So he thought of the old ironic verse about: For want of the nail, the shoe was lost. For want of the shoe, the horse was lost. The rider was lost, the message he carried went undelivered, so the battle was lost. Hubbard wanted to set up a similar situation.

  Now, having said that, we kind of know the broad outline of the story, but not the specifics. One of the gifts that Hubbard had is that he could very quickly—pre-Internet, pre-Google—figure out what he needed to know in the way of facts in order to tell a believable, detailed story. Then he got that necessary information. Some of it came straight out of his head, because there were things that everybody knew who was alive at the end of the Great War.

  And there were things that Hubbard simply invented, that might have been possible or true. What mattered was that they happened to this character in this story. It’s true within the story. So while in this essay he doesn’t actually give us the story itself, he tells us what the story was going to be, what it became.

  Instead of showing part of a draft of the story, where we’d see scenes develop with dialogue and so on, he merely implies those, hints at them. What he actually gives us is the told story, which I believe is the real story, the deep story, the Plain Tale, which is the aspect of the story that is completely translatable into other languages and into other media.

  The Plain Tale consists of what happens and why. Not the “plot,” because that is a listing of which scenes to write out in detail, including who is present in each scene. The Plain Tale doesn’t insist on particular details except those absolutely essential to the motivations and possibilities of the characters. The actions and events in the story, along with enough information for us to know why they happen as they do—that’s the deep story.

  Thus Hubbard describes how he went from what amounts to a prompt—some idea that’s a trigger and that makes you start to think—to the process you go through in order to turn that idea into something that will be memorable, where, at the end of reading the story, you go: That was a story.

  The techniques and processes L. Ron Hubbard used in the Golden Age of short fiction still apply, after all these years. They always will.

  Hubbard already had the skills of writing for a popular audience, which is relatively rare, because popular fiction has to be so clearly written that an untrained reader, on a cold reading, can understand everything that is said, without the reader having to slow down, back up, and reread in order to figure out what just happened. Once a reader has to stop and struggle to decode the writing, you’ve proven yourself to be incompetent at writing clear fiction. You never have to do that with Hubbard.

  Hubbard wrote his earliest science fiction before all the good ideas had been used up. Now we sci-fi writers have to do a very different thing. We have to create societies that depend on difference in the culture—because of changes in technology, evolution, planetary dynamics, climate, or society. And it’s not enough to simply reveal the cool idea at the end; the writer has to lead us to care about the characters and how their lives turn out. So we no longer depend entirely on the science fictional tool set. We have to learn from other genres, broaden our appeal, find ways to make reading our stories a memorable experience.

  Hubbard lived in the Golden Age of science fiction. Everything was free. You could do whatever you wanted because it hadn’t been done before. The genre was new. The term “science fiction” had only recently been coined. Hugo Gernsback was still trying to get people to use “scientifiction,” which doesn’t work because you can’t place the stress. It’s either scientific-tion, or scientif-iction, and neither one does the job. The language will do what language does, and “science fiction” won out in the end.

  It was better than what people used to call the nascent genre: “Scientific romances like those of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne.”

  The name “science fiction” is somewhat misleading. Science does not control even a majority of the stories in the genre. I don’t know any science well enough to actually practice it, but because I need the tool kit and subject matters of science fiction, I have to keep up with the relevant sciences well enough to avoid embarrassing myself. But at no point do I even hint about how to actually build any of the machines I postulate; to design a spaceship, you’re going to need some calculus, and I’m happy to have never needed an intimate relationship with logarithms.

  Hubbard didn’t write stories in which you could build the cool machines, either. He didn’t go into science fiction as somebody who was fanatical about space, requiring him to know everything about it.

  No, he was fanatical about writing and telling stories. He knew he was good at that. We all make our stories work the way Hubbard made things work in his story about this Russian hat toward the end of World War I. He didn’t have to show every elaborate detail. He showed what was needed for the story to be clear to the reader. That’s what we do today.

  So while we face the same kinds of problems he had to solve, the actual problems have changed. Today, if I was going to set a story at the end of the Great War, I would have to explain the importance of the continued survival of the Tsar as a focal point of resistance to the Bolshevik Revolution, because I can’t count on any American high school or college graduate having any idea about that period.

  I’ve studied it, because I love history and read it more than any other genre, so as Hubbard described his story in “Magic Out of a Hat,” I recognized the historical situation immediately. There are only about nine of us left who can do that.

  I’m exaggerating. There are forty.

  But not that many people have studied much about the Great War in order to instantly grasp what the story is about. So if Hubbard had known that he was writing it, not to an audience that had recently read about these events in the newspapers, but to a future audience that had never needed to know the events in detail, he would have devoted considerable time to setting up the situation so that modern readers would grasp it easily as the story unfolded.

