February 5th 2023
Battlefield Earth is a classic piece of pulp science fiction where the bad guys are either capitalist, greedy business beings or priests, the good guys are so good that the main character is even called ‘Goodboy’ and the good guys not only win; they totally defeat the bad guys by using their own greed against them. It seems to be the perfect novel for the current rage against the machine generation so why is it not seeing greater coverage? Simple. Despite being relatively fun it is around 600 pages too long and, to be blunt, shit.
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To many people L.Ron Hubbard is best known as the founder of Scientology; and whilst you do not hear much about it these days, it does tend to colour perception of Hubbard as a bit of a crank. As for Battlefield Earth well that is best known for being a truly awful film staring John Travolta. Make no mistake it is bad but I needed to pad out a birthday gift list so added this without much expectation of my family getting it me. Oops. Still, I had it so it seemed only right and fair to read it.
Battlefield Earth is set on a future Earth where humanity has been all but wiped out by an alien race called the Psychlos who are mining the planet out for the rare and expensive minerals that exist in abundance on Earth. They found Earth as a result of recovering an unmanned probe (implied to be Voyager 1) and using their advanced tech wiped out humanity with some form of gas and then moved in. Some humans survive however and one of them is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler.
Jonnie leaves the safety of his village and is captured by a Psychlos who wants to use humanity for his own get rich scheme. Treated as an unthinking animal Jonnie is given an education using a speed learning machine as well as old books he recovered in what is revealed to be the ruins of Denver.
He discovers that Earth’s captors will die if they are exposed to an oxygen atmosphere and that the gas they do breath will explode if exposed to uranium. With the aid of some of the most stereotypical scotsman ever; the first half of the book deals with them learning to use Psychlo machinery in the aide of Terl, a security chief with a desire for money.
They then use this against him by hiding nuclear weapons in the caskets of dead Psychlos and subsequently blowing the Psychlo home planet to bits. The second half of the book deals with Earth becoming a galactic superpower and Jonnie having to deal with the machinations of a bitter and jealous priest from his childhood. I am keeping this high level because, if I am honest, the second half of the book whilst interesting in places was a lot less fun than the first.
So why then is this book so shit?
Well to be fair to it there are some good elements. The concept that Earth has been invaded for mineral exploitation and corporate greed is a good one and it makes much more sense than it happening just for the sake of it. Maintaining an empire is expensive so you would only do it to make money, as our own history tells us. This gives the story a reasonable background and the geographical representations of places seems accurate. Likewise there is nothing particularly horrible with the writing style itself and whilst the plot armour is strong it does at least wrap most things up when it eventually reaches its ending.
The problem here firstly is that the book is long. Really long. The version I have is over 1000 pages and whilst that is not necessarily a problem for me, I regularly re-read The Wheel of Time, the problem here is that the story just does not support 1000 pages of narrative. There is no real character development and the plot itself is extremely linear. Hubbard attempts to add in some intrigue but its pretty surface level and boils down to greed and corruption. Despite being fun to read, due to the pulp nature, it is paced so slowly that you do often feel like wading through treacle and there is nothing at the end to show for it. This book could have been half the size and still told the same story (in fact it probably would have been better for being tighter!). I read this in about a week but at the end it was more a sense of relief than “wow that was time well spent.”
I said above that the writing style is technically decent enough. It does however fall down on character development and the stereotypes are strong with this one. Some of that is due to the age of the piece but if you are offended by books where men and men (and pretty much exclusively white for large parts of the novel), women do the cooking, cleaning and (by implication) breeding then this book will hit all your triggers. I don’t like adding racial characteristics for the sake of it but the absence of any balance here is so stark that it borders on satire. I also have to be honest that the lead being a 6ft tall, muscular blue eyed blond a little uncomfortable; it feels a little too much as it were. Also, I don’t know if Hubbard ever actually met a scottish person but the characterisation here is straight out of Braveheart. The result is a technically proficient story that feels souless.
That lack of soul also comes through with the plot. At no point did I ever feel that the good guys (with the leader of course being American because this was after all written in the 1980s) were going to loose. If there is no feeling of risk then there is no engagement and feeling of reward when they do win. I felt no connection to any character when reading this and would be hard pressed to remember any of the side ones. Likewise the almost total absence of reflection on them committing genocide is stark here. The Ender books also deal with a species genocide and do it much better (arguably dwelling on it a little too much in Speaker for the Dead).
So would I recommend this book? No. It is overly long, stereotypical and jingoistic rubbish which is fun in that you don’t have to think very hard about it or pay much attention. It’s the sci-fi b movie you find late at night which makes you smile because it is so bad but then you forget about it and never watch it again. The one saving grace is that it is not as bad as the film it spawned and for that at least we should all be grateful.
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