To The Stars by L. Ron Hubbard

Barry Malzberg, one-of-a-kind SF author and respected SF historian, in a video which I highly recommend available at YouTube, talks about his favorite fifteen issues of Astounding.  One of these is the February 1950 issue, which contained the first part of what Malzberg considers L. Ron Hubbard's best novel-length work, To The Stars.  I got a hold of a 2004 hardcover edition of the novel, and read it yesterday; it's pretty short, like 200 pages in this edition but with large print and wide margins. 

To The Stars is about the Einsteinian time dilation effect we see in numerous science fiction books, like Heinlein's 1956 Time for the Stars and Haldeman's 1975 Forever War.  If you fly in a space ship at a large fraction of the speed of light, then return to Earth, you will find that while maybe only a year or two has passed for you, on Earth much more time has passed, and maybe your little nephew is now twice your age or your whole society has gone through a political or cultural revolution and you don't fit in.  

At the start of To The Stars it is thousands of years in our future, and the solar system has a classbound society.  The rich nobility live in skyscrapers and the masses of the poor lack social services and swarm down on the surface.  Alan Corday is a young gentleman, highly educated, but his father has fallen into bankruptcy and our hero has no money to marry his girl or start his engineering business.  He goes to the slums around the New Chicago spaceport, hoping to get passage to Mars, where he thinks he can get a job with the duke who runs Mars.  But he gets shanghaied and impressed into the crew of a ship going to Alpha Centauri and Betelgeuse, one of the long haul ships subject to the Einsteinian time dilation effect.  By the time he gets back his girl is going to be an old hag!  Only desperate people with nothing to hold them on Earth crew these long haul spaceships, and now upper class Corday is trapped on a ship with a bunch of these lower class clods!

The style of To The Stars is a little weak, but I like the plot, and the characters are simple but interesting.  Hubbard portrays the ways the various members of the starship's crew deal with the stress of their bizarre lifestyle, which has them again and again landing on planets they left just a few months or years ago to find that decades or centuries of political, social, and technological change have taken place.  They are men and women without countries, who often can't even talk to the natives when they return to their own home planets because pronunciation, spelling and grammar have changed, not to mention social and political attitudes.  (When poor Corday gets back to Earth 60 years have passed and a revolution has occurred; everyone from his social class has been massacred and people are afraid to be seen with Corday because he is wearing old-fashioned clothes that they recognize from school text books as characteristic of the enemy class.)  Their country is the ship, but does life have meaning or value when you live in a country of a few hundred people suffering stress disorders and regularly face terrible dangers?

This book is much better than Hubbard's postapocalyptic The Final Blackout; To The Stars is a traditional SF story of guys flying around in a spaceship, solving problems with ingenuity and ray guns, trying to figure out their place in the universe.  In some ways it reminds me of those early Heinlein novels in which a young man matures and learns responsibility while having adventures; I guess I'm thinking of Starman Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy, because so much of them takes place on space ships.

Solidly entertaining: fans of classic rocket ship and ray gun adventures should check it out. 

Two early 1950s short stories by C. M. Kornbluth: "The Altar at Midnight" and "The Adventurer"

On March 12 of this year I explained why I avoid Cyril Kornbluth's work and panned his famous and influential story "The Marching Morons."  But I try to keep an open mind at this here blog, so today I read two more Kornbluth stories, both available for free to all us cheapskates at gutenberg.org.  The gutenberg versions are the original magazine versions, and include the original art by Freas and Ashman.

"The Altar at Midnight" (1952)  

This is sort of a hard-boiled story set in the Skid Row of some Earth town.  The narrator meets a spaceship crew member in a strip bar and takes him to a different bar, one inhabited by crippled drunks who enjoy telling the stories of how they were crippled working for the railroad.  The spacer explains how the regular changes in air pressure and the hard radiation in space have damaged his body, how being a spacer is risky, gets you involved in trouble with women, damages relationships with your family, weakens your religious faith, coarsens your morals, etc.  It turns out that the narrator is the scientist who made space travel possible.  He feels guilty about his accomplishment, because of how rough space travel is on people and (it is hinted) because Earth's Cold War tensions have spread to the moon (where there is some kind of missile base) and maybe Mars and Venus.  

