Malory: Sir Thomas Malory, English author, wrote Le Morte d’Arthur, one of the most popular prose romances about the medieval period. The book was the first full-length book in English about the adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. → to text
manumission: a formal written act to free slaves. → to text
manumitting: releasing from slavery or servitude. → to text
Marzo: the month of March. → to text
Mizar: a double star (two stars that revolve around each other under their mutual gravitation) in Ursa Major (the Big Dipper). → to text
Muses: (Greek mythology) any of the nine daughters of Zeus (king of the gods) and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory), each of whom preside over a different art or science. The nine Muses and their specialties are traditionally: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry, lyric art), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia or Polymnia (hymns, sacred songs), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy) and Urania (astronomy). → to text
neurasthenia: a condition marked by chronic mental and physical fatigue and depression. → to text
ODM: Ole Doc Methuselah. → to text
OOD: officer of the deck; officer on duty in charge of the ship representing the commanding officer. → to text
pill roller: a health professional trained in the art of preparing and dispensing drugs. → to text
pinked: to stab lightly with a pointed weapon; prick. → to text
pipe: to play on a pipe, a distinctive silver whistle used by the bosun during ceremonious greeting for important officers and officials as they come aboard or leave a ship. → to text
powder magazine: a compartment for the storage of ammunition and explosives. → to text
Procyon: Procyon System; a system of two stars that revolve around each other under their mutual gravitation, located approximately 11.5 light-years from Earth. → to text
ragweed pollen: any of a number of weedy composite herbs that produce a pollen that is a frequent cause of allergies. → to text
Rappaccini’s Daughter: a novel written in 1844 by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), American novelist and short story writer. His work includes The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). He was one of the leading writers of his time, moving away from formalism and exploring the ideas of individual responsibility, the importance of creative expression and man’s relationship to the natural world. → to text
reef in his nerve, took a: sea jargon for “quieted down or steadied up.” It comes from the nautical phrase, “Take a reef in your top sails,” meaning to take in or lessen the area of a sail, an action done in windy conditions to improve the ship’s stability and reduce the risk of capsizing in a strong wind. → to text
rheumatic heart: condition in which the heart valves are damaged by rheumatic fever, an infectious disease which is characterized by fever and joint pain. → to text
Rotarian club: a club of business and professional men devoted to serving the community and promoting world peace. → to text
sgt: sidereal galaxy time. → to text
sideboys: sailors stationed to form a human passageway for distinguished visitors, officers or officials to pass through when arriving or departing a ship, plus an officer who pipes them (makes a call with a special whistle called a pipe) as they board or leave. The number of sailors varies from two to ten, depending on the rank of the visitor. → to text
sidereal galaxy time: time determined by or from the stars. “Sidereal time” is time measured on Earth with respect to the stars, rather than the sun. Thus, “sidereal galaxy time” would be time measured in a galaxy with respect to the stars in that system. → to text
Sirius: the brightest star in the nighttime sky, Sirius is a white dwarf star (what a star like our sun becomes after it has exhausted its nuclear fuel and is near the end of its nuclear burning stage) that has twenty-two times the brightness of the sun. → to text
Spica: the brightest star in the constellation Virgo, and the fifteenth brightest star in the nighttime sky. It is 260 light-years distant from Earth. → to text
swill parlor: a place, such as a tavern or bar, where beer is sold. → to text
texas: the structure on a ship containing the pilothouse and the officers’ quarters, so called because steamboat cabins were named after states. At one time Texas was the largest state, and as the officers’ quarters were the largest, they were called texas. → to text
trice, in a: a very short time; an instant; a moment. → to text
UMS: Universal Medical Society. → to text
Ursa Major: a constellation in the polar region of the Northern Hemisphere. Ursa Major, which means “the Great Bear,” contains the seven stars that form the Big Dipper. → to text
UT: Universal Time. → to text
Vega: the brightest star in the northern constellation Lyra, and the third brightest in Earth’s northern hemisphere. It is 25.3 light-years distant from Earth. → to text
washboard weepers: radio lingo from the 1940s for soap operas. → to text
About the Author
L. Ron Hubbard’s remarkable writing career spanned more than half-a-century of intense literary achievement and creative influence.
And though he was first and foremost a writer, his life experiences and travels in all corners of the globe were wide and diverse. His insatiable curiosity and personal belief that one should live life as a professional led to a lifetime of extraordinary accom-plishment. He was also an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician.
Growing up in the still-rugged frontier country of Montana, he broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled to a still remote Asia. The following year, to further satisfy his thirst for adventure and augment his growing knowledge of other cultures, he left school and returned to the Orient. On this trip, he worked as a supercargo and helmsman aboard a coastal trader which plied the seas between Japan and Java. He came to know old Shanghai, Beijing and the Western Hills at a time when few Westerners could enter China. He traveled more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land while still a teenager and before the advent of commercial aviation as we know it.
