Hubbard & Wives

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911, in Tilden, Nebraska. There are lots of lies and a lot of nonsense about his life. We'll skip over all of that and get to his wives and children.

First came Margaret Louise "Polly" Grubb. She was born on September 22, 1907, in Beltsville, Maryland. The two were married on April 13, 1933. They had two children, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, Jr. (May 7, 1934-September 16, 1991) and Katherine May "Kay" Hubbard (January 15, 1936-May 29, 2010). Both changed their names. Hubbard, Jr., nicknamed "Nibs," became Ronald Edward "Ron" De Wolf. Kay became Catherine May "Kay" Gillespie by a change to the spelling of her Christian name and her marriage to James P. Gillespie. L. Ron Hubbard and his first wife were divorced on December 24, 1947. She married John W. Ochs and died on November 17, 1963, in Valley, Pennsylvania.

Hubbard had already married his second wife by the time he was divorced from his first. She was Sara Elizabeth Bruce Northrup, former girlfriend of rocket scientist and occultist John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons (1914-1952). Sara was also an occultist and went by the witchy name of "Soror Cassap." Born on April 8, 1924, she was younger by half a generation than her paramours.

Sara and Hubbard were married on August 10, 1946, in Chestertown, Maryland. Their daughter Alexis Valerie Hubbard was born on March 8, 1950, in New Jersey. The attending physician was Joseph A. Winter (1911-1955), future brother-in-law of John W. Campbell, Jr. The infant Alexis came into the world in complete silence so that no engrams would be lodged in her brain. Dianetics was born two months later in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950. It was, in contrast, damaged from the beginning. Anyway, Hubbard was more devoted to his brainchild, such as it was, than his real child. The way he treated her can be considered nothing less than a disgrace, but what else can we expect from one of the most monstrous figures in all of genre literature?

Hubbard and his second wife were divorced on June 12, 1951, in Sedgwick County, Kansas. She afterwards married Miles F. Hollister (1925-1998). Sara Hollister preceded her last husband in death, her end coming on December 18, 1997, in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1968, L. Ron Hubbard had this utterly bizarre exchange with an interviewer from Granada Television:

Hubbard: How many times have I been married? I've been married twice. And I'm very happily married just now. I have a lovely wife, and I have four children. My first wife is dead.

Interviewer: What happened to your second wife?

Hubbard: I never had a second wife.

L. Ron Hubbard's third and last wife was Mary Sue Whipp. Born on June 17, 1931, in Rockdale, Texas, she was younger still than Hubbard's never-was second wife. She became involved in Dianetics in 1951 and journeyed to Kansas to be with fellow believers. She and Hubbard were married on March 6, 1952, in Kay County, Oklahoma. They had four children together, Quentin, Diana, Mary Suzette, and Thomas. Quentin killed himself. The others are still living.

In 1981, Mary Sue Hubbard was maneuvered out of her position of power within Scientology. Not long after that, she served a prison sentence for crimes she had committed while occupying that position. I like the words of Mr. Justice Latey of the English High Court of Justice regarding a different legal matter. They bear repeating here and everywhere: "Mr. Hubbard is a charlatan and worse, as are his wife, Mary Sue Hubbard, and the clique at the top privy to the cult's activities." (Quoted in "Judge Raps 'Slave' Cult" by Maureen Knight, Daily Express, July 7, 1984.)

A dissolute and utterly corrupted L. Ron Hubbard died on January 24, 1986, in Creston, California. I picture him at the end as being in the same condition as M. Valdemar of Poe's story. Hubbard's second and third wives survived him. Mary Sue Hubbard died on November 25, 2002, in Los Angeles, California. Scientology is supposed to have prevented two out of the three of those deaths, I think. In fact, after his death, Hubbard's successor at the head of Scientology said in a public address to his followers that Hubbard had "discarded" his body because it "had become an impediment to the work" he was to do outside the confines of the universe. In other words, he didn't really die. (Quoted in Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee, p. 402).

In all of this, I'm reminded of other totalitarian and gnostic belief systems. Like Joseph Stalin and his Marxist-Leninism, Hubbard and his Scientology considered certain persons to be actually nonpersons and sought to scrub them from the record. That's what he attempted with his second wife. Sorry, Ron, the world remembers her. Like Karl Marx, Hubbard had seven children. Four of Marx's children died in infancy or childhood, partly because he was such a layabout. (Say what you will about L. Ron Hubbard, he was at least energetic and ambitious.) Two others died by suicide. Only one of Hubbard's children has died in such a way. And like Marshall Applewhite (1931-1997)--and the fictional villains of That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis--Hubbard believed that the body can be discarded and the soul live on within an otherwise material universe (although, as his successor pointed out, Hubbard is now working outside the universe, address unknown). There is in the world of today a similar gnostic belief in what is referred to as "gendered souls" stuck in bodies of the wrong sex. We're supposed to believe that altering and mutilating those bodies will set things right. In other words, the universe and nature are flawed, and we are wise enough and powerful enough to correct those flaws. We have believed these things since very near our beginning. Old ideas die hard.

That's enough of Hubbard for now and for a long time to come, I hope. I promise to write about some better things to end this year.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

An Anonymous Comment on LRH

I'm still playing catchup on comments left on this blog. I have two more to go.

First is a comment on Joseph A. Winter, onetime associate of L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Campbell, Jr., in their development of Dianetics in 1949-1950. Sometime during 1950, Winter and Hubbard had a falling out. Winter died suddenly four years later of a coronary thrombosis. He was just forty-four years old.

On Saturday, May 28, 2022, I published an entry called "Joseph A. Winter (1911-1955)-Part One." I completed my series on Winter and his sister, Margaret Winter Kearney Campbell (1907-1979), several days later, on June 5, 2022. Winter's sister, better known as Peg Campbell, was the second wife of John W. Campbell, Jr., and the one who was with him to the end.

On Sunday, June 19, 2022 (Father's Day), Anonymous left this comment on my entry on Dr. Winter:

Readers should remember that Joe Winter was related through marriage to John W Campell's wife, Joe's sister. They all socialised with the Hubbard group and Street & Smith and the Saint Elizabeth's Hospital staffers in the heady days of the Bay Head Group, HDRF and the Elizabeth Foundation. Hubbard later said that he had to distance himself from almost all of those people due to the alleged dubious communist party loose associations. Maybe Winter and the others did get the wrong end of the stick. They were not aware (I think) of Hubbard's proven intelligence officer connections under Ian MacBean and Joseph Thompson since 1927 China. I personally think Ledora-May Waterbury de Wolfe or her Husband Harry Ross Hubbard were more than just casual civilians in that respect. Hubbard had a good home education before George Washington and later Princeton University schools. I wonder just why Joseph Winter parted ways so suddenly with LRH. The CIA connection had not been establish in public at that time. Only after 1985 were the CIA connections proven. It all centred around using psychological methods to achieve workable solutions for the US and UK players. Hubbard had to keep his silence on his role for all his life. Only in the taped lectures would he offer thin anecdotal evidence. What if Winter reincarnated and remembered a lot?

There's a lot of information in that comment, some of it probably arcane to the non-Scientologists among us. For your information and mine, I'll write about some of it.

