Stranger In A Strange Land : C or D?

AS it happens, re KSC's 3rd question, I recently re-read John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider", which I found quite amazingly prophetic in places, esp the internet, & virii. His overpopulation scenario-ed book "Stand on Zanzibar" is similarly good, & he wrote another book themed around overpollution which was quite believable. More later (this probably a sinkeresque good intention)

xoxo

Mr. Patterson revealed to me, "RAH and LRH had one or more discussions during 1944 and or 1945 when they were both in Philadelphia, and RAH pointed out to LRH that religions had an inordinate amount of legal latitude in the U.S. and that churches could engage in a great many activities otherwise thought of as secular, under the tax and other protection churches enjoy. He had already explored these ideas in some of his stories and was to revisit these notions in their original form in Stranger. It is possible that this conversation or series of conversations took place as late as December 1945 or early 1946 and in Los Angeles."

The theme of money and religion was apparently a very popular one for Hubbard as he seems to have mentioned it at several other informal discussions around the same time. In a 1978 interview Harlan Ellison commented "Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ Sakes!...We were sitting around one night... who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester Del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich"."

Editor and Author Sam Moskovitz claimed a number of times that Hubbard had made similar remarks at a convention he hosted in Newark in either 1947 or 1948. Another respected SciFi author, Theodore Sturgeon, revealed to Mike Jittlov, himself a respected filmmaker, an incident in the 1940's when Hubbard had become upset and said, "Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction! You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion!" Lloyd Arthur Eshback related in his autobiography, an incident in either 1948 or 49, "I think of the time while in New York I took John W. Campbell, Marty Greenberg, and L. Ron Hubbard to lunch...The incident is stamped indelibly in my mind because of one statement that Ron Hubbard made. What led him to say what he did I can't recall--but in so many words Hubbard said: "I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is!"."

Several of these claims have been refuted, but others have not. The Church of Scientology takes these matters very seriously and has won several court cases in regards to the issue of Scientology's origins and disparaging remarks made against it. The origins of Dianetics and Scientology may still be a little clouded but it seems clear to me now that a wager between the two authors, or anyone else for that matter, was not responsible and while it's possible that Heinlein planted the seed for Hubbard's Dianetics, Mr. Patterson cautioned me to remember, "Both LRH and RAH were talkers of the first water. This particular conversation was one of many they had at the time -- it only looks significant when we see it through the historical lens of experience of what LRH did with the ideas, long after he and RAH had fallen out of intimate personal contact."

So this new Heinlein bio...

great question

I am in a Science Fiction book club. Once we were given SIASL. It is one of the worst books I have ever tried to read. Kate pretty much nails it upthread, but other dreadful features of it are the long passages of appallingly written dialogue where some mouthpiece of Heinlein's views gets to blah blah blah blah blah at great length.

Kate - I wish I could blot this book out of my memory.

Found these two reviews of bio:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/11/AR2010081105457.html
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20100628/clute-c.shtml

Seem to say that it's not particularly well-written but has some interesting research. Also didn't realize that this is only Volume 1 and only goes up to 1948.