Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

by Alec Nevala-Lee

ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1944, MARK HUBBARD, LESLYN HEINLEIN’S BROTHER-IN-LAW, WAS KILLED BY the Japanese. Three years earlier, he had been living on Luzon in the Philippines with Keith and their two sons, working as an engineer on a research expedition, when the island was taken. Dynamiting his gold mines to keep them from being taken by the enemy, he disappeared into the bush, listening to the news with makeshift radios that he fueled with alcohol that he distilled himself. It was an example of the competent man at his best, but Mark Hubbard did not get the ending that he deserved. He caught malaria—his weight fell to below a hundred pounds—and he was handed over to the Japanese occupiers. After a protracted ordeal, he was executed at Bilibid Prison. He was later awarded the Purple Heart, and Heinlein would write one day, “This is how a man gets to Valhalla.” But no one at home knew of his death for months.