Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only €10,99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Battling Pilot
    The Battling Pilot
    The Battling Pilot
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    The Battling Pilot

    By L. Ron Hubbard

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Pilot Pete England used to think there was nothing more exciting in the world than flying off into the wild blue yonder. But lately the blue yonder hasn’t been wild at all . . . it’s been downright dull. Pete’s like a jaded Clark Gable who’s hungry for adventure—and he’s about to get his fill.

    Pete has fallen into a rut, flying the same route—New York to D.C.—with the same passengers, day after day after day. He might as well be driving a bus… until “her highness” climbs aboard. Apparently a princess, she’s the Carole Lombard to Pete’s Clark Gable, and for one flight, she’s bought up every ticket on the plane.

    Once Pete gets her into the air, the action heats up fast. He learns that the lady is at the center of some international intrigue that could turn the tide of war … and now a mysterious plane is on their tail, bent on shooting them out of the sky. But that’s the least of Pete’s concerns. There’s more to this princess than meets the eye, and falling in love with her could turn out to be the greatest flight risk of all.

    As a barnstorming pilot in the early days of aviation, Hubbard was dubbed “Flash” Hubbard by the aviation magazines of the day. Expanding his knowledge even more, he visited Boeing in Seattle where the president and chief engineer gave him an inside look at their test pilot program. His unique and pioneering insight of flight streaks across the page in novels like The Battling Pilot.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGalaxy Press
    Release dateJun 21, 2012
    ISBN9781592126187
    Author

    L. Ron Hubbard

    Mit 19 Bestsellern der New York Times und mehr als 250 Millionen Exemplaren seiner Werke im Umlauf gehört L. Ron Hubbard zu den anerkanntesten und meistgelesenen Schriftstellern unserer Zeit. Als ein Hauptakteur der amerikanischen Pulp-Fiction der 1930er und 40er ist er außerdem einer der einflussreichsten Autoren der Moderne. Tatsächlich gibt es kaum einen Meister der fantasievollen Geschichten, von Ray Bradbury bis Stephen King, der L. Ron Hubbard nicht Tribut gezollt hat. Zur Feier seines 50-jährigen Jubiläums als Autor tritt er wieder an die Spitze der Populärliteratur, mit seinen monumentalen Epen Kampf um die Erde und der 10-bändigen Serie Mission Erde. Zusammen dominierten diese Titel die internationalen Bestsellerlisten für mehr als 200 Wochen und verbleiben unter den Rekord-Klassikern der modernen Science-Fiction.

    Read more from L. Ron Hubbard

    Related to The Battling Pilot

    Related ebooks

    Historical Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Battling Pilot

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Battling Pilot - L. Ron Hubbard

      Battling Pilot cover

      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

      Title Page

      Published by

      Galaxy Press, LLC

      7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200

      Hollywood, CA 90028

      © 2012 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.

      Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC. Story Preview illustration: Argosy Magazine is © 1936 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc.

      ISBN 978-1-59212-618-7 ePub edition

      ISBN 978-1-59212-736-8 Kindle edition

      ISBN 978-1-59212-305-6 print edition

      ISBN 978-1-59212-296-7 audiobook edition

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903539

      Contents

      FOREWORD

      THE BATTLING PILOT

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      STORY PREVIEW:

      RED DEATH OVER CHINA

      L. RON HUBBARD

      IN THE GOLDEN AGE

      OF PULP FICTION

      THE STORIES FROM THE

      GOLDEN AGE

      GLOSSARY

      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.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1