Tags:
Fiction,
Literary,
General,
Fantasy fiction,
Fantasy,
Action & Adventure,
Magic,
Adventure stories,
Circus,
Circus Performers,
Dwarfs
surface area will change by the square of the scale; i.e., if a 2" square block is made twice as big (2 x 2), the surface area of the block will be four times as big, but the volume, and therefore the weight, will be eight times as much (2 x 2 x 2). If one kept increasing the block in this way, it would eventually collapse under its own weight. Conversely, if an object’s size is halved, its structural strength (surface area) will be one-fourth of what it was, while its volume, and therefore its weight, will be only one-eighth of what it was. So, proportionally, it would be stronger.
SS: steamship.
stateroom: a private room or compartment on a train, ship, etc.
stern: the rear end of a ship or boat.
stint: a pause; halt.
stock: a kind of stiff, wide band or scarf for the neck.
strawberry shortcake: dishonest money.
swallow-tailed coat: a man’s fitted coat, cut away over the hips and descending in a pair of tapering skirts behind. It is usually black and worn as part of full evening dress.
thistle chins: local residents.
van: vanguard; the forefront.
white wagon: the circus main office on the lot.
L. Ron Hubbard in the
Golden Age of
Pulp Fiction
I n writing an adventure story
a writer has to know that he is adventuring
for a lot of people who cannot.
The writer has to take them here and there
about the globe and show them
excitement and love and realism.
As long as that writer is living the part of an
adventurer when he is hammering
the keys, he is succeeding with his story.
Adventuring is a state of mind.
If you adventure through life, you have a
good chance to be a success on paper.
Adventure doesn’t mean globe-trotting,
exactly, and it doesn’t mean great deeds.
Adventuring is like art.
You have to live it to make it real.
— L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard
and American
Pulp Fiction
B ORN March 13, 1911, L. Ron Hubbard lived a life at least as expansive as the stories with which he enthralled a hundred million readers through a fifty-year career.
Originally hailing from Tilden, Nebraska, he spent his formative years in a classically rugged Montana, replete with the cowpunchers, lawmen and desperadoes who would later people his Wild West adventures. And lest anyone imagine those adventures were drawn from vicarious experience, he was not only breaking broncs at a tender age, he was also among the few whites ever admitted into Blackfoot society as a bona fide blood brother. While if only to round out an otherwise rough and tumble youth, his mother was that rarity of her time—a thoroughly educated woman—who introduced her son to the classics of Occidental literature even before his seventh birthday.
But as any dedicated L. Ron Hubbard reader will attest, his world extended far beyond Montana. In point of fact, and as the son of a United States naval officer, by the age of eighteen he had traveled over a quarter of a million miles. Included therein were three Pacific crossings to a then still mysterious Asia, where he ran with the likes of Her British Majesty’s agent-in-place for North China, and the last in the line of Royal Magicians from the court of Kublai Khan. For the record, L. Ron Hubbard was also among the first Westerners to gain admittance to forbidden Tibetan monasteries below Manchuria, and his photographs of China’s Great Wall long graced American geography texts.
Upon his return to the United States and a hasty completion of his interrupted high school education, the young Ron Hubbard entered George Washington University. There, as fans of his aerial adventures may have heard, he earned his wings as a pioneering barnstormer at the dawn of American aviation. He also earned a place in free-flight record books for the longest sustained flight above Chicago. Moreover, as a roving reporter for Sportsman Pilot (featuring his first professionally penned articles), he further helped inspire a generation of pilots who would
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