Battlefield Spork

Mission Spork is Go

2011-07-05T20:42:00.002-05:00

My overly-long hiatus has ended, and I have a new book to loathe and a new blog to do so in. Mission Spork is currently under construction, and I will shortly dive into book one of the Mission Earth "dekalogy," The Invaders Plan. I haven't decided on a tagline yet, but am considering "And You Thought Battlefield Earth Was Bad..."

In between working on Mission Spork, I hope to find time to pretty up Battlefield Spork a bit, maybe by finishing up the cast page that's sat half-completed for too long, or seeing what I can do to make moving through the posts easier. Other than that, though, this blog is pretty much done, if not quite finished. Not that it's going anywhere, hopefully. Take your time, look around, kick up your heels. Just, you know, if you want to read something new, you'll want to follow the link in the previous paragraph.

Or you could go to another site, I guess. If you've got places to go and stuff. It's cool. I understand.

Closing the Book

2011-03-02T19:58:00.002-06:00

I’m can’t think of much else to say. I’ve gone through the book, I’ve done some half-baked analysis, so now I guess it’s time to call it a day.

Battlefield Earth is a book of science-fiction, and it fails at both aspects of the genre. Hubbard’s grasp of radiation is ludicrous at best and dangerously misinformed at worst, and he treats it as a plot device more than anything else. Likewise, anyone with a background in economics will boggle at how gold is the most important resource in sixteen universes, while biologists will have a good belly laugh at Hubbard’s description of viruses.

The "fiction" part of the equation is similarly lacking. Despite his assurances in the book’s introduction, Hubbard fails at writing characters that behave like real people or make the reader care about what happens to him. He fails at writing villains who are threatening, or even villainous to begin with. His story is a jumbled mess of contrivances and plot holes and overly-long, pointless passages that desperately cries out for a skilled editor to take a chainsaw to it.

So who in his right mind would spend a year and a half going through it, chapter by chapter, complaining about how bad it is?

In my defense, I didn’t have anything better to do, and would describe myself as "differently sane" rather than "right-minded."

But working on this blog has been fun, Hubbard-induced headaches and all. It gave me something to do while digesting supper, let me write, and enabled me to pursue my passion of being an overly-critical, sarcastic smartass.

It was more of a pet project than a "professional" blog. I never got around to monetizing the thing, and put no effort into promoting it. I should really be surprised I got any readers at all, but nonetheless some people out there on the internet apparently found my ramblings to be a good waste of their time. So to those of you who made it this far, I salute you! You have withstood a bare-bones blog page and an author writing more for himself than for an audience, and have succeeded in going through Battlefield Earth by proxy.

So what happens now?

Vacation time, first of all. This blog helped give my evenings structure, but sometimes it’s good to plan a night without a self-imposed publishing deadline hanging over your head. At some point I may come back and tidy things up a bit, maybe add a cast page or a handy guide to Battlefield Earth’s alien races. I may even risk a frivolous lawsuit by monetizing this thing, blessing future readers with banner ads while the old guard can reminisce about the good old days before the blogger sold out.

And then… well, it’s been suggested that I do Mission Spork, a journey through Hubbard’s ten-book (!) Mission Earth series. And I must admit to being curious as to whether it’s any better than Battlefield Earth, of if not, than if it at least fails in new and exciting ways. So unless my schedule changes, I’ll probably have that to look forward to in my future. I’ll be sure to make a post announcing the new blog if and when that happens.

I guess there's nothing left to say, except "Thanks for reading!" Remember to keep irradiated bullets on your person at all times, pledge obedience to any handsome stranger weaving a tale of demons from outer space, and always oppose the forces of psychiatry in their bid for world domination.

Ways to Salvage Battlefield Earth

2011-02-25T20:12:00.002-06:00

Battlefield Earth is not a good book, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks a good premise. There’s always a market for an alien invasion story, and Hubbard puts a twist on this old favorite by being set a thousand years after the war. There’s some real potential here, buried like a Rolex in a pile of manure.

The biggest issue would be how the Psychlos are presented. The book is plagued by the discrepancy between what we are told about them and what we are shown, so the author would need to pick a scenario.

The first would be that the Psychlos are exactly as sadistic and irredeemably evil as Hubbard insists they are. Instead of ring toss at the Psychlo rec hall, we’d have performance torture sessions. Jonnie, as an experienced outdoorsman, should immediately know something is very wrong the first time he’s taken to the Psychlo compound and notices the complete lack of animal life. We should see vacationing Psychlos going out on man-hunting expeditions. Jonnie should be horrified at the stories of other humans, whose tribes have endured such raids for a thousand years, assuming his own tribe hasn't experienced this for itself.

