"L Ron Hubbard - Mission Earth 01 - The Invaders Plan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hubbard L. Ron)

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Mission Earth 1 : The Invaders Plan
By L.Ron Hubbard
Scanned and proofed, 3/20/2002
Version 4.0

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
Science Fiction and Satire

A few years ago, I wrote Battlefield Earth to celebrate my golden anniversary as a writer.
At nearly a half million words, it was a bit larger than others I had turned out in my fifty-year
career. But, after all, it was my anniversary so I decided to splurge.
It was fun to write and if best-seller lists were any indicator, people found it fun to
read. It was also gratifying to know that pure science fiction (as I defined it then) has such a
wide audience. It reminded me again of sf's many facets: adventure, romance, drama, comedy,
tragedy and intrigue, with adventure science fiction probably the most dominant type within the
genre.
However, there is another aspect to science fiction: by its nature most of it has an element
of satire. It has been used by such notables as Mark Twain, Johannes Kepler, Samuel Butler, Jules
Verne and Sir Thomas More. This becomes more obvious when the history of satire is examined and
compared to science fiction.
Satire is not restricted to the western world. In fact, the Chinese character for the word
can be translated as "laughter with knives." Meanwhile, the origin of our word satire is not as
sharp. It comes from the Latin satura which meant "medley" or "mixture" and seems to have been
part of the vocabulary of food to describe a hodge-podge assortment, a "mixture full of different
things," such as a bowl of mixed first-of-the-season fruits. The essence of the word seemed to
mean a simple dish of a down-to-earth variety that may have been common but it was hearty,
healthy, satisfying and fun.
It was quite natural that satura came to be used for the popular, improvised skits that were
performed before an undoubtedly boistrous Roman audience. There was no form or plot. Song, prose,
verse and dialogue were enthusiastically mixed to entertain with praise and ridicule.
Thus when the father of Roman poetry, Quintus Ennius (c. 239-169 B.C.), chose to introduce
the word satura for some of his poems, he probably borrowed from both uses and meant that his
poems were a simple (but hearty and healthy), jocular mixture of drama and comedy that mimicked
and entertained through prose, verse and song.
But it wasn't until the seventeenth century that the actual origin of the word satire was
discovered. Until then, writers were misled into believing that satire came from the satyr, the
rude, shaggy, half-human, half-beast creatures that drank wine and chased wood nymphs, and so
mistakenly thought that satire should be crude and rough. But the origin of the word had nothing
to do with them and the idea really had little to do with the Greeks who did not consider satire
as a genus of literature. It was left to the Romans to develop the art form that addressed the
everyday frustrations of life.
Two of their poets, Horace (65-8 B.C.) and Juvenal (A.D. 50-130), represented the two
classic schools of satire— the playful and the cynical.
Both used and contributed to the development of formal verse, a poetic form that was to
dominate satire until the eighteenth century. Horace was seen as the playful wit, the optimistic,
sophisticated critic who, though serious, is light and "tells the truth with a laugh." Juvenal, at
the other end, was the bitter cynic who seethed with anger, believed people were incorrigible and
wrote to wound and punish, not to cure or instruct. Thus one was a physician. The other an