The story is short and to the point, which I appreciated.  Its pessimism about space travel reminded me of Murray Leinster's Other Side of Nowhere (1964) and Edmond Hamilton's "What's it Like Out There?", also published in 1952.  Then there is the story's bleak view of the railroad.  It is remarkable how many science fiction writers and stories express ambiguous or even hostile attitudes towards technological advances - in just the last few days I read L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout (1940), in which he blamed modern war on "machinery," and of course there are many more examples, even before talk about pollution and ecology and the environment became de rigueur around 1970.  

"The Altar at Midnight" is an effective story, even if you aren't some kind of Luddite who thinks that the locomotive and rocket ship were a mistake.  It is economical, the tone is consistent, and the style is not bad.  It is no great masterpiece, but it is worth reading.

"The Adventurer" (1953)

In the future the United States (called "the Republic") is a tyrannical hereditary monarchy, wracked by coup attempts and fights among the elite over succession, perhaps reminiscent of the struggles for succession we see in the Roman Empire.  The United States is still locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union; this conflict has extended out into the solar system, including on Io, which is half Soviet and half Republican.  The story follows events in Washington among the politicians and on Io, where a shooting war breaks out and a charismatic young officer becomes a hero.  Like Caesar or Napoleon, the young man turns on the Republic and makes himself ruler.  It is revealed that his rise was engineered by patriotic conspirators who wanted to end the current political system, but instead of embracing the conspirators, the young officer, who declares himself a god, has them all executed.

This story seems pointless.  The satirical elements, the adventure elements, and the trick ending elements are all weak.  Was Kornbluth just projecting a silly romantic theory of history (that on occasion great men rise up to take over and revive moribund empires) onto the future in order to ridicule it?      

Embedded in the story is an interesting idea, a future art form whose main focus is not line or form or color or composition (as in a painting or sculpture) but texture; one doesn't appreciate these art objects primarily by looking at them but instead by touching them.  I guess this is maybe a joke, perhaps an ironic reference to money (the art objects are called "fingering pieces") but I found it the most memorable part of a weak story.

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So, one average story and one poor story.  There is a third Kornbluth piece available at gutenberg, The Syndic, but it is a full length novel and I'm not feeling up to it after the almost useless "The Adventurer."  The Syndic in 1986 received a Prometheus Award for being a "Classic Libertarian SF novel," which is intriguing, so I will probably read it someday, but not today.   

Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard

Lots of people are down on L. Ron Hubbard, and it is easy to see why.  The psychological theories and religion he made up seem like an even more transparent scam than the psychological theories and religions most people believe in.  The extravagant praise of his followers is also a little off putting, and there are probably people who find his politics objectionable (as I recall, his Mission Earth series was a broad and merciless satire of almost every aspect of modern American life.)

Still, I read the first half of Battlefield Earth and the first half of Mission Earth when they were new, when I was in my teens, and thought they were fun.  Not good enough for me to read all 1,000 pages or whatever it was of either, but good enough to read 500 pages or so of each.  And so when people say Hubbard is horrible I am apt to defend him, arguing that he is not horrible, just mediocre.

In his introduction to Angry Candy, Harlan Ellison praises Hubbard's writing and lists some books of Hubbard's he enjoyed, including Final Blackout and To The Stars.  I managed to get my hands on library copies of these two books, and first read 1940's Final Blackout in its 1989 edition, which includes an introduction by Algis Budrys.  

Published before American entry in World War II, Final Blackout is set in a Western Europe in which the war has lasted for decades and civilization has been almost totally destroyed.  Aircraft and even artillery have ceased operation because there is no longer any industrial base to maintain or supply them.  War and the resulting plagues have destabilized all governments and revolutions and coups break out regularly in London, Berlin, and Moscow; as the book starts Communists are in power in England while Czarists have thrown over the Bolsheviks and are in charge in Russia.  Disease and biological warfare agents have destroyed most agricultural crops and depopulated most of the world, and the British Isles are under a strict quarantine; the British Army units on the Continent are forbidden to return home.

