A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to theReview

byJanrae Frank Janrae has made this introduction and article public domain. She feels that the message is moreimportant than the messenger. Feel free to disseminate at your leisure! If you wish to confirm thedetails listed here, email Janrae at janraefrank@gmail.com. In 1986 I sold first North American print rights to an article called

A Funny Thing Happened on theWay to the Review

. It came out in a Hugo Award-winning semi-prozine entitled

Thrust: Science Fiction in Review

. The article can speak for itself. What I want to bring to people's attention is thereaction of the Scientologists to the article.I had two guest pieces in the

Washington Post Bookworld

a few months before

Happened

was published. I used a mail drop in Hollywood as my address for doing business. It had kept me safefrom irate people connected with some of the articles I wrote for

Cinefantastique

and other publications on more than one occasion. I have no idea how they found my home address, but findit they did.A well-dressed blond woman, Simone, and a male whose name I no longer remember knocked onmy door one afternoon. They introduced themselves as being PR people for Scientology and theywere very concerned about the nature of the article I had in Thrust. They wanted me to take back several statements that I had made in the piece. I received a long lecture and a copy of

Dianetics

.Over the next several weeks I received a minimum of one visit a week from Simone. She asked mewhat I thought of

Dianetics

and I tactfully sidestepped the fact that I had glanced through it andtossed the book in the fireplace. When it became clear that I was not going to retract certain sectionsof the article, Simone offered a compromise. She wanted me to make up for my misdeeds bywriting another article about Hubbard's novels, they would then approve it, and place it somewhere.I would receive a very large sum of money for doing it. I refused.Gradually she shifted from cajoling and offering bribes to threats of ending my career as a journalist. They investigated me and Simone hauled out my dirty laundry. (Which is one of thereasons for my current policy of "I have no skeletons in my closet, they're all hanging from theyardarm." You can't blackmail someone who has no secrets.)I never budged and a few times I threw her out of my home. I will probably never know if theywere behind the markets that suddenly closed their doors to me or not. What I do know is that myability to sell articles was impaired in some mysterious fashion and I moved from writing to NewAge editorial work.I reinvented myself (to steal a phrase from Warren Ellis's

Transmetropolitan

) as an editor. Ireinvented myself again when I became an ebook author. Now go on and read the article and see if you can figure out why they were so upset with me.After the galleys of

The Invader's Plan

had sat on my shelf for several weeks, insinuating guiltabout the edges of my mind as only the work of one of my childhood's favorite authors is capable of doing, I decided to read and review it. A simple decision, really.I had been aware for some time that Hubbard was an intermittent source of controversy within the

SF community, but had never taken it too seriously. Upon making a decision to review

The Invader's Plan

, I went to my mainstream editors to ask if they'd be interested in running such areview (for financial reasons, I do almost nothing on spec these days: four mainstream editors of long acquaintance turned me down after long interrogations of my motives for doing such a review.("What are you. anyway? A Scientologist or something?")My only contact with Scientology came in 1968 when, as an insatiably curious thirteen-year-old, Isent off for a free pamphlet on the subject A year of receiving nagging, hand-written lettersfollowed the arrival of that slender booklet I was finally forced to write them a "leave my childalone" letter, to which I forged my grandmother's name. But then one should never judge an author by his "fans", and I doubt that the person writing those letters to me knew that I was a snot-nosedkid, not an adultBut I've always felt that a book, especially a work of fiction, should be judged on its own merits,not by what its author did away from his or her typewriter. As any student of Western literature cantell you, fiction writing has long been the domain of social mavericks, moral degenerates, anddangerous dreamers, not to mention just plain bad dudes. Going back to the very roots of Westernliterature, we find Chaucer, dear to the hearts of librarians everywhere, was a convicted rapist whoescaped the noose by claiming "benefit of clergy" (meaning, in that illiterate age, that he would readand write and was therefore too valuable to waste). Christopher Marlowe, a quasi-contemporary of William Shakespeare (and one who the Bard is said to have plagiarized) may, if the rumor-mongersof the day are to be believed these four hundred years later, have been a murderer; he certainlyseemed to delight in drawn-sword quarrels, and met his death in a dispute over a tavern bill. A greatmany writers seem to have tried to live up to the reputations of Chaucer and Marlowe, in deeds if not in talent In much more recent memory in the science fiction field, there was the small matter of wife-stealing that opened a serious breech between one of SF's most illustrious editors of the 1950sand one of the field's most seminal writers.I would have to say that so trifling a matter as founding a religious / philosophical movement (a practice which has become fairly commonplace since the 1960s) just isn't in the same league asrape, murder and wife-stealing.A long time ago, when the subtleties of fiction and the nuances of language were more sharplydefined, the term satire was limited to work whose humor derived from irony and sarcasm. To besatire, it has to have a bite to it The shallow slapstick humor of Robert Asprin and L Sprague deCamp isnt really satire, although some may be quick to apply the title to such light, humorous work.

The Invader's Plan

has a delightfully sharp set of teeth which Hubbard sinks into a good number of science fiction literature's favorite objects of derision: intelligence agencies, bureaucrats; andDudley Do-Right heroes, as well as one not so favorite current mystique (though it ought to be),feminist machismo.It seems that Earth has been marked for potential exploitation ("acquisition") by a ruthless galacticempire. But their advance scout gets a bad case of financial indigestion upon discovering that pollution and the threat of nuclear warfare is jeopardizing the empire's investment in time andresearch on what promised to be a very lucrative project In order to enslave the Earth, they firstmust rescue it from corporate polluters and trigger-happy politicians.

The Invader's Plan

is definitely worth the price of admission. As I begin reading the second book inwhat is promised to be a ten-book series,

Black Genesis

, it looks like the writing will hold upthrough the series.

Postscript

Shortly after writing this review I learned, along with the rest of the world, that L Ron Hubbard haddied. I can only wish that he had come back to science fiction sooner. It is small consolation that the