Ai! Pedrito!

The late British pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard was so prolific that he left numerous unpublished works and fragments, which his publisher is hiring other writers to complete. Such is A VERY STRANGE TRIP, a comic time-travel story, whose main character is a modern hillbilly who becomes trapped in the eighteenth century. The tape is less a dramatization than a dramatic reading with sound effects, somewhat inexpertly done, but it's fast-paced and amusing nonetheless. B.S. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine


L. Ron Hubbard wrote successfully in almost every genre imaginable, so it only makes sense that he tried his hand at lighthearted satire. In this 1999 novelization of an original Hubbard screenplay, character actor Tait Ruppert has a gleeful time playing the clueless but always-intrepid West Virginia moonshiner's son Everett Dumphee, who accidentally turns on a covert military time machine and takes off into the past. His adventures include wooing Native American maidens and battling saber-toothed tigers. Galaxy Press has added a bed of realistic, film-like sound effects and a complete musical score to keep the action hopping, while a host of Hollywood voice talents provides good pacing and comic-book voices to this playful spoof of everything sci-fi. B.P. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

June 28, 1999
Everett Dumphee, the descendant of a venerable line of West Virginian moonshiners, joins the army to avoid prison, only to accidentally activate a time machine while transporting a truckload of experimental Russian weapons to Denver. He then tries to return to 1991, enduring several stopovers, including in the Ice Age, during the height of Mayan civilization and at a train station under Indian attack in 1870. Joining Dumphee at the latter are a cowardly lieutenant and four Indian "squaws" who display an incongruous facility with modern armaments. Attempts at humor come from two angles: poorly executed slapstick (an experimental weapon manifests a gigantic phantom of Joseph Stalin to terrorize Mayan warriors; a mis-aimed cannon destroys a henhouse) and anachronistic pop culture references to Star Trek, Star Wars and Rambo (a "squaw"'s cleavage is her "silicon valley"). Characterization isn't a strength, either: Dumphee's primary ethical qualms come from concern over the Indian women's gold lust, which is awakened by Mayan riches, and his cheap moralizing over whether to remain in the past as a god. Despite the fact that the late Hubbard (Battlefield Earth) gets top billing, Wolverton (Beyond the Gate) wrote this novel, based on an unpublished story by Hubbard. He's done much better on his own--and so did Hubbard. Simultaneous audio; author tour.

Before inventing Scientology, the late L. Ron Hubbard was known primarily as a writer of science fiction. This title is a screenplay that Kevin Anderson has novelized. It's not sci-fi, but a hilarious spoof of spy thrillers given a multi-cast treatment augmented by some music and sound effects. The actors have a good time with the material, but the text is wittier than they are. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine