Greed

July 4, 2011
This slim volume of three stories and a novel excerpt from the 1950s is part of an ongoing 80-volume collection of short stories by the prolific and controversial Dianetics guru, L. Ron Hubbard (1911â1986). He had numerous adventures, and the works here all star his avatars: daring, magnetic, flawed personalities who exploit the weaknesses of their opponents against enormous odds. The dated gee-whiz narrative voice falls flat in "Greed" and "The Automagic Horse," achieves terminal pomposity in "Final Enemy," and dominates the four-page snippet of Beyond All Weapons, an account of a Martian colony's revolt against an oppressive Mother Earth. (The whole novel can be ordered, a not-so-discreet footnote announces.) Even a glossary of 1950s catchphrases can't make this highly commercial promo for Galaxy's "Golden Age Book Club" relevant to 21st-century readers.

October 1, 2011
This volume in Galaxy Press ongoing project to revive Hubbard's pulp fiction collects three stories originally published in 1949 and 1950. Greed features an officer in the United Continents Space Navy whose greed for power and conquest winds up benefiting all humanity. A morality tale posing as a war story, it's an uncharacteristically weak effort (sf was usually one of Hubbard's strong suits). Better is Final Enemy, a twist-ending story in which Captain Bristol and the crew of Argonaut VI search for signs of alien invaders, only to find out said aliens are a lot closer to home than anyone had suspected. In The Automagic Horse, a special-effects wizard is handed the tough assignment for his latest movie of building a photorealistic, mechanical horse. But Gadget O'Dowd has a secret assignment as well, one that could catapult him to the stars. Of the three stories, this is the most enjoyable, entertaining, and lightheartedand the least encumbered by moralizing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)