Founder of the Church of Scientology in the second half of the twentieth century, La Fayette Ron Hubbard was known chiefly in literary circles as a talented and prolific author of pulp fiction from the time of his first sale in 1934 until the early 1950s. In those penny-a-word days, if survival was to be maintained, being prolific was just one of the job requirements, and Hubbard more than met it. His stories appeared in magazines devoted to high adventure and mystery, as well as science fiction. Perhaps his two most famous stories in that genre were Fear and Typewriter in the Sky. Because of his skills at weaving the fantastic into plausible narratives, Hubbard was among such authors as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov whom editor John Campbell relied on to fill the pages of Astounding Science Fiction, the leading periodical in...