  If Hubbard had set a story in the court of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, he would have provided enough background for his story to make sense to, and matter to, readers of his time. And all science fiction writers who set stories in alternate universes or in remote futures face the same difficulty: carrying the audience into the world of the story and giving them enough of a guided tour to know where they are and what’s at stake.

  L. Ron Hubbard was not writing for an audience that expected to learn history or science from his stories. He did not want his readers to examine every word, every metaphor, every theme or symbol. Those are fun games to play, but they have nothing to do with the pleasure of experiencing a well-told story. Readers who read that way are like mechanics who can’t enjoy driving somewhere in their car, because all they can think about is the workings of the engine, the drive shaft, the axles, the suspension.

  It’s not that they “can’t see the forest for the trees.” It’s that they can’t see the forest for the fungus they’re examining in the root system of one particular tree. There is no forest for them. Just as, for critical readers who concentrate on the manner of writing, there is no story. Just language.

  L. Ron Hubbard wrote for people who wanted to explore the forest, for readers who want to enjoy the drive without thinking of the machinery of the car. Hubbard’s readers want to be moved. They want to move through time, experiencing things that will never happen to them in their real life. When the story is well-conceived and clearly written, those memories become part of their memory, part of their human experience.

  In that way, Hubbard and all of us are trying to write for civilians, for volunteer readers who are not expecting to have to write essays about the fiction they read. Readers who buy fiction, not as gifts, not as requirements, but simply to read it themselves. We are all doing the same job that Hubbard was so good at: creating vicarious memories that people will want to carry around with them. Stories that might actually change them because of what they’ve seen and heard and experienced while reading.

  Now, I don’t really think visually. I just don’t. All I care about is what happens and why.

  But that doesn’t change the fact that I have my mental picture of Frodo standing at the Cracks of Doom. I have my own memory about how Bilbo’s ring was left behind when he departed, with Gandalf there to guard it, but refusing to touch it or take it himself. He wasn’t yet sure what the ring was, but he had his suspicions, and later he comes back and we get the marvelous scene where he tosses the ring into the fire, verifies that it is the One Ring, and then explains the history of the ring to Frodo.

  Those memories are imprinted in our memories after reading the first couple of chapters of Lord of the Rings. Therefore, I live in a memory world where I have carried the ring, because the author of the story wrote it so well and so clearly that there is nothing standing between me and that memory.

  Hubbard was perfectly content to have his writing be accessible. He wants us to care about the characters, to believe in them. That’s why his stories hold up, why they’re still readable.

  Almost all of science fiction is still available to us, still alive. That’s one of the amazing things about our genre. That is partly because science fiction was never taught in the universities in the early days. Even now, science fiction is rarely taught using the same critical procrustean bed that force-fits everything into the same literary model.

  Instead, in those early days, we came up with our own standards of criticism. Defining what makes the difference between “good” and “bad” science fiction, and how to sort out the different subgenres in the field.

  By “we,” I mean me and my predecessors—mostly them, not me, because I came to the field rather late in the game. The critical standards were not discovered or devised in university English departments, but rather in fanzines, in little mimeographed and dittoed news sheets, in things so horribly reproduced that you could hardly read them, in fanzines that were only mailed out to ten people. Yet if they were the right ten people, who believed in what you said, you could influence the whole community of science fiction readers and writers.

  That’s the world into which L. Ron Hubbard sent his science fiction stories—as did everyone else in those early days. It was a world where the critical standards were being invented according to what the best writers actually did. And the stories that worked, that readers responded to, became the measure by which everything else was judged.

  That was so liberating.

  People complained because the professors “don’t care about what we do, they don’t understand, they undervalue our literature.” But that was the best environment in which this revolutionary new literary genre could develop. We didn’t need professors to define and explain the stories we wrote, the stories we loved to read.

  Our stories are designed to be read without the intervention of an interpreter. Only if you write in a language that requires translation into English, is there any need for an interpreter. Our fiction is meant to be read by volunteers, unaided. They can understand what’s going on, because we give them, within the story, all the information they need in order to understand it.

  Even when Hubbard is writing an essay about the invention of a story, which is what “Magic Out of a Hat” is, he still tells that story so clearly that no interpreter is needed. Period. He is speaking directly into the reader’s mind, using clarity of language.

  In science fiction, we still have all of the writers whose works still live. Asimov is gone, but you can still get his books, and they are still revelatory. You can read L. Ron Hubbard, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke. You can read the stories of every period of science fiction you want, after the Golden Age. You want great stories about the Cambrian Era? Blish is still in print. You want to read the beginning of the experimentalists? You can still find Philip K. Dick, Thomas Disch, still in print.

