Over the broad spectrum of his professional career, all of this—and more—found its way unforgettably into his writing, giving his stories a compelling authenticity and an exciting sense of the textures of life, or of the way things credibly might be in some possible future or alternate dimension or in the deep vaults of space, that continue to captivate and engross readers everywhere.

Beginning with the publication in 1934 of The Green God, his first adventure yarn, in one of the hugely popular all-story "pulp" magazines of the day, L. Ron Hubbard's outpouring of fiction was prodigious—often exceeding a million words a year. Ultimately, he produced more than 250 published works of fiction—including 15 New York Times bestsellers—in virtually every major genre, from action and adventure, western and romance, to mystery and suspense, and, of course, science fiction and fantasy.

Mr. Hubbard had, indeed, already attained broad popularity and acclaim in other genres when he burst onto the landscape of speculative literature with his first published science fiction story, The Dangerous Dimension. It was his groundbreaking work in this field from 1938 to 1950, particularly, that not only helped to indelibly enlarge the imaginative boundaries of science fiction and fantasy, but established him as one of the founders and signature architects of what continues to be regarded as the genre's golden age.

Such trendsetting L. Ron Hubbard classics of speculative fiction as Final Blackout, Fear, Typewriter in the Sky, the Hugo Award nominated To The Stars, as well as his capstone novels, the epic saga of the year 3000, Battlefield Earth, and the ten-volume Mission Earth® series, continue to appear on bestseller lists and to garner acclaim in countries around the world.

The single biggest science fiction novel in the history of the genre—and a perennial international bestseller for nearly two decades—Battlefield Earth was given hallmark recognition, among its many other accolades, when it was voted the best science fiction novel of the twentieth century by the American Book Readers Association and one of the top three English language novels of the past 100 years in a Modern Library Readers Poll.

It was in the introduction to this epic novel that L. Ron Hubbard expressed his own view of science fiction, "Science fiction does not come after the fact of a scientific discovery or development. It is the herald of possibility. It is the plea that someone should work on the future. Yet it is not prophecy. It is the dream that precedes the dawn when the inventor or scientist awakens and goes to his books or his lab saying, 'I wonder whether I could make that dream come true in the world of real science.'"