He returned to the United States in the autumn of 1929 to complete his formal education. He entered George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he studied engineering and took one of the earliest courses in atomic and molecular physics. In addition to his studies, he was the president of the Engineering Society and Flying Club, and wrote articles, stories and plays for the university news-paper. During the same period he also barnstormed across the American mid-West and was a national correspondent and photographer for the Sportsman Pilot magazine, the most distinguished aviation publication of its day.
Returning to his classroom of the world in 1932, he led two separate expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition; sailing on one of the last of America’s four-masted commercial ships, and the second, a mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico. His exploits earned him membership in the renowned Explorers Club and he subsequently carried their coveted flag on two more voyages of exploration and discovery. As a master mariner licensed to operate ships in any ocean, his lifelong love of the sea was reflected in the many ships he captained and the skill of the crews he trained. He also served with distinction as a U.S. naval officer during the Second World War.
All of this—and much more—found its way, into his writing and gave his stories a compelling sense of authenticity that has appealed to readers throughout the world. It started in 1934 with the publication of “The Green God” in Thrilling Adventure magazine, a story about an American naval intelligence officer caught up in the mystery and intrigues of pre-communist China. With his extensive knowledge of the world and its people and his ability to write in any style and genre, he rapidly achieved prominence as a
writer of action adventure, western, mystery and suspense. Such was the respect of his fellow writers that he was only 25 when elected president of the New York Chapter of the American Fiction Guild.
In addition to his career as a leading writer of fiction, he worked as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood where he wrote the original story and script for Columbia’s 1937 hit serial, “The Secret of Treasure Island.” His work on numerous films for Columbia, Universal and other major studios involved writing, providing story lines and serving as a script consultant.
In 1938, he was approached by the venerable New York publishing house of Street and Smith, the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction. Wanting to capitalize on the proven reader appeal of the
L. Ron Hubbard byline to capture more readers for this emerging genre, they essentially offered to buy all the science fiction he wrote. When he protested that he did not write about machines and machinery but that he wrote about people, they told him that was exactly what was wanted. The rest is history.
The impact and influence that his novels and stories had on the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror virtually amounted to the changing of a genre. It is the compelling human element that he originally brought to this new genre that remains today the basis of its growing international popularity.
L. Ron Hubbard consistently enabled readers to peer into the minds and emotions of characters in a way that sharply heightened the reading experience without slowing the pace of the story, a level of writ-ing rarely achieved.
Among the most celebrated examples of this are three stories he published in a single, phenomenally creative year (1940)—Final Blackout and its grimly possible future world of unremitting war and ultimate courage which Robert Heinlein called “as perfect a piece of science fiction as has ever been written”; the ingenious fantasy-adventure, Typewriter in the Sky described by Clive Cussler as “written in the great style adventure should be written in”; and the prototype novel of clutching psychological suspense and horror in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, Fear, studied by writers from Stephen King to Ray Bradbury.
It was Mr. Hubbard’s trendsetting work in the speculative fiction field from 1938 to 1950, particu-larly, that not only helped to expand the scope and imaginative boundaries of science fiction and fantasy but indelibly established him as one of the founders of what continues to be regarded as the genre’s Golden Age.
Widely honored—recipient of Italy’s Tetra-dramma D’Oro Award and a special Gutenberg Award, among other significant literary honors—Battlefield Earth has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in 23 languages and is the biggest single-volume science fiction novel in the history of the genre at 1050 pages. It was ranked number three out of the 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century in the Random House Modern Library Reader’s Poll.
The Mission Earth dekalogy has been equally acclaimed, winning the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the coveted Nova-Science Fiction Award from Italy’s National Committee for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The dekalogy has sold more than seven million copies in 6 languages, and each of its 10 volumes became New York Times and international bestsellers as they were released.
The first of L. Ron Hubbard’s original screenplays Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong, novelized by author Kevin J. Anderson, was released in 1998 and immediately appeared as a New York Times bestseller. This was followed in 1999 with the publication of A Very Strange Trip, an original L. Ron Hubbard story of time-traveling adventure, novelized by Dave Wolverton, that also became a New York Times bestseller directly following its release.
His literary output ultimately encompassed more than 250 published novels, novelettes, short stories and screenplays in every major genre.
For more information on L. Ron Hubbard and his many works of fiction visit
www.GalaxyPress.com and www.LRonHubbard.org
L. Ron Hubbard, Ole Doc Methuselah: The Intergalactic Adventures of the Soldier of Light
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