Scientology Approved Katie's Dungeon Picture? hmm
killahbabe
check out the story and the images here:
Clarence Thomas
L. RON HUBBARD WAS MORE THAN JUST A CULT INVENTOR!
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Books Review:
‘The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown,’ by Paul Malmont
By Michael Dirda,
July 20, 2011
This much is true.
In 1944 the science-fiction magazine Astounding published a short
story called “Deadline.” In it, the author, Cleve Cartmill, described
a superbomb very much like what was then being developed in New Mexico
by the physicists of the Manhattan Project. Worried that there had
been a major security leak, the FBI questioned both Cartmill and
Astounding’s editor, the legendary John W. Campbell.
It is also true that the science-fiction writers Robert A. Heinlein,
Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp worked together at a naval
laboratory in Philadelphia doing research for the war effort.
Perhaps even more astounding and amazing, if not entirely unknown, is
the fact that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, was himself
once a prolific pulp-magazine writer, a president of the major writers
guild of the time and part of a sex-and-magick cult run by Jack
Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Let me stress that all these items are part of the historical record.
You can look up many of the details in William H. Patterson’s
biography of Heinlein, Asimov’s memoirs, and various histories of
science fiction and Scientology.
At this point, however, novelist Paul Malmont enters the picture. In
his previous pulp-historical thriller, “The Chinatown Death Cloud
Peril,” the heroes were none other than Walter B. Gibson and Lester
Dent, the creators, respectively, of the Shadow — “Who knows what evil
lurks in the hearts of men?” — and Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. Fans
of that earlier book will be pleased to learn that both Gibson and
Dent reappear, albeit as subsidiary characters, in “The Astounding,
the Amazing, and the Unknown.” (The odd title plays off the names of
three of the best-known fantasy and science-fiction pulp magazines.)
In these pages Malmont discloses still another thread in the “secret
history” of the 20th century.
Suppose that a motley group of hack writers, famous for cranking out
tales of bug-eyed monsters, robots, gosh-wow space cadets and faster-
than-light travel, actually discovered that a superweapon, one as
powerful as any imaginary death ray, was not only possible but had
actually been invented. What if Wardenclyffe Tower — a scientific
folly designed by Nikola Tesla early in the 20th century — was more
than just a giant broadcasting antenna that never quite worked?
As a certain colonel tells Heinlein and company: “There have been
rumors ever since Wardenclyffe was shut down that Tesla was up to
something else there other than trying to create a new form of
electronic communications. Something potentially devastating. In these
letters he wrote in the last year of his life he claimed to be able to
use an invention of his to knock an entire fleet of aircraft from the
skies or sink an armada in an instant. . . . I need you to help me
find out what happened at Wardenclyffe. We need to know why the Nazis
consider it a Wunderwaffe. A wonder weapon.”
In recent years, books like “The Amazing, the Astounding, and the
Unknown” have become increasingly common, as the barriers between
fiction and nonfiction, and especially between fantasy and history,
have grown more porous. Real and imaginary people mingle freely in
most 19th-century steampunk stories. Tim Powers, for instance,
features the poets Percy Shelley and John Keats as major characters in
“The Stress of Her Regard.” Mark Hodder’s “The Strange Affair of
Spring Heeled Jack,” winner of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, turns
explorer Richard Burton and poet Algernon Swinburne into Victorian-era
secret agents.
Still, “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown” is a somewhat
troubling case. Just when you’re settling down for pulpy adventure,
the book grows soul-bruisingly serious. Throughout, Malmont contrasts
the search for the truth about Tesla’s Tower — did it, for instance,
cause the famous 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia? — with sometimes
painful accounts of the domestic and sexual lives of his characters.
So we hear about open marriages, suicide attempts, life traumas,
erotic rituals, sexual difficulties and all sorts of marital
unhappiness (and happiness in the case of the de Camps and the Dents).
From having read several of the books used in Malmont’s research (they
are listed in an appendix), I know that most of what he describes
about these young writers isn’t fiction. While Malmont generally
sympathizes with Heinlein, Asimov and even Hubbard, we’re always aware
of who these figures are, of what they became, and even of how we once
chatted with them on the phone or at a convention. Such knowledge
generates a distinct aesthetic dissonance, even a slight revulsion, as
if one weren’t only a novel reader but also a peeping Tom.
“The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown” feeds this confusion by
its series of amusing in-jokes. John W. Campbell complains that he
doesn’t want to be in “the Isaac Asimov mag business.” (Since 1977,
Asimov’s Science Fiction has been a major sf magazine.) On a train
Heinlein murmurs the phrase “So it goes,” then passes along some pulp
magazines to a young soldier named Kurt, who has heavy eyebrows. While
sailing to the Aleutians, Hubbard chats with “Herbie,” a Seabee who
wishes he could see a desert, “a lovely, dry, brown desert full of hot
sand.” Many readers, and most serious science-fiction fans, will smile
at these sightings of Kurt Vonnegut and Frank Herbert, author of
“Dune.” But after a while, one starts to look for them.
For the most part, our main heroes embody the qualities associated
with their own fiction. Heinlein is the chief, omnicompetent and
commanding but ready to fall in love (with Virginia Gerstenfeld, who
would become his third wife). De Camp appears as the encyclopedic know-
it-all, familiar with both ancient engineering and the byways of
history and myth but also rabidly devoted to H.P. Lovecraft. Asimov is
portrayed as the classic nerd: immensely smart, but wimpy, afraid of
heights, preferring his typewriter to his unhappy bride. Hubbard comes
across as the most complex character in the book: Brash, vulgar and
sexually rapacious, he is already prone to strange visions and
fantasies. To a large extent, the novel chronicles his early progress
toward “Dianetics” and Scientology.
Despite its ambition, “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown”
never quite lives up to its title. It opens slowly, breaks up its
narrative among too many different characters and plot lines, and is
unpersuasively framed as a story related by physicist Richard Feynman.
Frequent comic episodes, some verging on slapstick, don’t wholly come
off. Nor are the big scenes — involving secret tunnels underneath the
Empire State Building or the final showdown at Tesla’s Tower —
altogether fresh. I couldn’t follow much of the science, and Hubbard’s
feverish dreams reminded me of accounts of bad LSD trips.
Still, if you’re already a fan of any of the writer-heroes of this
novel, you’ll probably be irresistibly drawn to “The Astounding, the
Amazing, and the Unknown.” And the book does have some good moments.
It’s almost worth reading just to arrive at the pronouncement: “Oh my
God! . . . You’ve vaporized Isaac Asimov!”
[Dirda reviews books for The Post every Thursday.]