• Joseph A. Winter, M.D. (1911-1955) was a physician, originally from Michigan but who moved to New Jersey in January 1950 in order to assist Hubbard and Campbell in their "research" into Dianetics. A newspaper article on his move was the first mention in print that I have found of "Dianetics" as a noun specifically in reference to Hubbard's brainchild. As I have mentioned, Winter's sister, nicknamed Peg, was the soon-to-be wife of Campbell. Presumably, Dr. Winter introduced them sometime in 1949 or 1950.

• Street & Smith were the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction, edited by Campbell.

• St. Elizabeth Hospital presumably refers to a hospital in Elizabeth, New Jersey, now called Trinitas Regional Medical Center (or possibly a hospital in Manhattan), but there is another St. Elizabeth Hospital that figures in the history of Dianetics/Scientology. That one is a place where Hubbard is supposed to have studied psychiatry.

• The Bay Head Group were the earliest developers of Dianetics, including not only Hubbard, Campbell, and Winter, but also electrical engineer Don Rogers and publisher Arthur Ceppos. The group was based in Bay Head, New Jersey, where Hubbard made his temporary home. (Most of his homes appear to have been temporary.)

• The HDRF was the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, incorporated in April 1950. Its members were Hubbard, Campbell, Winter, Rogers, Ceppos, lawyer C. Parker Morgan, and Hubbard's second wife, Sara Northrup Hubbard, you know, the one who didn't exist.

• Ian MacBean was Ian Gordon Macbean or MacBean, presumably a British military man born on February 24, 1892, and who died on June 29, 1944. To say that Hubbard had "proven intelligence officer connections" is to repeat, I think, a bit of fancy dreamed up by Hubbard and his followers in Scientology. In 1927, Hubbard was sixteen years old and on a trip with his mother to visit China. Can we even imagine him making "intelligence officer connections" on such a trip?

• Joseph Thompson was Joseph Cheesman Thompson (1874-1943), a wacky kind of character who served in the U.S. Navy, spied on Japan, studied herpetology, and bred Burmese cats, among other things. He is supposed to have known Hubbard, dating from early 1923 when Hubbard was eleven years old. Thompson was also a psychoanalyst and studied the insane at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C. Thompson had his own ideas about the mind, insanity, mental illness, and psychological trauma. One of his nicknames was "Crazy Thompson," and at least one of his fellow psychoanalysts considered him mentally ill or insane. In 1929, while in Hawaii, he was relieved of duty with the Navy and went into retirement. Whether or not Hubbard was actually one of his associates, he appears to have fit the mold. After all, Hubbard, too, served in the Navy--without any distinction I should add--and was almost certainly mentally ill, if not insane at one time or another in his life. And like Thompson, Hubbard was influenced by the works and ideas of Sigmund Freud.

• Ledora-May Waterbury de Wolfe (1885-1959) and Harry Ross Hubbard (1886-1975) were L. Ron Hubbard's parents. According to public records, her name was actually Ledora May Waterbury. The DeWolf part comes from her mother, Ida Corinna DeWolf Waterbury (1863-1944). L. Ron Hubbard's son, L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (1934-1991), changed his name to Ronald DeWolf. Known as "Nibs" or "Ron," DeWolf cowrote the book L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman? (1987) with Bent Corydon.

As for everything that comes after in the comment above made by Anonymous, those are his or her thoughts and opinions, seemingly informed by Scientology. Joseph A. Winter may have explained or implied his reasons for breaking with Hubbard in his book A Doctor's Report on Dianetics: Theory and Therapy (1950), but I don't have a copy of that book, so I can't say. I also can't say whether Winter was ever reincarnated.

Anyway, I would like to thank Anonymous for writing. His or her comment has led me to learn a little more about Hubbard, Dianetics, and Scientology.

Further Reading

• Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019).
• "The Spy Who Never Was? L. Ron Hubbard and 'Maj. Ian Macbean of the British Secret Service'" by Chris Owen on the website The Underground Bunker, July 29, 2022, here.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The comment left by Anonymous is his or her own original work and should be considered his or her intellectual property and so protected under copyright. I have reproduced it here for informational purposes.

Summer Reading List No. 4-The Engines of the Night by Barry N. Malzberg

I had planned on finishing this series before the end of summer. My Internet non-provider had other plans though. Call it (this series) now obsolete. But maybe not quite, for it will end with books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and an imitator of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and so I'll be back to the previous series, which may also be, if not quite obsolete, at least late in arriving.

* * *

Before getting to Barry N. Malzberg's book, I'll bring up another book I read more recently, Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins (1980; paperback edition, 1981). It's a crazy, funny book, full of crazy, funny, and inventive expressions, similes, metaphors, and other turns of phrase. Reading it is likely to color your own thoughts and words for a time. It did mine. First, I'll offer you the opening paragraph of chapter one:

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting--with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui--for something momentous to occur. (p. 3)†

So even in the late 1970s when Mr. Robbins was tapping out his story on an "all-new Remington SL-3," decline had set in. I can't say whether we're in the same curve now--maybe we climbed out of it somewhere along the line, at least for a while--but signs of decline are all around us. The image that came to me while I was reading Still Life with Woodpecker is that we live in an elaborate and carefully constructed world, one like a great palace--except that it's made of sugar. And the rains have started to fall. Things might be okay where you are, but over here, there is already pitting, like acne scars or astroblemes, in the surface of this sugar-palace of a world. Things might be okay where I am, but over there it's starting to melt and crumble. Soon the melting might look like the acid-blood of a face-sucking alien burning through the decks of the Nostromo, threatening the whole ship with destruction. How long can it hold?

Although Still Life with Woodpecker is not really a genre work, there is talk of UFOs, ancient aliens, pyramid power, and other outré subjects in its pages. (The book is divided into phases, like the moon, and so "the last quarter" of the opening sentence carries with it a double meaning.) You might call the whole book outré. But in seeing what has happened in our world over the past year and a half, and in witnessing what is happening now, I wonder whether we might be headed for some kind of science-fictional situation, something previously only imagined and not really foreseen. Maybe something momentous will occur after all, and we will no longer be, in our everyday lives, bored and tired. We will live in interesting times.

* * *

In August, I read The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties by Barry N. Malzberg (Bluejay Books, 1984). It's a good and interesting book, but I wish there were more detail in it. The subtitle is misleading, for Mr. Malzberg copyrighted his book in 1982; the Bluejay edition is from September 1984. In other words, less than half of the decade had passed by the time The Engines of the Night was published; there is no mention of William Gibson and his Neuromancer.

There are some interesting discussions of science fiction during previous decades, though. More than once, Barry Malzberg referred to science fiction in the late 1940s as "dystopian." I think he used that word in a general, less precise way, meaning pessimistic or negative, dim or dark. He didn't really provide examples, and I don't know enough about science fiction to say, but if it's true that the genre was dystopian in the late 1940s, it's no wonder that science fiction writers--Raymond A. Palmer and L. Ron Hubbard specifically--came up with more hopeful or positive or affirmative visions. Maybe that's how the religions of science fiction were born.

There were of course seeds of dystopia in Hubbard's belief system. He seems to have been afflicted with a totalitarian personality and riddled like a disease with totalitarian impulses and ambitions. So his vision became spoiled soon enough. The flying saucer vision, though, was more hopeful and positive. These were, after all, our space brothers, and they were bringing to us messages of peace, love, and salvation. It was not merely by chance that The Day the Earth Stood Still was released in 1951, four years after the first sighting of flying saucers and a year before the great flap of 1952.* In contrast to Dianetics and Scientology, the more freeing and hopeful vision of the flying saucers endured . . .

