The Story So Far

The Fourth Brigade is less a proper brigade and more a ragtag bunch of hardened war veterans from several different countries. The Lieutenant (the L is arbitrarily capitalized starting with the final installment, so I’ll capitalize it here as well for consistency’s sake) is like a father to his men, making sure they’re well provided for and given resources which have become awfully scarce in the closing days of this latest war. The Lieutenant and his men have been ordered to return to GHQ, an underground fortress in France where a small upper crust of leaders and officers lord over the starved soldiers who have taken refuge in this large and yet labyrinthine bunker. The idea is to strip the Lieutenant and effectively put him under house arrest, while his brigade gets absorbed into another unit. This plan goes very badly, though, for the men in charge of GHQ, as the Fourth Brigade is still well-manned, well-armed, and well-fed, while the opposing troops don’t put up much in the way of resistance. What the Lieutenant’s men lack of raw numbers, they more than make up for in loyalty to their commanding officer. There are some casualties for the enemy, but miraculously the Fourth Brigade makes it out without any on their end.

Up to now the UK has been isolated from the rest of Europe, due to a combination of a contagious and fatal disease call soldier’s sickness and a plague of insects which helps spread said disease. The UK itself has become a communist one-party state, with the BCP and its leader Hogarthy being in charge. None of this sounds like good news for the Lieutenant, except that he and his men have become immune to the disease; those who didn’t, died. Having been separated from their homeland (although for some it’s not their homeland at all, but then mainland Europe is so scarred from endless war that there’s really nowhere else to go), the Fourth Brigade now makes way for England, by way of several boats. Overthrowing Hogarthy and restoring order will be difficult, or so it seems.

Enhancing Image

The amphibious assault on the beaches of England, which takes up the first stretch of this last installment, also ends up being something of an anticlimax. It’s pretty compelling, however, in terms of both how it reads in a post-WWII world and the politics Hubbard (perhaps inadvertently) injects into it. There’s a fundamental irony in a bunch of soldiers under British leadership, some of whom never even lived under the British flag before, making headway against a severely weakened British home front that also had turned communist years ago. I mentioned much earlier, I think in my review of the first installment, that in the world of Final Blackout the UK and Russia have basically traded places, with Russia now working under a monarchy and with a functioning but by now fatigued military. Time works like a flat circle here, with Russia here being in a similar position to how they were during WWI. I also mentioned that while SF historians and fellow reviewers have pointed out Final Blackout‘s strange relationship to WWII, it’s clear that Hubbard was taking cues from that war’s predecessor. Like Russia in the final days of WWI, the leader goes down almost without a fight. The Lieutenant’s men capture Hogarthy, who I’m not sure even has a line of dialogue, whereupon the Lieutenant orders the man to be executed without a trial. This is a bit of cold-bloodedness that aligns with what Our Anti-Hero™ has done thus far, but it also anticipates a broader ugliness that will come to reflect the novel’s political philosophy.

In seemingly no time the Lieutenant becomes the dictator of the UK, with the country having gone from a communist dictatorship to a nominally capitalist (I say “nominally,” more on that in a minute) dictatorship with a military junta in control. There is also a symbiotic partnership struck up with another despot, a “man who styled himself King of Scotland,” who like in the very old days ruled over that part of the UK while the Lieutenant lords over England. Partly this was done for practical reasons, since not only does the Lieutenant not have any political experience, but he’s given himself the Herculean task of rebuilding a country which has long since been brought nearly to destruction by a combination of never-ending war and government mismanagement. The Lieutenant, moreover, doesn’t really have politics of his own in the sense that he doesn’t support a specific ideology; but on the other hand, he makes it clear what he doesn’t support. The Lieutenant’s (and I think it’s safe to say also Hubbard’s, by extension) worldview is a conservative one, in the sense that he doesn’t like to get involved in politics as this “other” thing, with its own rules and experts. The novel’s conservative bent was apparent long before this, but it’s here in the last stretch that Hubbard articulates his feelings on government the most clearly. The UK under the Lieutenant becomes, over the span of a couple years, a largely agrarian society run on the philosophy of Social Darwinism. The land has been depopulated, but the people and even the plants and animals that remain are said to have built up a resistance to both soldier’s sickness and the swarms of ravenous bugs. The “weak” have since been weeded out, making for a stronger and better (so we’re told) England.

British society under the military junta, in which only the “strong” have survived, falls in line with some of Hubbard’s other pre-Dianetics fiction I’ve read, most especially his short novel To the Stars. If Hubbard can be said to have a consistent political stance, it’s a belief in the possibility of a “superior” man, having been created either via eugenics or trial by combat like in Final Blackout. This is by no means a unique position in magazine SF of the ’40s, but it’s notable in how pronounced it is here, as well as the fact that Hubbard would take this idea far enough as to create a religion around it. The Church of Scientology is and has always been a bourgeois church, in which a rather large number of its membership is comprised of the rich and famous. It might be the first religion ever to have been created with the aim of appealing to the ruling class, a church both by and for the rich—that exceedingly small group of “superior” (if only by way of money and property ownership) men and women. You’ll find a liberal Scientologist, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Scientologist who’s a socialist or anarchist. I’m sort of convinced that such a thing doesn’t exist. Hubbard, at his best and most entertaining, is able to use this deranged belief in Social Darwinism to create openly fantastical and not terribly serious power fantasies. On the opposite end he was also able to create some of the most harrowing visions in magazine SF of the era. For ever Slaves of Sleep or Typewriter in the Sky there seems to be a Fear or a Final Blackout. These are two extremes, but they also strike me as two sides of the same coin.

The climax of Final Blackout involves a very strange political situation which, surprisingly, makes sense within the context of the novel. After a couple years of rebuilding his country, the Lieutenant is met with a war ship, the USS New York, as well as a recon plane from that ship. The Americans have arrived. In any other SF story from that time this would be meant as good news, but not so in Hubbard’s novel. This might be the only time in Campbell’s Astounding, at least when the magazine was at its peak, that the Americans are framed as the villains. What’s even more surprising is that it’s not a moustache-twirling kind of villainy, but instead the kind that would prove to be prophetic of how the US would conduct itself on the world stage following the end of WWII. The US, having steered clear of the countless wars in Europe, has spent the decades obtaining colonies in South America and Africa. Despite the apparent left-leaning bent of the American government, with the “Social-democrats” and the capital-S Socialists having replaced the Republicans and Democrats as the two dominant parties, the US has gone full imperialist. The degree to which Hubbard predicted a power-hungry US is creepy. So, the people of the UK are left with two options, both of which are unsavory: either a military dictatorship under the Lieutenant, or as a satellite state under the US. The conclusion clearly favors the former, but the result is still violent and at best bittersweet. I feel like I should stay away from giving away specifics about the ending, but let’s say this is not a feel-good type of story.

A Step Farther Out

Final Blackout is not quite as thrilling as the best of Hubbard’s fantasy and horror from around this time, and there’s also the sense that getting it published just a few years later, once the US entered WWII properly, would’ve been more difficult. There’s a lot to discuss with the political position Hubbard seems to take here—if only more people in living memory had read this novel. There used to be quite a few fans of Hubbard’s early fiction, but they all seem to be dead now. Even so, taking its faults and pretty dubious politics into account, it’s hard to find anything quite like Final Blackout in the pages of ’40s magazine SF. The fact that it ran in Astounding almost feels like an accident, and may have only happened because Hubbard and John W. Campbell were chummy with each other. This is one of the darkest and bloodiest SF novels of its era (hell, it might be the darkest and bloodiest), and on that front alone I would have to recommend it. Just be aware of what you’re getting into.

See you next time.