Interesting read: Editing Hubbard's "Mission Earth" novels.

[BTM]

So, here's an interesting article on the net, I found, but first, some background...

Say what you will about L. Ron Hubbard, but the guy sure did like to write.  Probably not as much as Stephen King, but I'd say close.  Among his other works was a looong story called Mission Earth which was split into TEN novels.  I read all of these years ago back in high school.  Basically, it's a sci-fi story about a group of humanoid aliens who send one of their own on a secret mission to save earth from destroying itself.  However, unbeknown to our hero, The Apparatus, a "secret" intelligence agency, within the alien society wants the mission to fail.  You see, the main bad guy of the series, appropriately named Lombar Hisst, is using the drugs to get various people in positions of power addicted, so he can take over the whole empire.  

Yeah, among other things, this society's pretty Utopian, there's apparently no drugs, no pollution, no psychology, and so forth.

Now, the neat thing about this article is it chronicles everything the poor guy who was assigned to be its editor had to go through.  Apparently, among other things, L RON HUBBARD'S works do not NEED editing.  In fact, the only reason the article's writer got the job was because the first editor had the GALL to write LRH and asked him if there were any particular parts of his books that he liked.  Needless to say, that editor learned quickly you don't talk to LRH that way.

Anyway, if you've ever had an interesting in the behind the scenes workings of the publish world, or what it was like to be an employ of Hubbard, or want a laugh and be thankful that your boss isn't as bad as this one, I recommend you read it.

http://www.holysmoke.org/rvy/rvy2.htm

[Javakoala]

I read some of the Mission Earth books and after the first one, I was inclined to think they may have been ghost-written.  The tone and style seemed to be off after the first one.  Maybe it was just me.

But they made great paperweights!!!

[ghouck]

I've read the whole set 3-4 times, I seem to be one of the few people that really likes them. I have them in hardback, which are easy to come across since they were overprinted and the COS bought them up to MAKE them into bestsellers, only to sell them to used book stores later. I believe I got the entire set, with dust jackets, for $35.00 about 15 years ago.

Personally, I didn't notice any difference from the first one, but rather I noted their consistency. Bad guys are always bad, good guys are always good, smart guys are always smart, and furthermore, when they try and do something against their character, it's disastrous. I've always said that LRH briefly describes a character upon it's introduction, then spends the rest of the book proving it. Obviously there are TONS of anti-government, anti-business, anti-media, anti-EVERYTHING overtones in his work, to a point of I would even say Anti-HUMAN, but for me it was easy to keep in mind that it's just a work of fiction, and I enjoyed the story quite a bit. One could almost say the story, if taken seriously, is a campaign AGAINST the U.S. constitution in some ways, BUT, there's no reason to take them seriously.

[BTM]

Obviously there are TONS of anti-government, anti-business, anti-media, anti-EVERYTHING overtones in his work, to a point of I would even say Anti-HUMAN, but for me it was easy to keep in mind that it's just a work of fiction, and I enjoyed the story quite a bit. One could almost say the story, if taken seriously, is a campaign AGAINST the U.S. constitution in some ways, BUT, there's no reason to take them seriously.

Well, been awhile since I've read it, but I distinctly remember there's a LOT of attacks against psychology and psychologists in it, so many so that some of parodies border on absurdity.  For instance, I recall a scene where a teenage girl tells the main character Soltan how her psychologist raped her.  Soltan thinks she's lying so he interviews the psychologist and he says something along the lines of, "That's ridiculous!  Besides, even if I wanted to rape someone, I have plenty of young boys as patients I could molest..."  

Then there's the denouement of the story, we they find out that pretty much everything that's been going wrong with the Federation for the last couple of decades is because of ideas the main bad guy acquired from spying on earth.

:)