The second option would be a little more thought-provoking – have the Psychlos as regular guys doing a job, who just happen to be occupying another species’ home planet. Jonnie would be struck by the common ground between him and a Psychlo like Ker, and struggle with the ethics of waging war on an occupier who played no part in the invasion of Earth and who isn’t actively oppressing him now. Jonnie would have to decide how to deal with the Psychlo miners, if he can try to recruit them or if he’s justified in killing them.

Another problem would be the state of humanity. Battlefield Earth is confusing because there’s so much regression amongst the human tribes despite so little reason for it. There’s no ongoing genocide campaign, only the occasional off-screen hunting expedition. And yet the humans remain near extinction and are at a medieval tech level at best, despite a hundred years to rebuild.

So we need to be shown why this is, and see the Psychlo raids that make long-term settlement impossible. Have a dedicated Psychlo security force monitoring the planet via satellite and surveillance drone, sending strike teams to flatten any large collections of campfires. Show us the Psychlos’ attempt at destroying history by torching every last library on Earth in order to slow the humans’ progress. Then have Jonnie visit the humans’ greatest treasure, a hidden city where the surviving records of civilization and science are meticulously preserved and reproduced – that could be the “underground university” the Scots mention and never elaborate on.

All that would make the setting a little easier to swallow, and from there the adjustments are relatively minor. The whole “exploding breathe-gas” thing needs to go because it turns the big, hulking monsters into big, hulking targets If each Psychlo is a struggle to bring down, it becomes a lot more plausible how a small population of civilian miners are able to hold onto an entire planet. Terl’s gold-smuggling scheme is similarly contrived and unnecessary – just have Jonnie sneak his bombs into an ore shipment. Instead of making a fortune illegally obtaining gold, Terl could be aiming for a promotion by coming up with a way to save the company money while boosting productivity through slave labor. And the catrists' mind-control scheme could similarly be tossed overboard, as it's mostly an expression of the author's derangement rather than a central part of the story.

A tricky bit would be rewriting the rules regarding teleportation, since they basically exist to justify the very particular sequence of steps Jonnie takes to save the day. The whole “one portal per planet” rule needs to go, since as I’ve ranted it means that the Psychlo empire, as run from the capital, simply shouldn’t function, and makes the threat of a Psychlo counter-attack a non-issue since they can only arrive during a very specific window. Problem is, if you do that then there’s no reason the Psychlos wouldn’t counter-attack the minute they realized that Earth was in revolt. Kinda a logical Catch-22 – maybe Jonnie has to invent some sort of teleportation jammer? It would cut Earth off from the Psychlo Empire, though at the cost of rendering the captured alien technology useless. Assuming the stupid “teleportation motors” were kept.

So yeah, needs more fleshing-out, but there’s definitely potential there. Obviously you stop the book after the liberation of Earth, and the middle section needs a chainsaw taken to it, but somewhere in Battlefield Earth is a decent story waiting to be told. Just a shame that its author had a bloated ego and an inexplicable hatred of mental health practitioners.

Good grief, I almost want to take a crack at a Battlefield Earth fan fic now. Maybe I’m the crazy one.

The Film of the Book

2011-02-11T20:02:00.003-06:00

Back in the year 2000, a movie version of Battlefield Earth finally got released. The film had been a pet project of sorts for John Travolta, who’d been trying to get it done for years, but kept running into money or special effects concerns. But just before the damn of the millennium, the circumstances were finally right for Battlefield Earth to see the silver screen.

And it bombed spectacularly.

Since I’m not much of a movie critic, and because Battlefield Earth the film has been picked apart by so many others – the Agony Booth, the Nostalgia Critic, the legends at Rifftrax – I see little need to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of it. My recap will be brief and focus more on story changes than the special effects failures or camera angles.

Like the novel, the movie starts with an infodump about how the humans are near extinction thanks to Psychlo invasion, but while the former accomplishes this with a scene introducing our antagonist, the movie uses a text crawl, which although cheap does make Terl’s later introduction marginally more dramatic. After that we’re taken to Jonnie’s village, where there’s another minor alteration for the sake of drama – rather than seeing Jonnie moping over his father’s lack of a funeral and bullying the village into giving him one, instead we see Jonnie race home with some healing herbs only to be told that he was too late and his father has died. And really, in that kind of situation, what can you say except "NOOOOOOOO!"

So Jonnie leaves his mountain village despite the elder’s claim that monsters will get him if he leaves the safety of the highlands. He bumps into two more cavemen, they wander into a remarkably well-preserved shopping mall, and then blammo, Terl has his big entrance, struts in gun a-blazing, and captures them. See, the movie Psychlos are smart enough to utilize the humans as slave labor rather than hunt them for sport. This will not stop Terl from having to convince his boss that Jonnie and others should work as a mining crew, mind you – I mean, humans using pickaxes to renovate a ceiling is one thing, but humans using picks to tunnel for gold?!

