430,000 Words of Legendary Awefulness

I have just finished reading one of the most dreadful pieces of writing ever published.  Battlefield Earth by founder of Scientology, L. (Lafayette) Ron Hubbard.

It weighs in at 819 pages (in the hardback edition available at local Public Library) of consistently terrible prose, flat 1 dimensional characters, and plot holes you couldn't believe.

I think you could probably cut at least 50 pages from the book simply by removing the word "had" from Hubbards vocabulary.  Consider this from a page at random:

He had bunked down in the car in the outskirts.  He had the old Chinko map of the ancient city, but he had no curiosity about it.With a few shots of kerbando, he had eased himself off into sleep, ...
The car, however, had grown ..... Maybe it had been footfalls that had awakened him.
... He had seen horses... But he had never seen...
Only this one had  a second body...
The two beasts had now turned ...
He had his quarry trapped...

None of those sentences need the word "had" in them.  In fact they could all be improved by removing it. - He bunked down in the car in the outskirts [of the city]. He carried the old Chinko map in his pack, but wasn't at all curious about it.

The book (Originally titled Man, Endangered Species) is set in the year 3000, a millenium after the successful invasion of earth by the evil Psychlos - a malevolent species of 9 ft. tall creatures who have conquered planet across multiple universes in order to strip mine them for the profit of their intergalactic mining corporation.

Humanity has been reduced to a handful of primitive tribes living in mountainous regions of the earth - living as hunters and gatherers, wearing furs and skins, and wielding nothing more dangerous than clubs and spears.

Yet within a year of being captured by Terl (the Psychlo security chief stationed on earth) the hero - Jonnie Goodboy Tyler - is able to pilot fighter aircraft, has mastered advanced chemistry, nuclear physics and multiple languages.  Furthermore he has mined a over a ton of gold from a nearly inaccessible cliff-side, taught a band of warriors to pilot the fighter craft, and fought a successful revolution against the highly armed and overwhelmingly numerous Psychlos.

And the way that Jonnie Goodboy Tyler manages to win his final victory is too klutzy to be plausible.  The Psychlos don't breath air.  They breath "breathe-gas" which inexplicably explodes in the presence of radiation.  Jonnie and his band of rebels manage to teleport some nuclear weapons (which they found laying around , and after 1,000 years of neglect, were still operational.) to the Psychlo home planet and blew the whole thing up.

The book is also full of Hubbard's hatred for Psychologists and Psychiatrists (hence the name Psychlo given to the sociopathic aliens).  The Psychlos, Hubbard tells us, are led by a "medical scientist cult" known as "catrists"  (get it?  Catrists... Psychiatrists... Catrists... Psychiatrists ..).  In December 1980, two months after he completed the book, Hubbard told fellow Scientologists that "I was a bit disgusted with the way the psychologists and brain surgeons mess people up so I wrote a fiction story based in part on the consequences that could occur if the shrinks continued to do it."

And the Pyschlos themselves were made to be sociopathic and cruel by small devices implated in thier brains shortly after birth - which would kind of relate to Hubbards idea of engrams. 

The book may not have become anything based on its own merits.  So the Church of Scientology guaranteed to buy 50,000 hardback copies, and mounted a massive publicity campaign to support the book.  Individual Scientologists were encouraged  to go out and buy two or three copies. 


Former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney cited Battlefield Earth as one of his favorite novels.  Yikes!

The movie adaptation of Battlefield Earth is one of the worst movies ever made (thank you very much Mr. Travolta and director, Rodger Christian). 

The movie - a personal pet project of Travolta for many years - covers only the first half of the book.  Travolta had hoped to make a second to complete the tale,  but poor box office results meant that the world would be spared that sequel.

To offset reading this monstrously bad book, I also read a non-fiction book about L. Ron Hubbard.  Bare-Faced Messiah: the True Story of L. Ron Hubbard  by Russell Miller.

Mr Hubbard had a truly bizarre life - and in this case, the truth of his life is much much stranger than the fictional biographies (yes, plural) that the Church of Scientology has published about L.Ron. 


And to make this all a very timely post - Mr. Hubbard died on Januray 24th , 1986.