Here's to you, L. Ron Hubbard, wherever you are.

When it comes to science fiction, give me that old-time religion every time. When I was at the height of my fascination with the genre something over 40 years ago, almost all the science fiction was published in pulp magazines and the stories had to do with wars between planets.

As a result of my boyhood fascination, I have been most sympathetic with this country’s space program, even though I realize the money could have been used for most needy projects right here on Earth. When we have men out in the blackness of space or walking on the moon, this trekkie is right there with them in spirit and envy.

Of course, nowadays all rules are out the window with our so-called Defense Department saddled with billions that they don’t really know how to expend.

One of my favorite authors in those days was L. Ron Hubbard, along with A.E. Van Vogt and Clifford Simak. He churned out some 101 novel-long stories that had vast space fleets blasting each other to nowhere and gone, that had brave men in spacesuits battling the elements and bizarre creatures and that tickled the imagination about what life might be like in centuries to come.

After all, what would your great grandfather say if you were to tell him that you sit in your living room and watch pictures that come through the air?

I gave up science fiction when the trolls took over. In the past 20 years, sci-fi has become more of a gothic mumbo jumbo than anything else. From my present cursory knowledge, it is little more than grail treks by people with occult powers, kind of an ersatz Tolkien. To me, Star Trek lost its zip in its third season when story lines focused more on fairy tales than battles with Klingons.

But then, last month, I came across a new hard-cover book, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 that was written by none other than L. Ron Hubbard.

When the book opens, Earth has been devastated and only about 30,000 people survive in various forsaken spots.

The destruction was not caused by the usual nuclear holocaust, but by an invasion from outer space of an alien race called Psychlos, 1000-pound monsters who delight in cruelty and killing. The Psychlos who wished to mine the earth’s metals, attacked just as the United States and Russia were about to engage in the final nuclear holocaust, all of which became academic as each side was wiped out indiscriminately.

Thus for 1000 years the earth has been nothing more than a vast Psychlo mining operation, but in the year 3000, a young man named Johnie Goodboy Tyler decides there is something more to life than his primitive village in the Rocky Mountains near what was formerly Denver, and rides out on his horse Windsplitter to explore the unknown.

Before the book is over, some 819 pages later, this young man has destroyed the Psychlo empire, found union with thousands of other galaxies of the most bizarre type, and started earth back on an upward path again, all races united into one.

In between all this there are myriads of wild adventures, interplanetary battles and good old-fashioned science fiction of the type that keeps you reading even when the length of the tale and weight of the book bog you down somewhat.

L. Ron Hubbard still had the old skill when he typed his way through this wild adventure. He says in the foreword, which was dated 1980, that he wrote this book to celebrate his golden anniversary in science fiction writing. It is a golden oldie, all right, of the kind of sci-fi that I loved in my youth and my own golden years.

Here’s to you, L. Ron Hubbard, wherever you are.