Jonnie becomes leader of the human slaves thanks to… anyway, things progress much like in the book: Terl blackmails his boss, and Chrissie gets an explosive collar. But instead of spending time showing the humans working at The Lode, the movie has them meet Terl’s gold demand by raiding Fort Knox, which the movie Psychlos completely overlooked while stripping Earth of everything of value. Then the humans go to a military base in Texas, I think, and find miraculously-intact nukes and Harrier jets. No chapters-long search for uranium, no disaster at The Lode forcing them to scrounge up some more gold from a dues ex machina, and no Terl freaking out about secret agent Jayed.

There’s an “action-packed” climax, nukes get teleported to Psychlo to blow it up – which is shown, rather than revealed hundreds of pages later – Ker defects to the good guys, and Jonnie blows Terl’s arm off with the collar he’d put on Chrissie, then puts him a cell at Fort Knox as “leverage” and to ensure an ironic punishment. There’s the suggestion that there might be other Psychlos out there preparing for a counter-attack, and the movie ends.

It is very much a condensed version of the book. The Village of the Idiots is greatly reduced in importance, and Chrissie is the only other inhabitant to be given a name on screen, as far as I know. There’s no Brown Limper, no Parson Wossname, no Aunt Whossit. And the role of radiation as a Psychlo deterrent is cut out, thus begging the question of why the “monsters” never go up there, as well as removing the “plagued by mutations” angle. Oh, and no Pattie. Nor is there a Bittie, though there is a caveman who keeps gazing at Jonnie in a distinctly homoerotic manner.

In general, the moviemakers culled the cast herd. The only characters are Jonnie, Terl, Ker, and Chrissie, and the rest are pretty much nameless extras. There’s no mission to Scotland, so the closest we get to a Robert the Fox character is a guy wearing a fox’s skin as a mask, which I guess is a shout-out to fans of the book. No Angus, no Dunneldeen, no… uh… you know, those guys. No Colonel Ivan, no multinational force of freedom fighters. Heck, for all we know the only Psychlo foothold on the whole planet was the one in Colorado. And really, these omissions don't hurt the story in the slightest.

Now, Battlefield Earth the movie has a horrible reputation, but truth be told I kinda like it. It’s awful, but entertainingly so, like most of the fodder for MST3K. Die-hard fans of the book – yes, they exist, and they’re braver souls than I am for holding on to their opinion in the face of such massive opposition – complain about adaptation decay. And they have a point, since the Psychlos in the book weren’t so facepalmingly stupid as to overlook Fort Knox in their effort to strip Earth of its gold.

But for all its omissions I find the film rather faithful, because all of the stupid things in the movie are just magnified from stupid things in the book. In the book, Jonnie says a few sentences and gets a host of strangers to swear their loyalty to his cause – in the movie, a bunch of cavemen just show up and do Jonnie’s bidding. In the book, nukes and old guns and books are still functional a thousand years after the apocalypse – in the movie, airplanes are good to go after a millennium in a hanger, and a flight simulator was bucking about and powered when the cavemen entered the bunker.

All things considered, the screenwriters did a good job with what they were given. They had the sense to stop the movie after the obvious climax, didn’t waste our time with a lot of mining and searching in the lead-up to said climax, and culled the cast of its extraneous characters. And hey, they improved the Psychlos in one huge respect – rather than a scheduled once-a-year teleportation surrounded by a communications blackout, in the movie Terl is able to call planet Psychlo (using a magical transdimensional radio) and request reinforcements.

The two lead actors get a lot of flak, but I’ll disagree with the critics here. Jonnie’s actor won a Razzie for his performance, which is missing the point to some regard – yes, movie Jonnie is a one-dimensional twerp whose only emotional responses are “angry” and “none,” but that is exactly how Jonnie was written. Likewise, Travolta’s acting is perfect for Terl – hammy, arrogant, and deep down, a pathetic attempt at villainy. This is a character who swears by “the evil gods” and makes an incriminating boast to a corpse in the book, and who doesn’t notice an explosive collar attached to his arm before hitting the trigger in the movie.

So it’s a bad movie, yes, but it’s for the most part faithfully bad. They didn’t botch something wonderful, they made an awful adaptation of an awful book. I’m almost disappointed that the movie bombed and dashed any hope of sequels. I’m curious as to how anyone who tackle the mess in between Battlefield Earth’s first climax and its grand finale, and wonder just how they’d film the “introducing JONNIE!” bit at the Kariba conference. Who knows - maybe a talented screenwriter could have come up with a compelling plot to bridge the two. Maybe they would have treated the Psychlos differently after the reveal about the implants.

I mean, Battlefield Earth has a decent premise at least. In the right hands something worthwhile might have been made from it. So maybe that was the filmmakers' dilemma - faithfully adapt something lousy, or try to improve it? Their mistake was keeping the wrong things and not doing enough with their modifications. Who knows, in a few decades Hollywood might take another crack at it, and I'll probably be foolish enough to pay money to see how they do.

