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    When Shadows Fall
    When Shadows Fall
    When Shadows Fall
    Ebook126 pages2 hours

    When Shadows Fall

    By L. Ron Hubbard

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    Star Trek’s Captain Kirk has a kindred soul in Lars the Ranger, a commander of his own star fleet. But whereas Kirk’s mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before, Lars is boldly going where other men are—in a desperate attempt to save his home planet … Earth. He’s not exploring the final frontier. He is our last hope.

    Earth is way past global warming. It’s totally fried—an environmental disaster—and most of its inhabitants have cut out for greener pastures, colonizing distant worlds. Lars leads an expedition across the galaxy to visit those worlds in hopes that he return with the resources needed to bring Earth back from the brink of extinction.

    But Lars has apparently failed. A mammoth fleet of mysterious starships are descending on the third planet from the sun. Is Earth history? Yes … and that may just be its saving grace.

    Also includes the science fiction adventures, Battling Bolto, the story of a giant, con man who’s running an interstellar scam, while the biggest trick of all lies right under his nose; and Tough Old Man, in which an aging constable’s lack of feelings is not a matter of insensitivity, but of a secret—and surprising—side of his character.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGalaxy Press
    Release dateApr 15, 2009
    ISBN9781592126330
    Author

    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.

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    • 5/5
      In a continuing effort to republish the fiction of writer L. Ron Hubbard, Galaxy Press put out “When Shadows Fall,” a short anthology of space stories from the 1940s.

      The first story in this anthology, “When Shadows Fall” is an indictment of colonization, where the colonizer, committing atrocities on its citizens, itself gets back the “karma”.

      In a future where the Earth is dying, both as a planet and as a people, the few citizens left, in an apathy, desire to get in touch with their now-rich colonies across the stars. But the citizens across the stars want nothing to do with Earth’s demands to help it. Bummer!

      What I liked about the story was not only the clear criticism of those who ruin a planet and therefore their own lives, but also that there is hope. One can rise out of the ashes, if only to remind those who could help that the civilization, though now broken, was once great and could be great again. Well-written.

      “Tough Old Man” is about a young recruit who is sent to work under Keno, a constable who is taking care of the law on a frontier planet, known for its harsh environment but also its billions of dollars’ worth of diamonds lying around. Moffatt at first thinks he’s hot stuff until Keno shows him up. Good ending, with the bad guys captured and a twist ending.

      “Battling Bolto” about a guy who works for a charlatan “Professor.” This guy makes robot shells and sells them as the real thing, and takes off before anyone else finds out. To snag our hero, the Prof convinces him to pretend to be a robot and win fights. This is fine until a particular population creates their own fighter. Can “Bolto” fight his way out of this one?

      Both stories are not badly done, and reflect the pulp fiction mania of the time.

      Recommended, and not just for Hubbard fans, but anyone interested in some quick fiction to get through the day!


    Book preview

    When Shadows Fall - L. Ron Hubbard

    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.jpg

    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; Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations; Story Preview and Glossary illustrations and Story Preview cover art: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC. Cover art thumbnail on back of book and story illustrations: © 1948, 1950 Better Publications, Inc. and Standard Magazine, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Hachette Filipacchi Media. Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission.

    ISBN 978-1-59212-633-0 ePub version

    ISBN 978-1-59212-799-3 Kindle version

    ISBN 978-1-59212-283-7 print version

    ISBN 978-1-59212-252-3 audiobook version

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927675

    Contents

    FOREWORD

    WHEN SHADOWS FALL

    TOUGH OLD MAN

    CHAPTER ONE

    CHAPTER TWO

    CHAPTER THREE

    CHAPTER FOUR

    BATTLING BOLTO

    STORY PREVIEW:

    ONE WAS STUBBORN

    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

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