The Learned Turtle: BOOK REVIEW: Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 by L. Ron Hubbard

My rating: 2 out of 5

IN THE YEAR 3000AD, Earth is a barren wasteland, plundered of its natural resources by alien conquerors known as Psyclos. Fewer than thirty-five thousand humans survive in a handful of communities scattered across the face of a post-apocalyptic Earth.

From the ashes of humanity rises a young hero, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. Setting off on an initial quest to discover a hidden evil, Jonnie unlocks the mystery of humanities demise and unearths a crucial weakness in their oppressors. Spreading the seeds of revolt, Jonnie and a small band of survivors pit their quest for freedom in an all-out rebellion that erupts across the continents of Earth and the cosmic sprawl of the Psychlo empire.

For the fate of the galaxy lies on the Battlefield of Earth.

***** *** *******

What a freakin' epic-sounding sci-fi adventure! And, at a bit over 1200 pages in paperback guise, it certainly looks epic too. I will say right from the start that the presentation of this book, in both print and ebook form is top-notch. In the case of the paperback version that I read mostly from, it's a well-bound and nicely presented example with great cover art, good typesetting and very few typo errors to distract. The ebook that I sampled is similarly well done with great formatting and indexing, etc. The edition that I read is the "21st Century Edition" published in 2017 [it was written in 1980] with an introduction by the author telling us all about how and why he got to the point of writing this book and there's a reasonable extensive interview and short essay about the author at the end. I'm only giving my opinion of the story itself here, but these additional sections do make for some interesting reading in themselves. All in all, it's a nicely presented novel, and the marketing has certainly been energetic, to say the least. So with it being so great-sounding, great-looking and with the author claiming that "it is the only one I ever wrote just to amuse myself", does this L. Ron Hubbard opus live up to all (or any) of my expectations? Well, mmm...yeah-nah. Let me explain...

I'm a New Zealander and us Kiwis commonly use the slang term "yeah-nah" which is essentially a combination of both yes and no, meaning "kind of" or "I get what you’re saying, but no", that sort of thing. Well, these two words sum up my feelings for this book very well; if there ever was a book whose press relations build up far outweighs its actual quality as a novel, it is this one. In what is surely an attempt to restore the late L. Ron Hubbard's reputation as a sci-fi author in the modern era, the publishers [Scientology-owned Galaxy Press] of this have done a bang-up job of hyping up a book which is, while definitely epic and modestly entertaining, nothing at all like the marketing spin portrays. In fact, it has been alleged that members of the Church of Scientology are largely responsible for propelling this book to the top of best-seller lists by bulk buying (then recirculating and re-buying) copies to influence the sales figures. That wouldn't surprise me in the least. Anyway, that aside, I've reviewed this book on its own merits for what it is and hopefully without undue prejudice.

With reasonably efficient use of words at the beginning, Hubbard lays the foundation of his story and the bleak post-apocalyptic world in which it takes place. It reads okay, albeit quite dated and erroneous in terminology [the numerous misuses of the word annealed particularly bugged me] but otherwise it cruises along not too badly. Right from the start, the Hubbard's pulp fiction roots show, and the style is reminiscent of other early action and western books that I remember from my Dad's collection, with enticing cover artwork and rollicking yarns within the pages. Hubbard actually states that when he wrote this novel "I wanted to write pure science fiction...and not in the old tradition...writing forms and styles have changed, so I had to bring myself up to date and modernize the styles and patterns." Well, I'm not so sure that he succeeded in this, but its mostly fine by me because [as those of you who have read other reviews of mine will know] I usually enjoy the old-school pulp style and relish the simple escapism that it allows, one of the key reasons why I read this sort of stuff in first place. The story is chronological and easy enough to follow for the most part, but the layout of the chapters seemed a tad complex and non-nonsensical to me; the novel is broken up into 32 parts which have up to ten or so chapters. The division into parts didn't really seem to occur at particularly significant stages of the story, rather it just seemed to serve the purpose of resetting the chapter count so it didn't go astronomically high and appear too daunting to the reader [over 300 chapters!]. Anyway, I digress, but I'll state that I thought that the writing style was [for me] mostly okay. However, I'll wager that the majority of today's readers won't particularly enjoy its feel and style as much as I did. I reckon that fans of more contemporary science fiction will find it a little lame and maybe even frustrating and I think they will know within a few pages or so whether or not they're going to get along with it.

Our hero - Jonnie Goodboy Tyler

The story itself is sound enough but nothing at all ground-breaking or startling. The Psychlo aliens are a nasty bunch of resource-hungry miners who have wiped out almost all of the human population on Earth [as well as many other planets], the survivors scattered across the planet and living in hiding for the last thousand years or so, reverting to old customs and ways. The big change begins when Terl, an enterprising Psyclo with a bit of authority, decides to investigate the possibility of training some human "animals" to secretly do some manual work that the Psyclos themselves are unable to do. You see, there is a simple yet rather crucial complication with the gas that they are required to breathe while outside their sealed habitation domes. By using the humans as labour will allow Terl to secure for himself quite a haul of mineral wealth right under the noses of his Intergalactic Mining Company bosses. What he doesn't bank on is the intelligence of these humans. You see, the Psyclos have been rampaging about raping the galaxy and its other races for millennia largely unopposed, so the concept of any other species being able to outsmart them is totally unthinkable. As far as they're concerned, they're at the top of the heap. That is until they meet our buckskin-clad hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a likely lad of a "muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his twenty years" and who looks to be just the chap to unite the human race against these cruelest of oppressors. A big ask, but he's the man for the job.

What follows is a moderately entertaining but long-winded tale of uprising and eventual triumph over the invaders. Thankfully, the last quarter of the book does take on a new level of interest with a bunch of new players entering the game (like lots of new and generally interesting alien species) and there is a rather unexpected and slightly amusing plot twist. Right throughout, Hubbard does tend to get sidetracked with trivial details of things such as financial dealings, political posturing or technical details and I feel that these most often bogged the flow of the story down too much. As usual in these situations, I found myself skipping over a number of paragraphs in an attempt to get back to the guts of the story, and if I start doing this while I'm reading a book, I know that it hasn't really got me on the hook. This pretty much turned into a 1200-page endurance test that stretched my curiosity to it's limit. Oh the things we do. I was trying to find out whether or not L. Ron Hubbard's reputation was deserved, whether he is able to actually produce great sci-fi or is this book [as I suspected and mentioned earlier] an overrated attempt to raise an old author's profile in aid of his other "serious subjects". I have to come down on the side of the latter. Hubbard will have put so much into this novel and good on him for doing so, especially if it was just for his own amusement, but I didn't get much out of reading it at all. I actually did really enjoy Hubbard's own introduction where he talks about his work as a science fiction author for the pulps in the Golden Age and what led him to the point of writing this book, but that was about the only highlight from all of those pages. I might have enjoyed this as a teen if it was divided into smaller parts but, even then, probably not.

I was really hoping that I was going to sit here and write you all a long glowing review of Battlefield Earth, and how it has really blown me away by being an epic masterpiece of science fiction from a true master of the art. But, it's not. What it is is a mildly entertaining [but far too long] story that ended up becoming quite an arduous read. Unless you're like me a lot of the time and your inquisitiveness knows no bounds, you won't thank yourself for picking this one up.

***** *** *******

2/5 for concept

2/5 for delivery

2/5 for entertainment

= 2 out of 5