Battlefield Earth and Scientology

2011-02-08T19:32:00.004-06:00

So I’ve written half-baked essays looking at Battlefield Earth as a narrative and as science fiction, but now it’s time to address the thirty-foot, fluorescent elephant tapdancing on the kitchen table – how Scientology fits in to the book.

I must issue a warning – I am no expert on Scientology. I do not have any official documents or first-hand accounts of the group’s beliefs, because I’m not willing to pay them money to hear about thetans. My knowledge has been pieced together from Wikipedia, that South Park episode, and other random sources. But I’ve never been one to let my lack of qualifications get in the way, so let’s dive in, shall we?

The most obvious thing to talk about is psychology. It is hard to overstate the enmity Hubbard felt for the field of mental health – he listed them as the number one threat to Scientology, followed by the media organizations that were fronts for psychiatrists, then the political figures involved in health and education who were also connected to psychology, and finally the bankers and financers trying to undermine Scientology who were, again, members of boards of psychiatrists. According to Hubbard, psychologists themselves had:

…the power to (1) take a fancy to a woman (2) lead her to take wild treatment as a joke (3) drug and shock her to temporary insanity (4) incarnate [sic] her (5) use her sexually (6) sterilise her to prevent conception (7) kill her by a brain operation to prevent disclosure. And all with no fear of reprisal. Yet it is rape and murder

So it’s no surprise that Hubbard named Battlefield Earth's alien bad guys the "Psychlos," who were controlled by a cabal of charlatan physicians called the "catrists" who exhibit many of the traits listed above. They represent a worst-case scenario for Hubbard, in which psychiatrists manage to take over the minds of an entire civilization, in order to… well, I’m not sure what the catrists were getting out of it. They probably did it all just for the evil of controlling others’ brains. I haven’t heard anything about the cabal of psychiatrists that controls the world wanting to reshape society around mining, so it's unlikely they did it just for the money.

And really, we get most of the book’s villains from Hubbard’s conspiracy theories. We have Arsebogger the corrupt and slanderous journalist, and a whole race of avaricious, soulless bankers subservient to the Psychlos and by extension the catrists. We’re told how the catrists were involved in the indoctrination of young Psychlos, and how the catrists used the ruse of medical treatment to implant their mind-control devices. The only thing missing is a psychiatrist-controlled politician, but instead of having Brown Limper become corrupted by an ancient psychology textbook, Hubbard decided to throw in Hitler.

Battlefield Earth, where if you oppose Jonnie you’re either an evil psychologist, one of their puppets, or a Nazi. Or a cannibalistic child molester from a mongrel African tribe.

Of course, I’m not sure how much an eternal opposition to psychiatrists is part of modern Scientologist teachings, so it’s time to look deeper. Back in the chapters concerning Jonnie's recovery from his injuries sustained halting the gas drone, I mentioned Dianetics, Scientology's precursor. Dianetics is all about discovering the subconscious triggers that are making you near-sighted/leukemic/gay, then defeating them with the power of positive thinking. This developed from Hubbard's story (that conflicts with medical and service records) about being left crippled and blind after his service in the Navy during WWII, but curing himself through sheer heroic willpower, much like how Jonnie recovers from brain damage thanks to his awesomeness.

But that is a minor detail, a mere lead-up to the link between Battlefield Earth and one of Scientology's most notorious beliefs. So it's time to talk about thetans, and tell the always-entertaining Xenu story.

Those subconscious triggers I mentioned a paragraph ago that cause all your mental and physical maladies? They come from memories, and I mean all your memories - childhood, pre-natal, past lives, and past alien lives. Y'see, 75 trillion years ago an alien overlord named Xenu solved his empire's overpopulation problem by collaborating with, you guessed it, psychiatrists. Under the pretense of tax inspections, he shipped billions of aliens to Earth, secured them at the bases of volcanos, and then used H-bombs to cause eruptions. As if that wasn't enough, Xenu had these aliens' souls captured and subjected to over a month of intense 3D movies in order to thoroughly scramble their minds. These wayward alien souls, called thetans, were left to wander Earth until getting lodged in human bodies, where they make your life miserable unless you pay Scientology for spiritual healing.

If I've done the math right, it takes about a $157,000 investment before a Scientologist is deemed ready to learn this terrible truth. According to Hubbard, an unprepared mind who learns about Xenu is struck with a triggered bout of pneumonia, so apologies in advance if my blog sends you to the hospital.

