Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102060043
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Although he was best known for inventing "scientology" and "dianetics" as self-improvement cults, L. Ron Hubbard was first and last a writer. He began in the 1930s until he got involved in his bigger money-making ventures, and went back to science-fiction in the years before his death, publishing a massive novel and an even more massive 10-volume space opera.
But his earlier stories were better and his publisher - apparently established exclusively for Hubbard's works - is now bringing out "Fear," which first appeared in 1940 in "Unknown," a highly acclaimed magazine killed off by World War II paper rationing. "Fear" is part of the good stuff that appeared in its pages.
Imagine that you are college professor James Lowry, that you have just published a piece ridiculing the supernatural, and that you suddenly find four hours missing from your memory - and subsequently begin seeing glimpses of things out of the corner of your eye that should exist only in nightmares.
Lowry's life gradually becomes a nightmare, with escalating encounters with the supernatural that finally tackles the question of reality itself. It all ends with a sentence that will still leave the reader wondering and, perhaps, glancing cautiously into corners to catch something just out of vision range - but don't peep at the ending or you'll spoil your own fun.
The Big Splash. By Louis A. Frank, with Patrick Huyghe. Birch Lane Press. $21.95.
The complete title is "The Big Splash: A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life, the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs, the Creation of the Oceans, the Nature of the Cosmos, and the Very Future of the Earth Itself."
That about sums up the book.
Frank, a physicist who has worked on instruments for more than 20 space missions, is best known in astronomy circles as the "small comets" man. He is among those who say that atmospheric holes, discovered about a decade ago by an Earth-orbiting satellite, were water vapor clouds left by water-ice comets about the size of a small house plowing through our atmosphere.
Because of their size, speed and makeup, Frank suggests that these comets have remained undiscovered despite their number - about 20 per minute, he estimates - until now. He says a telescopic search in 1988 confirmed the presence of small dark objects in near-Earth space. His detractors say the spots were glitches on the photos, even though the same "glitches" show up on two successive photos in several cases.
In the book, Frank carries his hypothesis to its logical conclusions and argues that it is the comet water which, over millions of years, has given us our oceans where life first evolved. That would make the comets responsible for us as well as our water.
He places the source of these comets as being somewhere out beyond Neptune, and points to water-ice found on the moons of the outer planets as showing cometary activity that far out. He suggests that periodic extinctions, like that of the dinosaurs, could be caused by a still-undiscovered dark planet with an orbit plowing through the cometary cloud every 26 million years and unleashing cometary destruction on our planet.
Almost as fascinating is Frank's account of the way such ideas get debated in scientific circles, and how publication in scientific journals is achieved. Such publication is how competing scientists keep score on whose theories gain credibility, in a process that involves "referees" reading submitted papers and helping to decide their fate. For non-scientists, this process may be almost as much an eye-opener as what Frank's small-comets theory could mean for the eventual fate of the world.
by CNB