The Great Secret: An Intergalactic Tale of Madness, Obsession, and Startling Revelations

By L. Ron Hubbard

Women. Liquor. Power... Women. Liquor. Power... That is Fanner Marston’s mantra—his reason for being—and while he knows a little about the first and a lot about the second, he may well be on the verge of learning everything there is to know about the third. Power. He may, in fact, be about to uncover the key to gaining absolute control over the entire universe. The only problem is, Fanner is certifiably insane—a crazed Peter Lorre on a power trip….

His starship has crash-landed, and he’s the sole survivor, which doesn’t matter to him. Driven by greed and lust for power, wracked by thirst, hunger and pain, all he cares about is reaching the ancient city of Parva and making himself at home. Because there lies The Great Secret to universal domination—and what’s a little suffering on the road to becoming God?

Does Fanner have a prayer? The writing’s on the walls of Parva—and you won’t believe what it says. . . .

By the spring of 1938, Hubbard’s stature as a writer was well established. As author and critic Robert Silverberg puts it: he had become a “master of the art of narrative.” Hubbard’s editors urged him to apply his gift for succinct characterization, original plot, deft pacing and imaginative action to genres that were new, and essentially foreign, to him—science fiction and fantasy. The rest is SciFi history.

Also includes the Science Fiction adventures, The Space Can, in which a decrepit space battleship is a civilian fleet’s only defense; The Beast, the tale of a hunter in the jungles of Venus, chasing an immoral beast; and The Slaver, in which an alien race has enslaved the human race, but can’t repress the power of human love.

“Serves as a wonderful introduction to the breadth of Hubbard’s output.” —Comic Buyers Guide

• Language: English
• Publisher: Galaxy Press
• Release date: Sep 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9781592125654

L. Ron Hubbard

With 19 New York Times bestsellers and more than 350 million copies of his works in circulation, L. Ron Hubbard is among the most enduring and widely read authors of our time. As a leading light of American Pulp Fiction through the 1930s and '40s, he is further among the most influential authors of the modern age. Indeed, from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, there is scarcely a master of imaginative tales who has not paid tribute to L. Ron Hubbard. Then too, of course, there is all L. Ron Hubbard represents as the Founder of Dianetics and Scientology and thus the only major religion born in the 20th century.

Book preview

SELECTED FICTION WORKS

BY L. RON HUBBARD

FANTASY

The Case of the Friendly Corpse

Death’s Deputy

Fear

The Ghoul

The Indigestible Triton

Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep

Typewriter in the Sky

The Ultimate Adventure

SCIENCE FICTION

Battlefield Earth

The Conquest of Space

The End Is Not Yet

Final Blackout

The Kilkenny Cats

The Kingslayer

The Mission Earth Dekalogy*

Ole Doc Methuselah

To the Stars

ADVENTURE

The Hell Job series

WESTERN

Buckskin Brigades

Empty Saddles

Guns of Mark Jardine

Hot Lead Payoff

A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s

novellas and short stories is provided at the back.

*Dekalogy—a group of ten volumes

TitlePgArt.jpeg

Published by

Galaxy Press, LLC

7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200

Hollywood, CA 90028

© 2008 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.

Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.

Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.

Cover art: © 1949 Standard Magazines, Inc. Story preview cover art: © 1948 Better Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Hachette Filipacchi Media. Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. The Beast, The Slaver and Space Can story illustrations; Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations; Story Preview and Glossary illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC.

ISBN 978-1-59212-565-4 ePub version

ISBN 978-1-59212-649-1 Kindle version

ISBN 978-1-59212-371-1 print version

ISBN 978-1-59212-249-3 audiobook version

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927526

Contents

FOREWORD

THE GREAT SECRET

SPACE CAN

THE BEAST

THE SLAVER

STORY PREVIEW:

THE PROFESSOR

WAS A THIEF

GLOSSARY

L. RON HUBBARD

IN THE GOLDEN AGE

OF PULP FICTION

THE STORIES FROM THE

GOLDEN AGE

FOREWORD

Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age

AND it was a golden age.

The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.

Pulp magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class slick magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the rest of us, adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.

The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.

In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.

Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.

Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.

In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.

Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called Hell Job, in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.

Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.

This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.

Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.

Pick up a volume, and remember what reading is supposed to be all about. Remember curling up with a great story.

—Kevin J. Anderson

KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the author of more than ninety critically

Reviews for The Great Secret

[jmourgos · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First Impressions:

Behind a veil of science fiction trappings come four stories from pulp fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, a collection of shorts that originally appeared in various magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, when kids during the Great Depression and WWII took some comfort in these fanciful stories.

I've collected or read these kinds of stories for some time now, and found that both Hubbard's and Heinlein's stories teach us lessons of the human condition, each with its own themes of redemption or honor -- or in some cases defeat!

What's In Here?

« The title story The Great Secret was not super exciting but did give a lot of description of one Fanner Marsten, an amoral thief and adventurer, who apparently has killed for the honor of discovering a lost city on a distant planet. Dying of hunger and thirst, he treks cross desert wastes and finds the ancient city. The city with the great secret.

« The "great secret" is on a huge poster, cut into metal. What it says was quite a surprised to me. And to a greedy bastard like Marsten!


Cute video of the first story, interviewing the main character. Liquor! Women! Power! LOL!

« The second story dealt with a skirmish in a war between Saturn and Earth. Clearly a juvenile story, a captain with a love for his vessel, his pride for it, his grief for the loss of it, and his eventual redemption was interesting, but is the weakest of the four stories. Who the enemy was, why the war, and so on is not covered. What's covered is personality and grit and determination.

« The third story I enjoyed the most of all: The Beast! A cocky hunter on Venus, aka the great white hunter (the natives call him), yet he runs into an impossible animal that fights him at every turn, beats him mercilessly and he barely escapes. The natives stop worshipping him and stop following his commands, as the beast kills men, women and children of the village. Here's a story of what courage is based, and that courage is not based on cocky over-confidence. Interesting twist ending I didn't see coming.

« The last tale is about a subjugated Earth called 'Slaver.' A slave ship lands on Earth and collects many men, women and children -- and an elite man by the name of Kree Lorin. As in the other story, he too was arrogant, proud and self-assured -- and stepping his heel on the lower classes -- until captured by the slaver and found out what it was like to be beaten and ground into the nearest slave hole! Hubbard could have easily made this into a novelette -- such potential at the end to continue Kree's adventure. I was disappointed when it was done.

Throughout these four stories are the themes of overconfidence, fear of losing and eventual or potential salvation of the protagonists.

The stories are typical pulp -- not heavy drawn-out plots, no complex characterization. Great for a quick tale while waiting for a bus or having some time to kill at a doctor's office.

Galaxy Press has reprinted dozens of these -- I'd take advantage.

Other Galaxy Press Books:

The Professor Was a Thief (Stories from the Golden Age)
The Iron Duke (Stories from the Golden Age)

And the Writers of the Future anthology series:

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, Vol. 22

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Meh. Very few stories and none of them really floated my boat.