So what do thetans have to do with Battlefield Earth? The catrist mind-control implants, of course! True, it’s a case of aliens messing up other aliens, but the implants remain an evil influence that Jonnie and his heroes are able to learn a way to counteract and extract, just like Scientologists can remove thetans with e-meters. And really, the Psychlos in general can be thought of as a thetan analogue. The catrists, through the Psychlo empire proper, were able to change the way the other galactic powers thought and behaved, at least until Jonnie "removed" them and showed everyone the right path. And I'm sure you could make a case for how contact with the Psychlos and thus the catrists by proxy was able to corrupt the Brigantes and Brown Limper.

But when you get down to it, the biggest Scientologist influence on Battlefield Earth is the story itself. It’s a form of wish fulfillment for Hubbard, a way to rewrite reality to better suit him. Consider - a man is ostracized by his neighbors for his nontraditionalist thought, and goes off in search of enlightenment. He makes some terrible discoveries about a great catastrophe in Earth's past, and how humans are in thrall to alien forces. Through his brilliance and charisma, the man is able to convert others to his side and lead them to defeat these overlords, which include a monstrous order of psychologists who hold millions in thrall. Even though corrupt human governments side against him, the hero is proven right, and leads his followers to a golden age of peace and prosperity, becoming the most wealthy and revered person on the planet.

So remember when I mentioned how Jonnie had all those Marty Stu traits, and in early book art bore a resemblance to Hubbard? Yep, Battlefield Earth is a self-insert fanfic... well, okay, maybe not. It's an original setting, not an established work.

Doesn't make it less scary, though. In Battlefield Earth, Hubbard is wholeheartedly in favor of Psychlo genocide, touts them as the bane of all life, and has characters explain that ever since those dastardly catrists took over the Psychlos, killing them is more an act of mercy than murder. If the Psychlos are how Hubbard thinks of real-life psychiatrists, is he advocating the violent death of every psychologist on the planet? Does he think of those "controlled" by psychologists as less than human, fair targets for the war to save mankind's soul?

Very cult-like, where a small clique of like-minded individuals is encouraged to see every outsider as a sub-human enemy. Very disturbing.

From all this, you might be wondering if Battlefield Earth is an attempt to quietly convert others to Hubbard's way of thinking, to inspire a burning hatred of psychiatrists and prepare them to follow a Jonnie-like figure. The answer is far less subtle: Battlefield Earth was indeed written to get people into Dianetics and Scientology, but not through themes, but through corporate synergy. The book reached the top of The New York Times' bestseller thanks to obedient Scientologists buying it in bulk, returning the unopened boxes of books, and buying them again. With one Hubbard book at the top of the charts, sales of Dianetics improved just from people checking out what else he'd written. Battlefield Earth wasn't really a book intended to be read, which explains a whole lot.

Manipulation of sales figures aside, I guess Battlefield Earth could have been an attempt to indoctrinate as well, but it's just as possible that Hubbard couldn't not write a story about evil psychologists. The only way to know for sure would be to read his other books, to see if Mission Earth has sinister psychiatrists manipulating everything behind the scenes.

...Oh goodie.

"Pure" Science Fiction

2011-01-31T19:00:00.010-06:00

Back in the book's introduction, when Hubbard wasn't dropping names or boasting that he was one of those gifted authors who "could write about real people," he spent a lot of time complaining about the genre of science fiction's lack of respect, as "few people understand the role science fiction has played in the lives of Earth's whole population."

He insisted that Battlefield Earth was "pure" sci-fi. Not fantasy; he was rather adamant about that. In fantasy, "a guy has no sword in his hand; bang, there's a magic sword in his hand," while Battlefield Earth has a guy who's an ignorant savage, but with a learning machine that transmits pure knowledge via light hitting his skin - bang, he knows trigonometry. Totally different.

Nitpicking aside, to Hubbard, science fiction helped advance civilization:

It is the plea that someone should work on the future. Yet it is not prophecy. It is the dream that precedes the dawn when the inventor or scientist awakens and goes to his books or lab saying, "I wonder whether I could make that dream come true in the world of real science."

Compelling words. Maybe he wants to take credit for the future invention of a teleporter? Never mind that the term has been around since the '30s and was popularized by Star Trek in the 60's.

So in Hubbard's mind, Battlefield Earth is sci-fi because it encourages science to step forward and invent the devices he made up for his story, and because it lacks the magic and spirituality (and "easiness") of fantasy. Fair enough. But Hubbard had a very... particular view of the world, what with psychologists who were serial rapists and murderers, and a list of personal accomplishments at odds with public record and others' recollections. So I want to take a closer look at these ideas about science fiction, whether they make any sense, and where Battlefield Earth fits in to it all.

The basic thing to distinguish science fiction is, obviously enough, the presence of science which does not exist at the time of its writing, i.e. fictional science. A book with a gun that shoots bullets is fiction; a book with a gun that shoots lasers is science fiction. But there's more to it than that - the way the fictional science is treated is important too.