The protagonist of the novel is the unnamed "Lieutenant," a British Army officer.  Casualties have been so heavy and replacements so few that he commands an entire brigade, but his brigade consists of less than 200 men, and is an amalgam of soldiers from many Allied nations: Britain, Poland, France, etc.  There is very little communication between governments and their small depleted armies, and these armies have mostly ceased pursuing large strategic objectives and now cross the ruined countryside on foot seeking enough food to survive while avoiding the most radioactive and plague-ridden spots.  The Lieutenant is skilled in tactics and a talented leader, and has managed to keep his men alive and well fed and they admire, even worship, him.

The plot of the book consists mostly of the Lieutenant and his men traveling around, meeting and outwitting one foe after another.  The Lieutenant succeeds because he is smarter and more experienced than his opponents, tricking them, out thinking them, out maneuvering them.  Hubbard's writing style isn't great, merely acceptable.  Hubbard doesn't achieve much in the way of tone and doesn't evoke much emotion.  You don't get too involved with the characters, and the story progresses pretty methodically, without much tension or excitement; because the battles are resolved via trickery there isn't much in the way of blood and guts thrills.

Cover of edition I read

The politics of the book are largely what you might expect.  The men and officers who fight on the front lines have contempt for the politicians back in England and the staff officers and rear echelon troops stationed in an impregnable fortress (General Headquarters) in the rear, close to the Channel.  The Lieutenant has no patience for Communists or Socialists, and refuses to follow political orders from Communist Party officials (like the order to set up workers' councils among his soldiers.)  When his superiors try to take away his command and disperse his brigade among their own units, the Lieutenant turns the tables on them, stealing their best troops and then returning to England to overthrow the Communist Party and make himself ruler of England's population, which is now less than one million.

It is pretty common for people to be against socialism, and to be skeptical of politicians and high level military officials.  Where Hubbard's politics are unusual and remarkable is not in what he opposes, but what he advocates.  Rather than arguing in favor of some creed or system in opposition to socialism, like democracy and/or free enterprise, Hubbard expresses opposition to all creeds and systems.  Final Blackout seems to be romanticizing personal rule based on a mutual devotion between a charismatic leader and a grateful public, as well as the simple life he envisages was led by people in pre-industrial society.  

Once in charge of England and Wales, the Lieutenant rebuilds society in a feudal form, with an honest aristocracy committed to the welfare of the common people.  There are no elections or judges or anything like that - the lieutenant resolves issues on the fly, he's a sort of benevolent dictator.  There is no money or banking, either.

After a few years of this utopian situation a super high tech submarine/aircraft carrier arrives from the United States.  The USA, which participated less and suffered less from the war, has recovered from the plagues and now its Socialist Party government is looking for some place to send its surplus population and production.  The Americans are hoping to make a colony out of England, and expect the English will welcome all their high technology.

The Lieutenant thinks that it was modern machinery and overpopulation which led to war in the first place, by causing unemployment and reliance on the welfare state, and so he has no interest in American equipment, supplies or settlers.  The English, who lack any aircraft or antiaircraft weapons, are at the mercy of the Americans, so the Lieutenant sacrifices himself in one final trick, a bid to preserve the low-population low-tech kingdom he has built and which he feels is the ideal society.

Final Blackout is an acceptable entertainment, and the setting is interesting, but there is nothing special about its style or plot or ideas to make it stand out.  (It is very strange to read the introductory matter in this edition which compares Hubbard and Final Blackout favorably to H. G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt and Isaac Asimov, all of whom have distinctive styles and ideas.)  Final Blackout is not offensively bad, just mediocre, like Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth, and thankfully, unlike those colossal 1980s books, Final Blackout is quite short.