Ole Doc Methuselah (30 page)

neurasthenia:
a
condition marked by chronic mental and physical fatigue and depression.
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ODM:
Ole
Doc Methuselah.
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OOD:
officer
of the deck; officer on duty in charge of the ship representing the commanding
officer.
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pill
roller:
a
health professional trained in the art of preparing and dispensing drugs.
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pinked:
to
stab lightly with a pointed weapon; prick.
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pipe:
to
play on a pipe, a distinctive silver whistle used by the bosun during
ceremonious greeting for important officers and officials as they come aboard
or leave a ship.
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powder
magazine:
a
compartment for the storage of ammunition and explosives.
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Procyon:
Procyon
System; a system of two stars that revolve around each other under their mutual
gravitation, located approximately 11.5 light-years from Earth.
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ragweed
pollen:
any
of a number of weedy composite herbs that produce a pollen that is a frequent
cause of allergies.
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Rappaccini's
Daughter:
a
novel written in 1844 by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), American novelist and
short story writer. His work includes The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House
of the Seven Gables (1851). He was one of the leading writers of his time,
moving away from formalism and exploring the ideas of individual responsibility,
the importance of creative expression and man's relationship to the natural
world.
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reef
in his nerve, took a:
sea
jargon for “quieted down or steadied up.” It comes from the nautical phrase,
“Take a reef in your top sails,” meaning to take in or lessen the area of a
sail, an action done in windy conditions to improve the ship's stability and
reduce the risk of capsizing in a strong wind. 
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rheumatic
heart:
condition
in which the heart valves are damaged by rheumatic fever, an infectious disease
which is characterized by fever and joint pain.
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Rotarian
club:
a
club of business and professional men devoted to serving the community and
promoting world peace.
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sgt:
sidereal
galaxy time.
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sideboys:
sailors
stationed to form a human passageway for distinguished visitors, officers or
officials to pass through when arriving or departing a ship, plus an officer
who pipes them (makes a call with a special whistle called a pipe) as they
board or leave. The number of sailors varies from two to ten, depending on the
rank of the visitor.
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sidereal
galaxy time:
time
determined by or from the stars. “Sidereal time” is time measured on Earth with
respect to the stars, rather than the sun. Thus, “sidereal galaxy time” would
be time measured in a galaxy with respect to the stars in that system.
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Sirius:
the
brightest star in the nighttime sky, Sirius is a white dwarf star (what a star
like our sun becomes after it has exhausted its nuclear fuel and is near the
end of its nuclear burning stage) that has twenty-two times the brightness of
the sun.
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Spica:
the
brightest star in the constellation Virgo, and the fifteenth brightest star in
the nighttime sky. It is 260 light-years distant from Earth.
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swill
parlor:
a
place, such as a tavern or bar, where beer is sold.
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texas:
the
structure on a ship containing the pilothouse and the officers' quarters, so
called because steamboat cabins were named after states. At one time Texas was
the largest state, and as the officers' quarters were the largest, they were
called texas.
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trice,
in a:
a
very short time; an instant; a moment.
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UMS:
Universal
Medical Society.
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Ursa
Major:
a
constellation in the polar region of the Northern Hemisphere. Ursa Major, which
means “the Great Bear,” contains the seven stars that form the Big Dipper.
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UT:
Universal
Time.
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Vega:
the
brightest star in the northern constellation Lyra, and the third brightest in
Earth's northern hemisphere. It is 25.3 light-years distant from Earth.
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washboard
weepers:
radio
lingo from the 1940s for soap operas.
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About the Author

L. Ron Hubbard's remarkable writing career
spanned more than half-a-century of intense literary achievement and creative
influence.

And though he was first and foremost a
writer, his life experiences and travels in all corners of the globe were wide
and diverse. His insatiable curiosity and personal belief that one should live
life as a professional led to a lifetime of extraordinary accom-plishment. He
was also an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and
photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician.

Growing up in the still-rugged frontier
country of Montana, he broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a
Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled
to a still remote Asia. The following year, to further satisfy his thirst for
adventure and augment his growing knowledge of other cultures, he left school
and returned to the Orient. On this trip, he worked as a supercargo and
helmsman aboard a coastal trader which plied the seas between Japan and Java.
He came to know old Shanghai, Beijing and the Western Hills at a time when few
Westerners could enter China. He traveled more than a quarter of a million
miles by sea and land while still a teenager and before the advent of
commercial aviation as we know it.