But only for so long. Remember that The Thing from Another World was also released in 1951. It provided an alternate version of the visitation-from-outer-space story. Its giant walking carrot was no space brother. By the mid fifties, certainly by the end of the flying saucer era in 1973, the hope represented by a belief in flying saucers had been replaced with fear, paranoia, conspiracy, even madness and despair.** Maybe it's no coincidence, either, that science fiction again became more negative or dystopian in the 1970s. Barry N. Malzberg was there to write some of it and to write about some of it in The Engines of the Night.

* * *

Mr. Malzberg has been canceled, or something like canceled. I don't have anything to say about that controversy. I'll just point out that in his essay "The Cutting Edge," he listed his choices for the ten best science fiction stories of all time. His top two are by women, "Vintage Season" by C.L. Moore (1946) and "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon; 1974). I have never read Alice Sheldon's story, but I won't argue with anybody who says that "Vintage Season" is the greatest science fiction story ever written.

-----

*In Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins continued: "Something momentous was bound to happen soon. [. . .] But what would it be? And would it be apocalyptic or rejuvenating? [. . .] A change in the weather or a change in the sea [. . . .] or a UFO on the White House lawn? (p. 3) That image, of course, is straight from the movies (but before Independence Day [1996]).

**Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers were both released in 1956. In the real world, UFO investigator Morris K. Jessup, a troubled man to be sure, killed himself in 1959. The supposed first alien abduction case, with all of its dark overtones, came two years later, in 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill were taken aboard a flying saucer, reliving in the process the experiences of General Hanley (no relation) and the police officer in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. As I have suggested before, things happen in science fiction--and in the works of artists--before they happen in the real world.

†Update (Jan. 11, 2024): It occurs to me now that Mr. Robbins' introductory paragraph to his novel echoes that of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1897):

     No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. 

The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties by Barry N. Malzberg (1984), with cover art by Wayne Douglas Barlowe. The title is suggestive of something dark or dystopian. Mr. Barlowe's illustration depicts that kind of darkness.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Reading List No. 1-The Listeners by James E. Gunn

Four years ago, on the day after Flying Saucer Day, I wrote about James E. Gunn and his novelette "The Listeners," originally in Galaxy Magazine in September 1968. Since then I have looked for the book version, which collects all of Mr. Gunn's stories in the series, originally published from 1968 to 1972. I finally found it this summer in one of my trips to Half-Price Books, a store that I hope stays in business forever. And this summer I read it.

First I should let you know that James E. Gunn died at the end of last year, on December 23, 2020. He was ninety-seven years old, another of that interwar generation who did so much, accomplished so much, overcame so much, even unto the end. We send condolences to his family and friends and I guess to the world of science fiction in general. James E. Gunn was born in the same year that Weird Tales began, 1923. Surely he was one of the last of the authors first published during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, 1938-1950. His first story was called "Communications" and it appeared in the September 1949 issue of Startling Stories. Communications would seem to have been a theme in his work.

The Listeners is episodic. Like Mr. Gunn's life, it is spread over nine decades, from 2025 to 2118. It is set mostly in Puerto Rico, at the site of a great radio telescope, an ear directed at the heavens, waiting to hear words from on high. The main character is Robert MacDonald, a middle-aged (and older) administrator and head of the listening project. (Yes, his surname is Scottish and, yes, he is an engineer.) MacDonald is hanging on, hanging on, waiting for the communications he's sure must come. He carries the Project on the back of his faith.

James Gunn was completely conversant in the history and culture of Listening. In his book, he referred to Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Otto Struve, and other figures in the what is now called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He quoted from some of them, too, in his inter-chapter "Computer Run" compilations, which were, I think, new to the book version, first published in 1972. (They remind me of the "Newsreel" sections in John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy.) He and Dr. Sagan seem to have formed a mutual admiration society, in fact. Dr. Sagan's blurb on the cover of the Ballantine edition reads: "One of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence ever written!" In his turn, Carl Sagan seems to have lifted Mr. Gunn's religious leader straight out of The Listeners and plopped him into the movie Contact (1997). The radio message returned to Earth in order to get our attention is also seemingly from The Listeners.

The depiction of that religious leader is a flaw, I think, in Contact, less so in The Listeners. I don't know what things were like in 1968 or 1971-1972 when James Gunn first wrote, but his character Jeremiah (cute name) verges on stereotype. Carl Sagan called him Joseph and was far less understanding. I think what both authors failed to understand is that Christians are far more tolerant of the idea that there may be other people in the universe than are the Listeners that there are not. It is, after all, the core belief of Christianity that we are not alone. It would be intolerable for the Listener to learn that we are, though. As James Gunn wrote:

And then maybe Adams was right. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe nobody was sending signals because there was nobody to send signals. Maybe man was all alone in the universe. Alone with God. Or alone with himself, whichever was worse. (Ballantine, 1985, p. 3)

MacDonald may or may not be an atheist. I think only Jeremiah calls him that. I'm not sure that he ever thinks or speaks of these things himself. Curiously, his ghost seems to keep appearing to people after his death, curiously, that is, for a story that is otherwise what I would call hard science fiction and in which the tone is essentially agnostic.

I gather that James E. Gunn was a midcentury American liberal. As that and as an author of science fiction, he seems to have believed in progress, perhaps especially in material and scientific progress. His story is set in Puerto Rico, at the site of a radio telescope. In his version of the story, that radio telescope and the listening project go on for decades, far into the twenty-first century. In the real-life version of the story, the radio telescope at Arecibo came crashing down on December 1, 2020. You could take that as emblematic of a kind of decline and decay of the American and/or scientific project. Maybe it doesn't mean anything like that at all. Anyway, science fiction author James E. Gunn died three weeks and a day later. (3 x 7) + 1: prime numbers all.

Science fiction is not prediction. But here is an excerpt from The Listeners. Take as much or as little of it as prediction or extrapolation as you want. Remember that Mr. Gunn wrote this in the early 1970s.

It is 2028. MacDonald is talking to Andrew White, the first black president of the United States (who would of course be played by Morgan Freeman in the movie version):

     "The function of government is 'to promote the general welfare,'" MacDonald said.

     "It is also a deliberate policy. Poverty and injustice are evils, but they are endurable evils in a world where other problems are greater. They are not endurable in a complex, technological society where cooperation is essential, where violence and rioting can destroy a city, even civilization itself."

     "Of course."

     "So we turned ourselves around and set this nation to the task of eliminating poverty and injustice--and we have done it. We have established a stable social system where everyone has a guaranteed annual income and can do pretty much what he pleases except procreate without limit or harm others in other ways."

     MacDonald nodded. "That has been the great accomplishment of the past few decades--the welfare movement."

     "Except we don't call it welfare anymore," White said. "It's democracy, the system, the way things are, what people are entitled to. What makes you think that science is not part of the system?"

     "It creates change," MacDonald said.

     "Not if it is unsuccessful," White said. [. . .] "The important task of government, you see, is to keep conditions stable, to hold down disturbances and unrest, to maintain itself, and the best way to do that is to give everybody the opportunity to do what they want--except change things. [. . .]" (p. 149)

I don't want to hit you over the head with this, but it's plain that the people of 2028 and before have tried to construct a kind of Utopia. Welfare, entitlements, a guaranteed income, happiness, democracy, and zero population growth are features of their Utopia, but the ultimate purpose is stasis.