On one extreme there's "hard" science fiction, where the science isn't just a plot device, but something the author takes pains to explain in a way that is logical and plausible. An example would be Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside from the stuff with the monolith or giant glowing space baby, anyway), what with gravity supplied by centrifugal-or-centripetal-I-always-get-them-mixed-up force and a noiseless vacuum. In these sort of books the actual story can take a back seat to the author describing the technology of the future, and if the author isn't careful they end up writing a technical treatise instead of a narrative.

On the opposite extreme is "soft" sci-fi, where little effort is made to explain how the technology works because it's more important as a story element than as a thought experiment. Star Wars is the obvious example: blaster weapons, artificial gravity, deflector shields, TIE fighters screaming in space, with only a cursory attempt made in supplementary materials to describe how it all functions. Star Wars could just as easily as been a fantasy story, except George Lucas wanted to recreate those scenes from WWII dogfights so he went with spaceships and laser swords instead of dragons and flaming swords.

But in either case, I'm not sure how much you can credit the fiction with advancing science. In the introduction, Hubbard makes a very lame example:

...a man writes a story about some metal that, when twiddled, beats an egg, but no such tool has ever before existed in fact. He has now written science fiction. Somebody else, a week or a hundred years later, reads the story and says "Well, well. Maybe it could be done." And makes an eggbeater. But whether or not it was possible that twiddling two pieces of metal would beat eggs, or whether or not anybody ever did it afterward, the man still has written science fiction.

Yes, but how much is the author actually contributing?

If the story featuring a proto-eggbeater is "soft" sci-fi, then the device probably isn't the focus, and the author doesn't have any meaningful suggestions about how to build it. All he's done is float the idea of scrambled eggs, and regardless of whether you classify his story as fantasy or sci-fi, he’s not done much to see his eggbeater made reality.

But if the story is "hard" sci-fi, there's two possibilities: either the author himself is a scientist with the knowledge and skill to basically design the eggbeater on paper, or he's keeping in touch with smart guys on the cutting edge of egg-thrashing technology. In either case the science fiction is at best a byproduct of the developing science, not the motive force behind it.

And it’s really egotistical to imply that inventors have to be inspired by science fiction to make things in the first place. A guy writes a story about an imaginary egg-beating engine – so what? Is he the only person to have this idea? What if the guy who makes the actual eggbeater never read the story? The Wright Brothers were more inspired by experimental gliders than any stories about hypothetical flying machines, as far as I know.

So I’m not convinced of the relationship between sci-fi and human progress, but what else is the genre good for? Well, in the intro Hubbard liked to mention Robert A. Heinlein, a man who’s considered one of the giants of the genre. Hubbard credits him with drumming up support for the space program, which isn’t much of a stretch – Destination Moon gets a lot of praise for its realistic and plausible portrayal of the space program, which got Americans excited about the idea (if for no other reason than to beat those damned Commies to the punch).

But Heinlein did more than “hard” sci-fi, he told stories. Weird stories, involving immortality and time travel and alien contact. The guy had a thing for temporal paradoxes and incest. Heinlein could do a story like Starship Troopers, regarded as both a good look at war-time government and a thinly-veiled Cold War analogy, but also “All You Zombies,” about a time-traveling hermaphrodite who learns he/she is his/her own mother, father and child. While I can’t be sure if Heinlein was intending to herald a new era of brain-breaking time-traveling shenanigans, I doubt that’s what he was going for. He just wanted to tell an interesting story, and he chose to do it through sci-fi.

Now consider The Time Machine. Certainly “soft” sci-fi, since as best as I can remember the closest we got to an explanation as to how the titular device worked was something about crystals. And in the century since H. G. Wells wrote the story we still haven’t cracked time travel. But it’s considered a classic, even though the science itself is relatively unimportant, because it tells an interesting story that ponders about the far future, takes a look at the perils of social stratification, and attempts to subvert our schoolchildren into becoming socialists, which is why we must burn every copy of the book in our schools. The Invisible Man? Again, soft science that justifies the premise, which is an exploration of racial identity and Marxism and whatnot. In both cases the stories would work just as well as fantasy, and have value for the thoughts they provoke rather than the science they discuss.

But now consider The Lord of the Rings, with its message of simple courage and appreciation for nature. Consider To Kill A Mockingbird, a powerful condemnation of racism. Consider Harry Potter, a series about the power of friendship that got a generation of TV and internet junkies to read again.

Hubbard was only half-right – yes, science fiction can change things, but fiction period can change things. Whether a work is fantasy, science fiction, horror, whatever – a well-written book can change the way people think, transmit a new idea, and alter the course of human history.

So why was Hubbard trying to claim sci-fi was something special and respectable? Hard to say, but it might have something to do with his history as a paid-by-the-word pulp writer. Maybe he felt he had to make up for that. Maybe he needed to convince himself that his work was accomplishing more than a half-hour’s diversion and a paycheck.

