well" as they wrote, then the answer is yes.

He's no Robert E. Howard though. Howard understood brevity and ol' L. Ron apparently just really liked to hear himself type.

Let's just say we should be VERY glad that the rest of Battelfield Earth was never filmed and that they stopped at when the Psychlos got beat. The rest of the book is sort of like Waterhsip Down or Dante's Inferno if it had been written by a bi-polar paranoid schizo who simultaneously thought he was a reincarnated super being/messiah AND a con man running a dirty scam on a stupid vapid counter culture movement all at the same time.

………………….

Heeheehee.

You…oh my….you are SERIOUS.

Um….no. Hell no. Hell no to the tenth power.

JUST SAY NO.

……….

I think that should cover it.

Actually, I would highly recomend his Final Blackout (I disliked pretty much everything else he has written).

It is not high art, but I did enjoy it. Essentially – imagine that WW1 went on for ages, and worked back and forth across Europe. It follows a Lieut. (the last surviving one?) and his band of survivors as they finally decide to screw it and go back to England, where they find a dictatorship.

The funny thing is, that after reading this, I spotted a lot of places in his "later" works I.e. battlefield earth, which made me feel quite stringly that he did not write them, but possibly just outlined the story and farmed it out (style issues).

"The funny thing is, that after reading this, I spotted a lot of places in his "later" works I.e. battlefield earth, which made me feel quite stringly that he did not write them, but possibly just outlined the story and farmed it out (style issues)."

I think it's more that by the time he wrote his layer works he was Pharma-ed out, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

No

Actually, he was thought to be dead at the time.