Futurism is prediction. Here is another excerpt, from one of the "Computer Run" sections of The Listeners:

The year 2000 conditions could produce a situation in which illusion, wishful thinking, even obviously irrational behavior could exist to a degree unheard of today. Such irrational and self-indulgent behavior is quite likely in a situation in which an individual is overprotective and has no systematic or objective contact with reality. For example, there are probably many people for whom work is the primary touch with reality. If work is removed, or if important functions are taken from work, the contact these people have with reality will be to some degree impaired.  The results--minor or widespread--may become apparent in forms such as political disruption, disturbed families, and personal tragedies--or in pursuit of some "humanistic" values that many would think of as frivolous or even irrational.

Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Weiner, 1967 (p. 165)

Illusion, wishful thinking, obviously irrational behavior--Kahn and Weiner called it in the year before "The Listeners" went to print. Kahn was an atheist. Did that give him special insight into the problems of a future populated by non-believers?

One last excerpt. A second message comes from Capella in the year 2118. Before it is displayed for all to see, a short "Computer Run" section intervenes. From it, these lines of verse:

[. . .] somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
                                   --William Butler Yeats, 1921

The imagery here, from Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," stands powerfully on its own, but it also strikes me now as a counterpoint to Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," about which I wrote last time. In "Ozymandias," the statue--and by extension the man and his power--lies in ruins. But in Yeats' vision, the statue, the power, the rough beast in the form of a half-man, awakens, moves, slouches to be born. In this vision, Apocalypse is our future.

Yet The Listeners ends in hope--hope at least for the Listeners.

The Listeners by James E. Gunn (1923-2020), published in 1985 by Ballantine Books, with cover art by Rick Sternbach.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein

The woke but godless, the arrogant but ignorant, the violent but physically unimpressive, the degreed but poorly educated, the broke but acquisitive, the ambitious but stalled--these are history's ingredients of riot and revolution.

--from "The Fragility of the Woke" by Victor Davis Hanson, July 9, 2020

Last night I finished reading Robert A. Heinlein's novel Beyond This Horizon (1942). By chance, it touches on some of the things I have written about lately. What I mean when I say "by chance" is that I didn't know what the book is about before I read it, and I don't have a program of reading in search of Cozy Dystopia. I just found this book at the secondhand store and read it at my first opportunity.

I wouldn't call Beyond This Horizon a cozy dystopia or really a dystopia of any kind. Although it seems to have been written as a kind of positive fantasy on the part of its author, I don't think Heinlein's book is really utopian, either. It simply describes a future society that's different from our own, one that maybe Heinlein would have enjoyed but no one else. (There's a lot of gun-slinging in it.)

Beyond This Horizon is not the most compelling of Heinlein's novels. It takes awhile to take off and you start to think that it's trying to be too many things at once and not any one thing all together. It's a kind of journey through an alternative society, and in that ways it has similarities to a utopian story. The society it describes, however, is not perfect and is not meant to sound like it's perfect. (At least I don't think it is.) The society in Beyond This Horizon actually sounds kind of disorderly--despite the emphasis on codes of honor and etiquette--and unpleasant--despite the comforts it offers its citizens. In other words, the society described in Beyond This Horizon is kind of like every other society throughout history.

There are innovations, or at least semi-innovations, in Beyond This Horizon. These include waterbeds, sperm banks, voice ringtones, telephonic fax machines, a programmable autopilot, escalators, and welfare payments made directly to citizens by their government. I call them semi-innovations because, although they may have been invented or conceived before Heinlein wrote, they seem to have made pretty early appearances in his novel. In fact, some could have appeared at that time only in a science fiction story.

A long time ago, before it was called science fiction, or scientifiction, or even scientific romance, our favorite genre was sometimes called pseudo-scientific adventure, or fiction, or, if the reviewer was feeling appreciative, literature. The term came along about when you imagine it would have, that is, in the nineteenth century, after there was such a thing as science, and because of that development, various pseudosciences. The earliest use I have found of the term pseudo-science in reference to what we call science fiction is from 1885 in--of all unlikely places--the Vicksburg, Mississippi Evening Post ("Vital Statistics," Sept. 7, 1885, p. 2). The Post's use of the term makes it clear that readers would already have had an inkling of what pseudo-scientific adventure is all about. I suspect the term had been in use for some time, possibly in reference to the works of Jules Verne. In any case, the terms pseudo-science and pseudo-scientific in reference to science fiction were used more often as the turn of the century approached. Curiously, the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction treats just one definition of the term pseudo-science, and it's the one we think of now when we see the word. You know, all of that crackpot stuff about eugenics, mental telepathy, space aliens, and reincarnation.

One of the problems with Beyond This Horizon is that there's a lot of that crackpot stuff about eugenics, mental telepathy, space aliens, and reincarnation. In fact, these things form the basic theme of the book, once it gets around to its basic theme. (And thank God it finally makes its point in its final three pages. That's how close Heinlein came to writing a pretty pointless novel. But then maybe he knew what he was doing all along.)

Beyond This Horizon takes place in the far future, maybe somewhere around the twenty-fourth-and-a-half century. (As in Buck Rogers, a man who went to sleep in the 1920s is awakened into this new world.) And although many of the names and much of the culture of past centuries has been lost (this is a post-apocalyptic world), some also remains, including knowledge of Arrhenius and his panspermic hypothesis (perhaps only a semi-pseudoscientific idea in our day) (p. 125), and Flammarion's (pseudoscientific) research into reincarnation (p. 143). (Flammarion also wrote science fiction by the way.) There's another idea from the past--a really hateful idea, in fact--that has survived in Heinlein's future society. More on that at the end.

Although he touched on other pseudoscientific and semi-pseudoscientific ideas, the heart of Heinlein's story concerns eugenics, and from eugenics it goes into mental telepathy and (spoiler alert) reincarnation, all of which are treated as scientific subjects. Eugenics, that dream program of early twentieth-century Progressivism, has thankfully been discredited since Heinlein wrote. (1) But in 1942, when Beyond This Horizon was first published, there were still those in the West who held to it, despite its growing association with the monstrous and often pseudoscientific ideas of Nazi Germany. Again, in the society described in Beyond This Horizon, eugenics is central: the whole point is to breed the superior man. And the whole point of breeding the superior man turns into the goal of developing telepathic abilities in that man, which are used in turn to confirm (in those last three pages) that the soul survives the death of the body and that therefore life has meaning.

I would call that a strange and ambitious subject for a science fiction novel.

As I read Beyond This Horizon, it occurred to me that the eugenics/superior man/mental telepathy program outlined therein seems also to have been the program of the whole of Astounding Science-Fiction under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. Heinlein's novel, serialized in the April and May 1942 issues of the magazine, had been preceded by A.E. van Vogt's Slan (Sept.-Dec. 1940), which treated similar ideas. By 1940 or '42, Campbell had already become interested in psychic phenomena. But who in this world can exercise his psychic abilities? Perhaps only the mutated man, the advanced man, the superior man. So that's the man about whom Campbell's writers wrote. He is in Slan and in Beyond This Horizon. He is also the end goal of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, which first saw the light of day in the May 1950 issue of Astounding, evolving soon after into Scientology.

