One might say that L. Ron Hubbard wasn’t just a writer. He had an extraordinarily inquisitive and receptive mind, which led him as a youth to begin a lifelong exploration of the world and the nature of man.
He studied firsthand more than twenty-one different races and cultures; from the Indian tribes of North America, to the Kayans of Borneo and the Mongols living in the Western Hills of China. He was a licensed master mariner, a pilot of early aircraft and an organizer and leader of expeditions which carried the flag of the Explorers Club. Coupled with this insatiable curiosity and love of adventure was an ability to look at the world and, all in a glance, reach often brilliant and startling insights based upon his observations.
L. Ron Hubbard began his professional writing career in 1930, scripting and directing action radio dramas. He was also a correspondent for a national aviation magazine before becoming a writer of popular fiction. Within a few years he had written a multitude of action, sea, and air adventure stories and rose to the top ranks of published authors. His work carried a verisimilitude that most other authors could not match, for while they fantasized about faraway places, storms at sea and death-defying aerobatics, L. Ron Hubbard had lived those adventures. With remarkable versatility, he soon added mystery, western, and historical fiction to his growing markets.
By 1938, Ron Hubbard was already established and recognized as one of the top-selling authors, when Street & Smith, publishers of Astounding Science Fiction magazine urged him to try his hand at science fiction. Though he had studied nuclear physics at George Washington University, he protested that he did not write about “machines and machinery” but that he wrote about people. “That’s just what we want,” he was told.
The result was a barrage of stories from L. Ron Hubbard that expanded the scope and played a part in changing the face of the literary genre, gaining Ron Hubbard repute as one of the founding fathers of the great Golden Age of Science Fiction.
The following notes were written by Ron in 1938. He had just found himself fully immersed in the world of science fiction. Not just writing soon-to-be popular stories, but also partaking in many friendly discussions about what is possible, what could be or has been. These thought-provoking notes share insight into the character of science fiction writers of the Golden Age and the inherent quality of those writers who are creating new worlds and existences far beyond what is known or possible.
He began his exploratory essay with this, “We are all more interested in these speculations about matter, space and time than we will care to admit to the professors who sometimes prove ‘something less than kind.’ I began to wonder about the validity of this inner circle of ‘science-fiction.’ Was it science at all? Or was it something else, even greater? Are we children of science or, to be blunt, philosophers? What would be the difference between them? And so we begin.”