OLE Doc Mithuselah-4 Cassettes [Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

This is one of my all time favorite stories and one of the earliest Science-Fiction/Fastasy tales I ever read. The style is classic early Sci-fi and the humor is rollicking and delightful. The material is a bit dated but it is still a great fun read!

Lance Whalin

It's interesting to see either complete hatred or unreserved praise for this, or all of Hubbard's book for that matter. In my opinion, neither are quite deserved. Quick disclaimer: unlike one of the reviewers below, all I know about Hubbard was that he founded Scientology which is really quite silly. I am really just reviewing the book.

Ole Doc Methuselah is a space-western. It is not sophiscated 'hard science fiction' and if read as such will generate a lot of frustration. For the most part, the author has his tongue firmly in the cheek and this shows. I mean - how can you take a hero (or the universe he inhabits) that fixes a planetary system's entire socio-political problems by 3 hours of plastic surgery seriously?!?!? There is some science though - for example Hubbard's description of TB sounds very much first hand; the use of omnipotent germ-cells to help regenerate tissue is a serious research discipline today; and the use of 'rays' much unheard of in the 30s & 40s for medical care is now reflected in the well-developed specialty of radiation oncology. What people need to remember is that this book, like many of the 'golden age' stories was written in the 40s and some parts are unavoidably dated.

But the series of short stories do manage to entertain very well. The style is unsophisticated but clear, with the occasional laugh-out-loud passages. The plots are fun and with some completely unlooked for and often improbable twists. The main characters - that is Ole Doc and Hippocrates, are vividly drawn and their conversation really flows. In my opinion, a book that entertained me and made me laugh is worth at least 3 stars - even if it is by a controversial author and will never win the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Ole Doc Methuselah stories are a series of seven novelettes that L. Ron Hubbard wrote for _Astounding_ between 1947 and 1950 under the pseudonym of Rene Lafayette. They remained uncollected for twenty years, but they were finally assembled as _Ole Doc Methuselah_ (1970), complete with a page explaining why L. Ron Hubbard was a Benifactor to Humanity. I do not have all of the stories in their original magazine form, but I do have a few of them. It looks as if few changes were made from magazine to book form.

The stories are about a human medical man with an alien sidekick who flies about the galaxy solving medical problems that are usually linked with skulduggery and planetary social troubles. Science fiction readers may notice a faint similarity with Murray Leinster's later Med Service stories, about a human medical man with an alien sidekick who flies about the galaxy solving medical problems that are usually linked with skulduggery and planetary social troubles.

There are some differences between the series. Leinster's stories are better crafted, more logical, and more scientifically savvy. But Hubbard's tales have a splash, color, and flamboyance that is lacking in the Med Service series. All of the stories are passably entertaining. My favorite yarns in this collection are the title story, in which Doc goes on a fishing trip that leads him into a ruthless planetary real estate scam; "Her Majesty's Aberration," in which Doc's absent-mindedness takes him to a planet that most of us would be happy to avoid; and "Plague," in which an old-fashioned solution is found to a new-fangled problem.

One story, "The Great Air Monopoly," makes use of a longish footnote about the United Medical Society (U.M.S.) from a fictitious future history by Hubbard. This was a practice that was common in pulp science fiction stories in the thirties and forties. They were frequently loaded with footnotes to give them a kind of authenticity. Sometimes the notes were basic science notations. But on other occasions, they could be rather free-wheeling and imaginative. After the forties, this practice was pretty much discontinued, though I believe that Jack Vance used it with some of his stories.

But it is impossible for certain passages not to hit me with their unintended irony:

"My man," said Ole Doc, "your precious bombs were one of the oldest known buncombes in medical history a propellant and ephedrine, that's all. Ephedrine barely permits the allergy patient to breathe. It wasn't 'air' you were selling but a phony, second-rate drug that costs about a dollar a barrel. They'd take a little and needed more. You were clear back in the dark ages of medical history-- about a century after they stopped using witches for doctors. Ragweed, ephedrine-- but they were enough to wreck the lives of almost everyone on this planet." (108)

A few months after the publication of the last Doc Methuselah story, the first of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics articles was published in _Astounding_. What do you suppose Doc Methuselah would say about that?