But now that I’ve spent a few pages musing over the significance and purpose of science fiction, where does Battlefield Earth fit into all this?

Well, it’s easily classified as “soft” sci-fi. There’s blast rifles and spaceships and teleporters, but little attempt is made to explain how they function. We’re told the Psychlos’ technology lets them swap two chunks of space-time, but never how a box of circuitry and dials is able to tear reality a new one. This is to say nothing of the magical learning machines that transmit math lessons via a beam of light that hits your arm and somehow travels up through the nerves in your skin to your brain. And, of course, none of these ideas are exactly new. Laser guns, teleporters, instant knowledge, all of it had been done well before this book’s 1982 publication date.

Battlefield Earth doesn’t have any big, world-changing ideas to share. It’s a standard “overthrow the evil aliens” plot at heart, and the closest it comes to making a statement is with complaints about taxation and the author’s hatred and paranoid towards psychologists. There were some opportunities to ask questions and offer thoughtful contemplation – why everyone so readily accepts Jonnie's leadership, why people would add him to their pantheons without ever meeting him, why the catrists would turn their race into bloodthirsty monsters, or what’s wrong with the other aliens that forces humanity to be the ones to save the universe – but Hubbard never asks those questions.

The book doesn’t do much for science, it doesn’t provoke thought, but does it at least tell an interesting story? I think I’ve spent a lot of time arguing the answer to that is a resounding “no.” When I took a look at the cover art over a year ago, I wondered if the dated chrome style of the spaceships was meant to evoke a Flash Gordon feel. If that was the goal, the book certainly didn’t live up to cover – there’s no fast-and-furious action here, no larger-than-life heroes to be found. The action scenes are few and far between, and forgone conclusions when they occur. Jonnie is boringly unstoppable and almost devoid of personality, and the rest of the cast amounts to little more than cardboard cut-outs. The only pulpy element is Terl, who has a self-aware evilness to him that prevents you from taking him seriously.

It’s just a mess. Battlefield Earth is a swashbuckling adventure with no buckling of swashes. It’s a scientifically-minded story that includes economics and medicine, and gets them woefully wrong. It’s a book about “real” people without personality. It doesn’t inspire us to change the world or better mankind, it’s boring and stupid.

But I will say this – Hubbard was right, it’s science fiction. The science is often flat-out wrong and the fiction is terrible, but the technological devices in the story don’t exist yet. So at least we know where to shelve it, even if there’s little reason to read it. And who knows, maybe sometime in the future, when someone invents a teleporter, she'll mention that it works a lot more sensibly than the ones in an obscure little turkey called Battlefield Earth.

The Problems With Structure

2011-01-24T19:15:00.008-06:00

One of the most obvious issues with Battlefield Earth is how big it is. The hardcover edition I've got clocks in at 1,083 pages, as mentioned in this blog's tagline. According to the bathroom scale this comes in at a whopping "Err" pounds.

This is not to say that a long novel is necessarily something to be avoided. Lord of the Rings, for example, told a story so huge that wartime rationing necessitated it being broken into three books. But then again, LotR is the total opposite of Battlefield Earth - though Tolkien's tale was told across three volumes, it was a single story centered around a quest to get rid of a piece of jewelry. It was rather slow to start, got sidetracked in places, and had a surprise extra ending (or two), but there was a clear structure to the plot.

Battlefield Earth, in marked contrast, is multiple stories crammed into the same book. I ask you this: where is BE's climax? Is it the fight to take the minesite? The destruction of the gas drone? The defeat of the last Psychlos on Earth? When Terl's teleporter goes kerblooey? Or when the Pax Jonnie is shoved down the galaxies' throats? If I were to try to graph the story, which I won't because I'm too lazy to learn how to create informative charts for the sake of a blog post, it'd look like a vampire's lower jawline - two big spikes bracketing a bunch of little nubs.

The "main" story of Battlefield Earth, the one that the movie adaptation focused on, is the liberation of Earth. This takes place over 14 Parts and 451 pages. There's a simple goal the heroes are working toward- teleport some bombs to the Psychlo homeworld and rally the remnants of humanity to overthrow their alien overlords... well, alien neighbors really, there wasn't enough contact between the species to call it an occupation. But I digress.

And so does Hubbard! For the first two Parts things move along just fine - we're introduced to our hero and villain (for better and for worse), we get the premise, and we see the conflict begin between a captive Jonnie and a drunken - er, scheming Terl. Jonnie gets the magical teaching machine and starts putting together a plan to strike back at the aliens, learning what he can about his enemy while Terl trains him for labor.

And then we hit delays. Terl's demonstration is sabotaged by a coworker for the lulz, so we get a couple of chapters of Terl scheming and blackmailing. Then we have to watch Terl scheme and blackmail his boss to approve the plan. While you could argue that this is necessary to show that Terl likes to scheme and blackmail, it delays the plot and slows the novel's pace to a crawl. If you have to show Terl gathering leverage, just do it once! The movie wisely cut the sabotaged demonstration entirely, because it is redundant at best and filler at worst.