He returned to the United States in the
autumn of 1929 to complete his formal education. He entered George Washington
University in Washington, DC, where he studied engineering and took one of the
earliest courses in atomic and molecular physics. In addition to his studies,
he was the president of the Engineering Society and Flying Club, and wrote
articles, stories and plays for the university news-paper. During the same
period he also barnstormed across the American mid-West and was a national
correspondent and photographer for the
Sportsman Pilot
magazine, the
most distinguished aviation publication of its day.

Returning to his classroom of the world in
1932, he led two separate expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition;
sailing on one of the last of America's four-masted commercial ships, and the
second, a mineralogical survey of Puerto Rico. His exploits earned him
membership in the renowned Explorers Club and he subsequently carried their
coveted flag on two more voyages of exploration and discovery. As a master
mariner licensed to operate ships in any ocean, his lifelong love of the sea
was reflected in the many ships he captained and the skill of the crews he
trained. He also served with distinction as a U.S. naval officer during the
Second World War.

All of this—and much more—found its way,
into his writing and gave his stories a compelling sense of authenticity that
has appealed to readers throughout the world. It started in 1934 with the
publication of “The Green God” in
Thrilling Adventure
magazine, a story
about an American naval intelligence officer caught up in the mystery and
intrigues of pre-communist China. With his extensive knowledge of the world and
its people and his ability to write in any style and genre, he rapidly achieved
prominence as a writer of action adventure, western, mystery and suspense. Such
was the respect of his fellow writers that he was only 25 when elected
president of the New York Chapter of the American Fiction Guild.

In addition to his career as a leading
writer of fiction, he worked as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood where he
wrote the original story and script for Columbia's 1937 hit serial, “The Secret
of Treasure Island.” His work on numerous films for Columbia, Universal and
other major studios involved writing, providing story lines and serving as a
script consultant.

In 1938, he was approached by the venerable
New York publishing house of Street and Smith, the publishers of
Astounding
Science Fiction.
Wanting to capitalize on the proven reader appeal of the

L. Ron Hubbard byline to capture more
readers for this emerging genre, they essentially offered to buy all the
science fiction he wrote. When he protested that he did not write about
machines and machinery but that he wrote about people, they told him that was
exactly what was wanted. The rest is history.

The impact and influence that his novels
and stories had on the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror virtually
amounted to the changing of a genre. It is the compelling human element that he
originally brought to this new genre that remains today the basis of its
growing international popularity.

L. Ron Hubbard consistently enabled readers
to peer into the minds and emotions of characters in a way that sharply
heightened the reading experience without slowing the pace of the story, a
level of writ-ing rarely achieved.

Among the most celebrated examples of this
are three stories he published in a single, phenomenally creative year (1940)—
Final
Blackout
and its grimly possible future world of unremitting war and
ultimate courage which Robert Heinlein called “as perfect a piece of science
fiction as has ever been written”; the ingenious fantasy-adventure,
Typewriter
in the Sky
described by Clive Cussler as “written in the great style
adventure should be written in”; and the prototype novel of clutching
psychological suspense and horror in the midst of ordinary, everyday life,
Fear,
studied by writers from Stephen King to Ray Bradbury.

It was Mr. Hubbard's trendsetting work in
the speculative fiction field from 1938 to 1950, particu-larly, that not only
helped to expand the scope and imaginative boundaries of science fiction and
fantasy but indelibly established him as one of the founders of what continues
to be regarded as the genre's Golden Age.

Widely honored—recipient of Italy's
Tetra-dramma D'Oro Award and a special Gutenberg Award, among other significant
literary honors—
Battlefield Earth
has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in
23 languages and is the biggest single-volume science fiction novel in the
history of the genre at 1050 pages. It was ranked number three out of the 100
best English language novels of the twentieth century in the Random House
Modern Library Reader's Poll.

The
Mission Earth
dekalogy has been
equally acclaimed, winning the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the
coveted Nova-Science Fiction Award from Italy's National Committee for Science
Fiction and Fantasy. The dekalogy has sold more than seven million copies in 6 languages,
and each of its 10 volumes became New York Times and international bestsellers
as they were released.

The first of L. Ron Hubbard's original
screenplays
Ai! Pedrito! When Intelligence Goes Wrong
, novelized by
author Kevin J. Anderson, was released in 1998 and immediately appeared as a
New
York Times
bestseller. This was followed in 1999 with the publication of
A
Very Strange Trip
, an original L. Ron Hubbard story of time-traveling
adventure, novelized by Dave Wolverton, that also became a
New York Times
bestseller
directly following its release.

His literary output ultimately encompassed
more than 250 published novels, novelettes, short stories and screenplays in
every major genre.

For more information on L. Ron Hubbard and
his many works of fiction visit
www.GalaxyPress.com
and
www.LRonHubbard.org