Say what you will about him, but at least Robert Heinlein was smart enough to see through Hubbard and his crackpot schemes. But Campbell and van Vogt? Not so much. Nonetheless, Heinlein seems to have had a favorable view of eugenics and its program of generating the superior man. I have a feeling that he thought of himself as one of them, already on Earth in the here and now. He seems also to have given some credence to mental telepathy as a scientifically explainable phenomenon. Time to move on.

* * *

One of the side plots of Beyond This Horizon is an attempted coup against the government. The government is already pretty lousy. Like human reproduction, the economy is planned and the people have become more or less serfs. (2) But the plotters against the government are worse still. We recognize them today, for they are still with us. Their ideas are the same, though older, more tired, and more worn out than they were in 1942, if that's even possible. They are the ideas of the Progressive, the Socialist (species national or international, it doesn't matter), the Collectivist ("The Whole is greater than the parts!" is their slogan in Heinlein's book), the Leftist of whatever stripe: Society must be destroyed and then rebuilt upon a foundation of Science and Reason.

I started this ever-expanding essay with an illustrative quote. Here are some others, from Beyond This Horizon (Signet, n.d.):

Had he [Monroe-Alpha, one of the plotters] been as skilled in psychologics as he was in mathematics he might possibly have recognized his own pattern for what it was--religious enthusiasm, the desire to be part of a greater whole and to surrender one's own little worries to the keeping of an over-being. He had been told, no doubt, in his early instruction, that revolutionary political movements and crusading religions were the same type-form process, differing only in verbal tags and creeds, but he had never experienced either one before. In consequence, he failed to recognize what had happened to him. Religious frenzy? What nonsense--he believed himself to be an extremely hard-headed agnostic. (Emphasis in the original.) (p. 92)

* * * 

Mordan [one of the government's men, who speaks after the coup has been put down] considered how to reply [. . .]. "Perhaps," he said, "it would be simplest to state that they [the plotters] never did have what it takes. The leaders were, in most cases, genetically poor types, (3) with conceit far exceeding their abilities. I doubt if any one of them had sufficient imagination to conceive logically the complexities of running a society, even the cut-to-measure society they dreamed of. [. . .] What it boils down to is lack of imagination and overwhelming conceit." (Emphasis added.) (p. 104)

* * * 

"I venture to predict [Mordan continues] that, when we get around to reviewing their records, we will find that the rebels were almost all--all, perhaps--men who had never been outstandingly successful at anything. Their only prominence was among themselves."

     Hamilton thought this over to himself. He had noticed something of the sort. They had seemed like thwarted men. [. . .] they were swollen with self-importance, planning this, deciding that, talking about what they would do when they "took over." Pipsqueaks, the lot of 'em. (Emphasis added again.) (p. 104)

Here is where I'll send you back to the quote from Victor Davis Hanson and where I'll just restate that we have seen the likes of these people before, the people about whom Dr. Hanson writes today and about whom Heinlein wrote before him. Heinlein described them as having "conceit far exceeding their abilities"; Dr. Hanson calls them "the arrogant but ignorant." "Pipsqueaks," Heinlein wrote; Dr. Hanson calls them "physically unimpressive." Heinlein understood that plotters are "thwarted men [. . .] swollen with self-importance"; Dr. Hanson calls them "ambitious but stalled." I'll refer you to Eric Hoffer, too. He understood, as Heinlein did, that the radical political impulse is religious in its aims and intensity. Instead of "thwarted," Hoffer referred to these men as having "spoiled lives," "spoiled" not as in materially comfortable, but degraded or ruined. They are bored and unhappy, self-loathing and alienated. They seek happiness, excitement, fulfillment, and a chance to lose themselves in mass movements of visionary and religious intensity ("wild, uncontrolled daydreams," Heinlein calls them). They are the same people today who are destroying and burning, tearing down and looting, beating and killing. They have never created anything, never accomplished anything; they are small, weak, and ignorant, and so they seek, out of infantile fury and rabid envy, to destroy the things that others have created, to bring down their accomplishments and scatter them in the mud and rubble of the hated, ruined, and soon-to-be-overthrown past. Children. Infants. "Pipsqueaks, the lot of 'em."

* * *

I have just two more things. There are anachronisms in Beyond This Horizon. That's for sure. Part of it is in the way people talk, a 1940s kind of snappy banter. That's common in Heinlein's writing. When it's good, it peps up a story. When it's not good, well . . . . Another is that some of the characters have old-fashioned names: Felix, Martha, Phyllis. The effect is to make Beyond This Horizon pretty badly dated. (Sorry to all people named Felix, Martha, and Phyllis.) As a cartoonist, I noticed another: the protagonist Felix is referred to once as a "Cheerful Cherub," which was the name of a newspaper comic panel from the 1920s by Rebecca McCann and which could hardly have survived into the far future (p. 149).

There's still one more that is far more troubling.

The man from 1926 comes out of his slumber-stasis and interacts with the superman Felix a couple of times. (This is another of the tangents in Heinlein's novel.) There is a misunderstanding. The man from the past is challenged to a duel. Felix advises him to apologize to the offended party so as to avoid being killed. The man's pride is hurt. And then he uses the n-word (p. 145).

And Felix, who knows only a little of the distant past, its customs, and its lingo, replies, "I don't understand what you mean. What has your color to do with it?" (p. 145).

So we are expected to believe that not only the word--that shocking and disgusting word--is still in use in the far future and that a man of that future knows what it means, but also that the perception and status of the people to whom it is applied have remained unchanged despite the passage of centuries. That is inconceivable to me, and it shows--despite everything else there is in this book--a terrible and inexcusable failure of the author's imagination. I'm not the first to make note of this. Thankfully others have noticed and objected before me. But in 2018, the World Science Fiction Convention awarded Beyond This Horizon a Retro-Hugo Award for best novel. I find Heinlein's use of the word a terrible flaw in an already flawed book. Was there any consideration of this flaw on the part of WorldCon? Couldn't it have found something else out of the year 1942 upon which to bestow its award? (4) And could such a thing happen now, just two years later? Not likely. Not in this climate. I'm not one for cancellation, bowdlerization, or censorship, but Robert Heinlein should have known better. It was 1942 for God's sake. He should have known better. Why should we award his ignorance and failed imagination now?

* * *

I'll close with another quote, this one from a commenter called WP on the website of the National Review. After someone else referred to our times as "stupid," WP wrote:

"Calling our current times 'stupid' is an insult to the dignity and majesty of stupid."

Give that guy (or woman) an award.

Notes
(1) Kind of. Founded by Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood is still in the business of correcting what she called "the most urgent problem today [which] is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." See her original article "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," from October 1921.
(2) Did Heinlein really look with favor upon a planned economy? Maybe so. A lot of people did in those days. The man from the twentieth century who emerges into Heinlein's present studied another one of Progressivism's isms, Taylorism, also called scientific management. Taylorism is often a feature of planned and controlled economies. After hating it, V.I. Lenin came to like it and adopted it in his new slave state of the Soviet Republic.
(3) Keep in mind that genetic superiority and inferiority is the unit of measure in Heinlein's imagined society. Feel free to insert your own unit of measure: it all comes out the same in the end. Put another way, there are just two types among the haters and destroyers: the evil and exceptional (like Lenin) and the stupid and thoroughly unexceptional (everybody who follows the evil and exceptional). The second type is waaay more common. This is the type that is currently running through our streets.
(4) How about Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher? It's not science fiction exactly, but it's about science fiction. Call it honorary science fiction and give Boucher the award.

Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein was first published as a serial in the April and May 1942 issues of Astounding Science-Fiction. Astounding used Heinlein's pseudonym Anson MacDonald as its byline. The MacDonald part was no doubt for Heinlein's wife at the time, Leslyn MacDonald (1904-1981), who was also a teller of weird tales.

The cover illustration by Hubert Rogers depicts one of the most interesting and well-written sequences in Heinlein's novel. That sequence takes place in redwood country in California during the attempted coup.

A. E. van Vogt's story "Asylum" appeared in the following month's issue, displacing Heinlein's on the cover. Rogers was again the cover artist. His green-glowing, fusiform craft is practically the same as the month before. Like Heinlein, van Vogt was a believer, I think, in the superior man. Unlike Heinlein, he went down the rabbit hole of L. Ron Hubbard's scam/belief system.

Revised slightly on July 11, 2020.
Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Meredith Beyers (1899-1996)-Part Four

After fleeing Chicago and his wife's suit for divorce, Joseph A. Sadony went to Michigan, and it was there that I believe he lived out the rest of his life. His story is tangled. Some of what he claimed was almost certainly made up. He was a called a psychic and a philosopher. Implications are that he was some kind of scientist, researcher, or inventor, too. We might just as easily say that he was a fraud, a scoundrel, a crackpot, and a fake who nonetheless may have believed in his own fakery. Sadony was also an occultist of one kind or another who lived at a time when the bounds between religion and science (or history), at least in the popular imagination, were fluid and uncertain. That mixture has yielded all kinds of pseudosciences, pseudo-religions, and pseudo-history. Thus we have Mormonism, Marxism, Theosophy, Christian Science, Lysenkoism, and later still Dianetics and Scientology--which bear, with their creator, some resemblance to Sadony and his beliefs. We can add to all of that, I think, Sadony's own Society of Psychological Science, Institute of Mental and Athletic Development, and Society of Psychical Research of Chicago and the many more brainchildren of his life's work in Michigan. The main thrust of all of this seems to have been to establish or describe (like Charles Fort) some kind of continuity between science and religion, between the material and the spiritual or supernatural. Did he ever succeed in his work? I'm not sure that anyone can say. Whatever he did or failed to do, Sadony created and shaped a world for and around himself and his family, a world from his own vision and his own efforts. In that, he might be called a great man, great in his qualities and accomplishments but also in his flaws and failings.

* * *

Joseph A. Sadony married Mary Lillian Kochem (or Kochems) on July 3, 1906. Having been born in September 1886, she was at the time of their wedding nineteen years old. Sadony's marrying Mary Lillian would have made him (like Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard) a bigamist but his two sons by her legitimate (I think). In any event, Sadony, who lived in Michigan as a child, had acquired a place in or near Montague, Michigan, in April 1906. (It was purchased as a winter home for his society by a wealthy woman of Milwaukee.) When things fell apart in Chicago in 1908, he seems to have repaired to that place, and it was in Michigan that he was counted in the U.S. Census of 1910 with his wife, called Lillian; their two very young sons, Joseph A. Sadony, Jr., and Arthur J. Sadony; his daughter, who was called Stella (meaning star), aged eleven; and a servant, Florence Smith, aged thirty-two. Stella Sadony was almost certainly Mercedes Sadony, daughter of Sadony's first wife, Lola P. Sadony. Thereby hangs another tale of scandal:

From The Inter Ocean, Chicago, Illinois, April 26, 1908, page 2.

The encampment in Michigan, called "Camp Philosophy," must have, at some point, given way to a new, permanent home for Sadony, his family, and his followers. By 1909, they were living in "the Valley of the Pines," an 80-acre farm located southwest of Montague and not far from the shoreline of Lake Michigan. (The farm is still in the Sadony family, who have lent their surname to nearby Sadony Bayou and Sadony Road or Sadony Bayou Road.) In the 1920 U.S. Census, the Sadony household was more or less the same as it had been ten years before except that Pearl M. Smith had taken the place of her sister Florence. (Both had been followers of Sadony since his Chicago days.) By 1930, though, more were added to the household: Charles Abel, caretaker; Marie St. Claire, an elderly widow of Wisconsin (and perhaps the original benefactress of the Sadony society); and (finally, finally) Meredith Beyers, listed as a lodger and as a secretary and writer. The Sadony household was even larger in 1940. It included all of those who had lived there in 1930, as well as Edith Smith, cook (another Smith sister); and R. John De Fraga, an electrician, machinist, or machine operator.

In 1910, Sadony had given his occupation as farmer, in 1920 as machinist, and in 1930 as newspaper writer. (He wrote a newspaper column and other newspaper items for decades. He also wrote many books.) In 1940, though, he and his younger son were engaged in "educational research," and it was in this field that Meredith Beyers is supposed to have worked as well, for the elder Sadony's Educational Research Laboratories.

At some point, Beyers made the transition into more conventional research. Sadony's two sons seem to have done the same in their founding and operation of Sadony Brothers Boat Works, which later became Valley Research Corporation. But there are gaps in the record of Meredith Beyers' life, and I'm afraid I can't fill them. He attended and probably graduated from Northwestern University in the late 1910s and/or early 1920s. From as early as 1930 to as late as 1940, he lived and worked at the Valley of the Pines with Joseph Sadony. Sometime in the 1940s or '50s, he branched out into more conventional work at Convair and Ryan Electronics, located in California. In May 1925, though, he had had a poem, "The Golden Nail," in Volume 1, Number 1 of a journal called The Great Work in America, published by John E. Richardson of Hollywood, California. The lead article in that issue, after Richardson's introduction (or manifesto), is one by its associate editor, none other than Joseph A. Sadony. (1) And in his introduction, Richardson mentioned Meredith Beyers, or "Meredith Beyers," as his name appears, "a young man [. . .] who has come to fill a most important place in Joseph's life and work." (p. 6) By that, we can assume, I think, that Joseph Sadony was a formative influence on Meredith Beyers. Whether that influence held after Beyers left the Valley of the Pines and the state of Michigan, I'm not sure that anyone can say. Maybe there are answers buried in the papers left behind after Sadony's death in 1960. (Sadly, all things must pass.) Maybe the books on which Beyers was working late in life carried on in some way Sadony's researches. It seems certain to me that at least one likeness of Meredith Beyers is in the photo gallery on the official Joseph A. Sadony website, called The Valley of the Pines and reachable by this link. The last gap in Beyers' life, of course, concerns his final years, from 1978 to his death on April 27, 1996, at age ninety-seven. It seems to me that he would have had voluminous papers, but if a man dies without children, siblings, nieces, or nephews, where do his possessions go? I suppose into the lost and irretrievable past, as all things eventually do.

* * *

The story of Joseph A. Sadony is immense and untellable in a blog, probably even in a book. It's nice to know a little of how things turned out, though, and so here some facts on a few of the principals:

• Joseph Alexander Sadony, born February 22, 1877, Montabaur, Germany; died September 1960, Muskegon, Michigan; buried Valley of the Pines Cemetery, a place that may be hidden on his farm near Montague, Michigan. Sadony was married twice (I think), first to Lola Pauline Mielke, then to Mary Lillian Kochem or Kochems. These two marriages in fact overlapped. The first presumably ended in divorce, probably sometime in mid to late 1908. The second ended with his death.

• Lola Pauline (Mielke) Sadony Lincoln, born August 1, 1879, New Ulm, Minnesota; died March 19, 1960, presumably in Chicago. She married William Henley Lincoln (1880-?), November 3, 1908, in Indiana, after her presumed divorce from Sadony. She was also known for some reason as Lizzie A. Mielke and Lizzie A. Sadony.

• Mercedes P. Sadony Lincoln Bierbaum, aka Stella Sadony, born November 28, 1898, Chicago; died September 1978, presumably in Chicago. She was the daughter and only child of Joseph and Lola Sadony. She married Harold O. Bierbaum (1905-1982).

• Mary Lillian (Kochem or Kochems) Sadony, born September 1886, Kentucky; died December 27, 1966, presumably in Michigan; buried Oak Grove Cemetery, Montague, Michigan. She was Joseph Sadony's second wife and mother of his two sons:

• Joseph Alexander Sadony, Jr., born 1908, Michigan; died ?

• Arthur Joseph Sadony, born April 14, 1909, Michigan; died May 29, 1998; buried Oak Grove Cemetery, Montague, Michigan. He served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II and was married to Beatrice H. Sadony (1920-2004). Both he and his brother had children who I think own and operate the Valley of the Pines farm and the official Joseph A. Sadony website of the same name.

Meredith Beyers' Story in Weird Tales

"The Last Entry" in Weird Tales (May/June/July 1924)

Further Reading

There is abundant reading on Joseph A. Sadony on the Internet. The best source I have found on the life of Meredith Beyers is a newspaper article, "He Holds All the Cards as County Votes" by Nancy Skelton, in the Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1978, page 20+.

Note

(1) In the same issue of The Great Work in America is an article about prenatal influences upon the mind of a child, written by the wife of the editor, Noneta S. Richardson. (Like Joseph Sadony, the editor, John Emmet Richardson, ran away from his wife with a younger woman and established a place, in California, for occult, spiritual, or philosophical activities. His brainchild, The Great School of Natural Science, is still in existence.) Researchers into the history of Dianetics and Scientology might want to have a look at Mrs. Richardson's article, moreover at the lives and works of John E. Richardson, Noneta S. Richardson, and Florence Huntley Richardson, and consider them as a possible precursors not only to L. Ron Hubbard's inventions but also to other West Coast wackiness, including George Adamski's yarns of contact and travels with aliens from outer space.

Professor Joseph A. Sadony, with his wife and associates, from the front page of The Inter Ocean, Chicago, Illinois, March 1, 1908, the day the scandal broke. Mrs. Sadony was Lola P. Sadony. Miss Pearl Smith was a longtime follower of Sadony and later a cook at his camp in Michigan. C.C. Christian was an officer, I think, in his society while in Chicago. Miss Bessie Brown was, I suppose, one of his votaries.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Religions of Weird Fiction

I'll get right to the point: there aren't any, as far as I know--religions of weird fiction, that is. If you look to the right, you'll see a label, "The Religions of Science Fiction." You'll see also that I have written a lot on this topic, and when you read what I have written, you'll understand that when I refer to the religions of science fiction, I'm talking about religious, pseudo-religious, and quasi-religious beliefs that have arisen from science fiction and its precursors. Chief among these are flying saucers, dating from 1947, and Dianetics/Scientology, from 1950. There are also what you might call proto-science-fictional religions in Theosophy and "I AM" Activity, and there are similar beliefs that have come along since the 1940s and '50s. Shaverism came from that era, too, and though it doesn't reach the level of a science-fictional religion, it has its own religious, pseudo-religious, or quasi-religious characteristics.

At first you might think that religion and science fiction don't go together. After all, science brooks nothing when it comes to unreason, superstition, or claims for the existence of anything supernatural. The other side of that, though, is that science clearly doesn't satisfy certain basic human needs. Believers leave religion and a belief in God behind them, but because they are believers, they need a replacement, and so they search endlessly for something to stand in the place of God. (More on that in a while.) Scientists and science-minded people, then, too easily fall into belief in the religions of science--Scientism, Darwinism (alternatively, Lysenkoism), materialism, atheism, Utopianism, Marxism or "scientific socialism," environmentalism, the cult of global warming, etc. Likewise, readers, writers, and fans of science fiction also fall too easily for the religions of science fiction. At least one of those religions--flying saucers--is pretty well harmless. Another, which shall remain nameless, has done great harm and has even brought about the deaths of some of its current or former adherents.

Weird fiction doesn't have that problem. Writers of weird fiction (notwithstanding Lovecraft's materialism--more on him in a while, too) concede the existence of the supernatural even before they begin. They seem to have their heads on straight and don't fall for pseudo-religious nonsense. They don't suffer the fate of their materialistic characters, who, because they can't bend, break. And so, as far as I know, no author of weird fiction has ever spawned a real-world religion or cult. Likewise, as far as I know, no reader or fan of weird fiction has ever followed his or her favorite author down the rabbit hole of a made-up religion. So my title, "The Religions of Weird Fiction," is about nothing at all. If anyone has a suggestion or assertion that there is or might be an actual religion, pseudo-religion, or quasi-religion of weird fiction, I'm happy to listen.

* * *

In doing research for my series on Harold S. Farnese, I ran across this passage in Lovecraft: A Biography by L. Sprague de Camp (Ballantine, 1976):

He [Lovecraft] argued science and religion with his correspondents. [. . . ] With Catholic Derleth he was polite about religion. But when, in early 1931, Frank [Belknap] Long flirted with Catholicism, Lovecraft went after him hammer and tongs: "that incredible & anti-social anachronism (1) called the Popish church . . . . Popery fosters everything effeminate & repugnant." Although on other occasions he admitted religion to have some practical social value, he now declared: "I hate & despise religion" because, he said, it lied about basic, scientifically established facts. (p. 372)

I have wondered before whether Lovecraft was anti-Catholic. (I wrote on this topic in "Lovecraft and the Mass Rock" on October 21, 2015, here.) Well, if de Camp described the situation accurately, now we know that he was. Lovecraft's comments here seem to me unsophisticated and noncritical, his tone overwrought. I suspect that his hostility towards Catholicism was a kind of knee-jerk reaction that would have come naturally to an old-fashioned Yankee Protestant or Puritan. We should remember that he was also a nativist and that he lived during a high water mark of the very anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan in America. Only recently (1928) had there been a presidential campaign in which very strong anti-Catholic sentiment showed itself, not only in the United States at large but also in Lovecraft's home state of Rhode Island. (1)

There's more to that passage from de Camp's book, though. Here is another passage:

When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew [sic], crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed--whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions--is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross--how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed? (2)

That's not from Lovecraft--it was actually written by Friedrich Nietzsche, and it comes from his Human, All too Human (1878). Note the same hostility and incredulity as in Lovecraft. Note the similar words or phrases, too, Catholicism as an "anachronism" and Christianity as "an antiquity projected into our own times from remote prehistory." In addition, Lovecraft sensed what Nietzsche articulated when the former wrote, "Popery fosters everything effeminate & repugnant," for Nietzsche famously criticized Christianity as a religion that feminizes men, or at least unmans them, for example:

Christianity [. . .] has waged a deadly war against this higher type of man; it has placed all the basic instincts of this type under the ban; and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the "reprobate." Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself. [Emphasis in the original, from The Antichrist (1888).] (3)

There are of course lots of other quotes like this from Nietzsche. Unlike Lovecraft, however, Nietzsche was not so keen on science. Both, however, were conservative and aristocratic. Anyway, I wonder, was Lovecraft familiar with the writings of Nietzsche? Or did he arrive at some of the same conclusions and for some of the same reasons (at whatever intellectual or philosophical level he may have occupied) as did Nietzsche?