  You want to read the “New Wave” of science fiction? Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” are still there, waiting to find new readers. Ellison’s great early stories are still magical—gloriously overwrought, because that’s what he was trying to do. They are still brilliant pieces of fiction.

  But then you move right on, and you’ve got John Varley. You’ve got Larry Niven, who never stopped writing the clear prose of the Campbellian writers. He’s the heir to Heinlein. He’s the heir to Clarke. And wonderfully he is still working, still producing. He is the writer who kept that kind of storytelling alive even when the sci-fi community seemed to be in thrall to the New Wave writers.

  But that was and is the glory and the frustration of writing science fiction in the English-speaking world. It was free. You could do whatever you thought your readers could bear. You could take them wherever you thought they could understand what you were telling them. And because it was being published on pulp paper, in installments in a magazine with half-clad women and hideous monsters on the cover, everyone would know not to pay attention to it in a serious critical way, science fiction was free to invent itself.

  L. Ron Hubbard was part of that invention. When he wrote about writing, as in “Magic Out of a Hat,” he wasn’t teaching us how to write science fiction. He was teaching us how to tell stories, how to come up with an idea and develop it into something coherent that would give the reader satisfaction upon reaching the end.

  As far as I’m concerned, we have had enough cultural changes that much fiction dating from those early days doesn’t hold up. Science fiction does better than most, because it was always trying to cut loose from its moorings in time. But the project hasn’t changed—you write to the audience of your own time, and then hope that at least some of your stories will have staying power because readers care about them and pass them along to other readers.

  When L. Ron Hubbard writes about how to go about thinking of a story, inventing and shaping and structuring, it’s still worth paying attention to what he says about it—because the job hasn’t changed.

  The Dangerous Dimension

  written by

  L. Ron Hubbard

  illustrated by

  Anh Le

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  By 1938, L. Ron Hubbard was a well-known adventure writer. Already more than 100 of his short stories, novellas and novels were published in the popular all-fiction magazines (the so-called “pulp magazines”) featuring adventure, military, western, detective and romance stories.

  He was almost larger than life. Author, editor, critic Damon Knight described him with this: “When Astounding published a short story called ‘The Dangerous Dimension,’ few of us had ever heard of L. Ron Hubbard.

  “Hubbard was the typus [sic] of a now-vanishing tribe of pulp writers: like Tom Roan who made occasional appearances in editorial offices wearing a ten-gallon hat and swearing like a mule skinner; Norvell Page, who affected an opera-cloak … Hubbard lived what he wrote. Big, swaggering, and red-haired (like many of his heroes); sailor, explorer, adventurer—a man among men … he cut a swath across the science-fantasy world the like of which has not been seen before or since.”

  Ron’s initial entrance to the science fiction and fantasy field was made at the request of Street & Smith’s management, the publishers of Astounding Science Fiction. The magazine’s editor introduced L. Ron Hubbard’s presence to his readers simply saying that it “represents, for Astounding, the effort to get the best stories of the science-fiction type by the best authors available.”

  Ron Hubbard’s first story for Astounding was published in the July 1938 issue, “The Dangerous Dimension.” Ron later described it as “unusual for its philosophy, humor and its emphasis on people and not monsters.”

  The letters started streaming into the editor, appearing in Astounding’s “Brass Tacks,” including a note from a young Isaac Asimov: “I laughed myself sick over it. Some more from L. Ron Hubbard, please.”

  Ron’s second story was serialized September through November in 1938. “The Tramp,” was a guy who acquires immense mental powers after a brain operation to save his life.

  And then there were more letters to the magazine editor.

  In answer, L. Ron Hubbard wrote the following, both as a response and a philosophical inquiry:

  In a recent issue, readers were kind enough to treat my story, “The Dangerous Dimension” with more kindness than it probably deserved. And there was an additional gratification about it: no story worth its paper fails to excite damning in one way or another and throughout the kind comments there was still a healthy undercurrent of damnation which had been, of course, expected for a story which lacked “scientific background.” One reader in particular was kind enough to say that he wished the author had given some excerpts from philosophic works showing the source of the idea that a man might project himself from one point [to another] mentally. Another very civilly offered to raise the devil if anybody jumped the story from the angle that it had no scientific background.

  On the other hand, “The Tramp” had this necessary ingredient because mitogenetic rays are well known, if not intimately. There was then considerable difference between these two stories? Would it be an idle attempt to startle to say that “The Dangerous Dimension” is probably supported far better than “The Tramp”?

  Not at first was this difference fully realized. As my realm, if any, is philosophy, I did not question the idea of the story. However this sameness of comment made me wonder. The reader’s wish for philosophic background came as a mental catalyst. Was there a background of any validity to this story and if so, what?

  The answer led to something also which may prove of interest. Anything is likely to happen when one gets started on a certain chain of thought.