inventing new fictional science (1950) |
Dianetics: The Evolution Invention of a Science
the "textbook" cover |
I suspect that Hubbard read Vance's "Potters" story and then created his own tale about death and volcanoes. Once he
latched onto an idea, Hubbard's imagination could move in amazing directions.
Sadly, we science fiction fans have apparently never gotten the complete story
of the volcanoes of Xenu. The full "truth" is reserved for those who join Hubbard's church and pay big buck$ for the privilege of revelation.
😞
Scott Aaronson |
Needless to say, no biologists
working to understand consciousness have dropped their biology research in
order to first create a complete and "correct" theory of quantum gravity. However, Penrose has contributed to the rise of a "quantum consciousness" cult that is no less persistent than Hubbard's church of scientology.
Fictional science in science fiction
from "To the Stars" Related Reading: shortcut |
Imagine the
human body as a machine that can malfunction and, in particular, picture the brain as a computer. Just think how great it would be if
simply by correcting errors in our mechanical thought processes we could cure illnesses
like tuberculosis! Hubbard apparently suckered Campbell into believing that
evidence for such medical "thought repair cures" had been obtained in the course of his (Hubbard's) many years of painstaking "research" on the subject. Dianatics was exactly the kind of thrilling, cutting-edge "scientific" advance that Campbell wanted to be able to share with the wonder-junkie readers of Astounding magazine.
Confidence
tricks or science fiction? image source |
To Campbell's credit, when after a year had passed and no evidence was
provided by Hubbard to support his claims of disease cures, Campbell stopped
acting as Hubbard's shill. Campbell quickly moved on to his next pseudoscience
enthusiasm. He needed to provide his readers with new thrills, not a boring "fact article" about how Hubbard's dianetics scheme had collapsed in bankruptcy.
profitable religion |
I love Isaac Asimov's 1955 novel
The End of Eternity. There are two amusing characters in that book, Senior Computer Laban
Twissell
and August
Sennor. I suspect that both Twissell and Sennor were characters built upon Asimov's
many years of experience with Campbell. Campbell was a smoker and Asimov
depicted Twissell as a smoker. Asimov describes Sennor as having "leapfrog
enthusiasms", moving on from one all-absorbing-interest to the next before
ever finishing his work on the last one. Twissell is depicted as a scam artist, hiding his personal crimes while secretly working to engineer the entire structure of Eternity.
scientology |
published 1950 in Astounding |
In 1950, Campbell was not the lone
shill for
Hubbard. The "fact article" by Hubbard in Astounding begins with an
introduction by Joseph Winter. (There was
almost a third entirely invented shill, as described
here.)
I love the idea that each human contains "a machine incapable of error, working with memory storage banks of infinite capacity". For my Exode Saga, I imagine that the positronic robots of Earth faced a major challenge when they developed time travel technology. They needed a way to control the "butterfly effect".
I imagine that when the
pek
arrived on Earth two billion years ago, they impregnated our planet
with
zeptites. When humans evolved, they evolved as biological organisms that contained a
zeptite endosymbiont. Later, when
R. Nyrtia
created
temporal momentum, a second
femtobot endosymbiont
was added to the human brain as a sub-system. For each human on Earth there
were corresponding
replicoids
in the
Hierion Domain.
Here on Earth, our endosymbionts can link us to the vast quantum computational
capacity of our replicoids in the Hierion Domain. The behavior of each person
on Earth can be made to precisely match the behavior that was "recorded" by
our replicoids in the previous
Reality.
"Hierion Writers Club" |
At first, only nanoscopic replicoids are made,
but eventually "full-sized" replicoids with the normal human body size are
created for use as
Interventionist
agents on Earth.
see this |
Hubbard could not get through his 40 page description of how he had invented his fictional science of human thought without explicitly mentioning science fiction. At the very end of his "fact article", Hubbard mentions Eric Russell's "sinister barrier". For his fiction, Russell had imagined parasitic Vitons (see the illustration to the left) who secretly control human behavior.
interior art by Walt Miller |
Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding |
Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding |
Part of the 1950 "fact article" in Astounding |
Related Reading. Asimov was a grandmaster of fictional science. See: psychohistory, endochronic starships and quantitative micropsychiatry
See Also: the Dean Drive
Next: fantasy teleportation
On page 66 of the Feb 1959 issue of Galaxy. Hubbard Association of Scientologists International. |
Visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers |
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