* * *

It seems to me that human beings have a need to believe in things that are infinite, eternal, and absolute, and that when we give up on a belief in God as the source of these things, we are faced with one of two choices: we can either try to find a replacement for God, or we can can try to live without them. Both paths lead to the same destination, for it seems to me also that we have a drive in us towards annihilation, especially self-annihilation, as well as self-defeat and self-destruction. Both paths are blocked, I think, by belief, but if there is no belief and no block, we generally proceed towards self-destruction. Whether Lovecraft would have been saved by a different belief system than the one he held, and whether we would now have his art as he created it if he had believed in something different, we can't really say. But he was certainly lost in the end by believing in what I guess was essentially nothing.

* * *

I came across a really interesting idea recently, but I can't say where I found it. The idea is that there are those among us who are convinced that the Creation is flawed and that it must be corrected. We see this on a small scale in popular culture when we go to a Batman or Superman movie and are treated yet again to the character's origin story, now overhauled by the newest moviemaker. We see it also in the Star Wars saga, in which George Lucas, who is the creator, goes back and alters the original form of his own creation, moreover, when the makers of every new Star Wars movie lay waste to what was done by those who came before them.

Anyway, the problem with the idea that the Creation is flawed comes about when we as human beings believe that we can make it right, that we are smart enough, wise enough, and visionary enough to remake it all according to our own ideas, schemes, and systems. This goes beyond the concept in tragedy of hubris and into the territory of an extraordinary arrogance and rebellion. People who dream up these things--intellectual ideas, intellectualized schemes or systems for living, prescriptions on how the rest of us must live--are in love with their own minds and their own ideas. They are possessed of a pride so extreme that the word "pride" no longer applies. We might ask, what is the source of this extreme pride and arrogance? How did your ideas and schemes and systems get to be so fine? How do you know these things so well and with such conviction? The answer that seems to come back is this: I know because I know. This is a Gnosticism for the modern age. Marx is a perfect example of this kind of thinking, but Madame Blavatsky, Richard Shaver, and L. Ron Hubbard also fit the bill to one degree or another.

In any case, last week in the U.S. Senate, we saw this phenomenon at work. We saw a group of people who appear to be in love with the fineness of their own minds, their own ideas, their own schemes, their own systems, their own innovations. Their pride is in themselves. They seem convinced that they are in possession of the knowledge and wisdom necessary to correct the perceived flaws in the Creation. They know because they know. There need not be any other explanation or justification, and nothing must stand in their way in the deadly serious business of remaking it. Their belief seems to be that they are God or gods and that they possess God-like or god-like qualities. Their quest is for power, as one of their company so easily saw and diagnosed as the condition running like an epidemic among them. What they don't realize is that they can never and will never have that kind of power. They will never be able to remake the Creation, for it is what it is intended to be. It is unalterable by human effort. They cannot bend reality to their wills, and, falling well short of their imagined godhood, they will all die in the end. Weak, frail, crippled--bed-bound, failing, necessarily mortal--they will one day, we can only hope, be chastened and disabused of their notions of themselves and the fineness of their own minds and ideas. Yes, they will all surely die in the end and the unaltered Creation will go on without them.

* * *

Finally, I have written before about weird fiction against the materialist (see here). Well, I have found another example in a writer who should have been in Weird Tales but never was. His name was Stefan Grabiński, and he was a Polish author active during the pulp-fiction era in America, from 1906 to about 1930. Born in 1887, he was a rough contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft, he died young, in 1936 at age forty-nine. (Nietzsche also died fairly young, at age fifty-five, five days after Lovecraft's tenth birthday.) In our weird fiction book club last week, we read Grabiński's story "The Frenzied Farmhouse," from 1908. The narrator of the story is a man, once a husband and father. Near the beginning of his tale, he tells us, "I am not sick, nor was I ever sick," likewise, "I am not, nor was I ever, a psychopath." We learn not to trust him very well in these claims by what he relates later on. One significant thing about these reverse confessions is that the narrator appears to head off a scientific or medical explanation for what he has done: "I am not sick, I am not a psychopath." He continues:

Instead, I was a complete skeptic. I did not adhere to any principle or doctrine; my temperament was not a suggestible one. In this respect, my friend K., whom I had always considered to be extremely superstitious, stood at the opposite extreme. His strange, at times crazy views and theories constantly raised strong opposition on my part, and we quarrelled [sic] continually, which resulted in us frequently severing contact with each other for long periods of time. And yet, it appears, he was not mistaken in everything.

So here is the former skeptic (note the past tense), now speaking (in the present tense) and telling us that he is not sick or a psychopath, implying that in and by his skepticism he was wrong, conceding that his friend K. (shades of Kafka), who is "extremely superstitious," is right, at least in some small way. In other words, as the materialist usually does in weird fiction, the narrator comes in contact with something that he cannot explain in purely scientific or materialistic terms, and he receives his comeuppance because of it. But this is a strange and not a simple story. It can't easily be categorized, explicated, or explained away. In the inexorableness of the narrator's actions, it puts me in mind of The Stranger by Albert Camus, which is a strange thing to do for a tale of weird fiction.

Note

(1) "Finally, the early 1920s saw the first great 'Red Scare,' the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Rhode Island, and the bitter Al Smith campaign in 1928, all of which produced a new level of anti-Catholic bigotry and heightened tensions between faltering Republicans and the rising Democrats." From "Ten Turning Points in Rhode Island History" by William G. McLoughlin, Rhode Island History, May 1986 (Vol. 45, No. 2), quote from pp. 48-49.

(2) Note the elements of the tale of supernatural horror or weird fiction: things still living out of antiquity or prehistory, a "god," a "sage," Christ as a fortuneteller, human sacrifice, the drinking of human blood (so that we might live forever, like vampires), prayers, miracles, "a beyond," death as "a portal"--"how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past!" [Emphasis added.] Might we say that Christianity, or religion in general, is the religion of weird fiction? Or is it actually the other way around, that the genres of weird fiction and supernatural horror are actually protrusions of an internal religious impulse, however primitive it might be, into the very secular and outward world of books, commerce, and pulp magazines?

(3) If Nietzsche's criticism is accurate and Christianity sees "the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the 'reprobate'," and if our current president is by some measure this kind of "strong man" (thus a "reprobate"), then the reaction to him, especially considering that it comes from so many who are themselves so deeply anti-Christian, is curiously Christian. But then I think that we live in a world teeming with non-believers and atheists who have been set up in their beliefs by two thousand years of Christianity. I guess you could call them "secular Christians," even "atheized Christians," in any case Christians of one kind or another who are ignorant or unaware of their very origins or what ultimately lies behind their beliefs and actions.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley