Scientology in Popular Culture - Fiction

Fiction

William S. Burroughs, who briefly dabbled with Scientology, wrote extensively about it during the late 1960s, weaving some of its jargon into his fictional works, as well as authoring non-fiction essays about it. In the end, however, he abandoned Scientology and publicly eschewed it in an editorial for the Los Angeles Free Press in 1970. Burroughs' work Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology contains many writings related to both Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard.

"Operation Freakout", also known as "Operation PC Freakout", was the name given by the Church of Scientology to a covert plan intended to have the author Paulette Cooper imprisoned or committed to a mental institution. The plan, undertaken in 1976 following years of Church-initiated lawsuits and covert harassment, was meant to eliminate the perceived threat that Cooper posed to the Church and obtain revenge for her publication in 1971 of a highly critical book, The Scandal of Scientology. The events of Operation Freakout are featured, in a thinly fictionalized form, in Giuseppe Genna's 2004 novel In the Name of Ishmael. Scientology is referred to as "Science Religion", Cooper is called "Paulette Rowling" and Mary Sue Hubbard is "Johanna Lewis". The book includes an almost word-for-word transcription of the Operation Freakout planning document of April 1, 1976, with the names of the principal figures substituted as described above.

In the science-fiction setting of Count Zero, a cyberpunk novel by author William Gibson, one of the character's relatives is mentioned to be a Scientologist. L. Ron Hubbard (referred to simply as "Hubbard") is also mentioned as an option of a possible hologram that could appear over someone's bed, another choice included the Virgin Mary.