Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard, was an American pulp fiction author. He wrote in a wide variety of genres, including science fiction, fantasy, adventure fiction, aviation, travel, mystery, western, and romance. His United States publisher and distributor is Galaxy Press. He is perhaps best known for his self-help book, the #1 New York Times bestseller Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (first published in 1950), and as the founder of the Church of Scientology.
L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific writer; according to the church, his written teachings make up approximately 500,000 pages and 3,000 recorded lectures, totaling about 65 million words. He also produced a hundred films and 500 short stories and novels.
Early writings
Although he was best known for his pulp fantasy and science fiction, Hubbard also wrote adventure, aviation, travel, mystery, western and romance. He wrote under his own name and as Kurt von Rachen and René Lafayette, his principal science fiction/fantasy pseudonyms. His other pen names included "Winchester Remington Colt" (rather obviously reserved for Westerns), Lt Jonathan Daly, Capt Charles Gordon, Bernard Hubbel, Michael Keith, Legionnaire 148, Legionnaire 14830, Ken Martin, Scott Morgan or Lt Scott Morgan, Barry Randolph and Capt Humbert Reynolds."
Hubbard's first short story, "Tah", was published in the Literary Supplement of The Hatchet, George Washington University's campus paper, in February 1932. In February 1934, the pulp magazine Thrilling Adventure was the first to publish one of Hubbard's short stories. Over the next six years, more than 140 of his short stories appeared in similar magazines devoted to high adventure and mystery.
Hubbard began publishing Science Fiction with the magazine Astounding in 1938, and over the next decade he was a prolific contributor to both Astounding and the fantasy fiction magazine Unknown. However, despite efforts by later supporters to assign to Hubbard a central role in the creation of modern science fiction, he was not a member of the small group of prime movers—L Sprague de Camp, Robert A Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—in the genre.
Dianetics and Scientology
Hubbard's first major financial success came with the publication of Dianetics in 1950, after which he departed the field of science fiction writing for many years. In 1951, he refashioned the material of Dianetics into Scientology. At this time, he established his first publishing organization, devoted exclusively to his own works, and used it (and its later incarnations) to publish his own "spiritual technology," as well as his ideas about business administration, literacy, and drug rehabilitation.
Hubbard returned to the field of Science Fiction writing in 1982 with the publication of Battlefield Earth, followed by the Mission Earth "dekalogy," a ten-volume series, most of which was published posthumously.
Output and reception
Hubbard produced more than 250 published works of fiction in his writing career. At his peak, he wrote “over 100,000 words a month.” He is remembered for his “prodigious output" and the "amazing speed at which he could produce copy.” He used a special electric IBM typewriter with extra keys for common words like ‘and’, ‘the’, and ‘but.’
Scientology's publishing arm has translated his work into seventy-two languages. His fiction and non-fiction books have sold millions of copies, and Hubbard holds four Guinness World Records for “Most Published Works by One Author”, “Most Audio Books Published for One Author”, “Most Translated Author in the World”, and "Most Translated Author, Same Book" (The Way to Happiness).
Criticism of Hubbard's fiction is mixed. Georges T. Dodds, columnist for WARP, newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy association writes, "much of [Hubbard's] science fiction and fantasy is quite entertaining, and in most cases as good or better than much of the pulp literature of the era." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly emphasizes "Hubbard's ability to pack an epic into relatively few pages -- this is indeed golden science fiction from the Golden Age". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction maintains that science fiction "was clearly not Hubbard's forte, and most of his work in the genre reads as tendentious or laboured or both. As a writer of fantasy, however, [Hubbard] wrote with an occasionally pixillated fervour that is still pleasing, and sometimes reminiscent of the screwball comedies popular in the 1930s cinema."