So around page 200 we get to Scotland and Jonnie convinces hundreds of strangers to become his army, and things start moving again. We get the Preparing For War sequence where the heroes start training and gathering weapons, but then we're hit with a double whammy - the Hunt for Uranium, which takes over fifty pages, and The Lode. Because when you think of a sci-fi epic, you're looking forward to reading chapters about mining. I guess you could try to spin it as Extreme! Mining because it's taking place in a dangerous canyon, but since the gold's only purpose is as bait in a trap, how much time do you need to spend describing how it was extracted from a cliff?

There's a brief action sequence in Part 8 when the heroes raid the minesite, but aside from random bear attacks and the capture of Jonnie at the end of Part 1, the story is basicaly three hundred pages of Terl being "clever" while Jonnie and the humans run around looking for gold/weapons/uranium. But finally, in Part 12, on page 369, does Jonnie prime the coffin-bombs and the attack on the minesite begins. Three hundred pages of preparation and buildup... and the battle for Earth takes place mainly offscreen, mentioned in a chapter or two. We get one chapter of Dunneldeen strafing a minesite in Cornwall, and there's a confusing dogfight between Terl and Jonnie, but Part 13 and 14 are mostly about Jonnie getting on and shutting down the gas drone. It's the story's climax, which I guess is meant to be an exciting game of cat and mouse, but manages to drag on as Jonnie keeps passing out and fumbling with a wrench and that stowaway Psychlo spazzes out. Then Jonnie falls in the ocean and is rescued.

So the Psychlos are soundly pantsed, but humanity faces a struggle to rebuild and prepare for a possible counterattack, while their hero recovers from injuries sustained in the brief and anticlimactic liberation of Earth. A good place to stop, isn't it? You've got an ending, but plenty of sequel hooks for the next novel. The movie, awful as it was, had the wisdom to call it a day at this point.

But Hubbard keeps going.

Part 15 opens with Jonnie recovering from his injuries, and then... what's the main plot, here? Terl scheming, again? The pathetic Brown Limper trying to become Hitler? Jonnie and friends trying to learn Psychlo math? The "best planned raid in history," the Psychlos' last and wholly unsuccessful attempt at posing a meaningful threat? The securing of the Kariba base? And then the Gray Man and a bunch of other aliens show up and... hover overhead for a few chapters, before launching an unsuccessful raid or two.

It'd be nice if it was like Empire Strikes Back and the plot threads all came together for a climax (and if there were only two plot threads to begin with), but nope. Brown Limper pops in and out of focus, the Psychlos go down like chumps, then Terl blows up the Brigantes, and it's generally a mess. I spent a good part of last year reading through these chapters and I'm at a loss how to put things in a chronology.

Now around the production of the Battlefield Earth movie, before it turned out to be an overpriced catastrophe, there were plans for a Battlefield Earth TV series (animated, if memory serves). That's what I think these middle chapters would work best as, a bunch of minor threats to be dealt with over a short arc, or maybe as the plot of an hour-long episode. Instead they're all thrown together in a jumble until Jonnie can sort them out one after the other. Like Hubbard had a lot of ideas but wasn't sure which one to focus on, and decided to not choose at all.

None of the villains are impressive - Terl's more deluded than ever and outsmarted at every turn, Brown Limper's a wanna-be dictator who is marginalized swiftly and holds power only over his Brigante goons, and the Psychlos are little more than big, explosive targets for the unstoppable heroes. An abstract concept like math is a longer-lasting obstacle than any of these dubious menaces. As a standalone work these chapters would be lackluster, but as the follow-up to a campaign to liberate the planet -unsatisfying as it may have been - they're extremely lackluster.

So I guess around Part 25, page 800 or so, we're into the final sequence of Battlefield Earth, centering on the alien coalition threatening Earth and Jonnie's plans to deal with them by mastering Psychlo teleportation technology. Except cracking Psychlo math and building their own console was one of the plot points for the middle section, so... I'm not sure how to diagram this. We get a climax, at least, when Jonnie and the bankers sell of hundreds of planets they've never set foot on and our hero threatens a holocaust on any alien who steps out of line. And then some sort of time-delayed climax from hundreds of pages earlier, when we finally learn what happened when Jonnie sent those bombs through the teleporter.

But who's the villain for these chapters? Terl's dead, Brown Limper's dead, and our major antagonists are some Tolneps we just met and who - what a surprise - are outsmarted or beaten down whenever they try to be threatening. And what were their names again? Snowl was the ambassador, I think, and the journalist was... on that's right, Arsebogger. Wow, must've forgotten that in self-defense.

And as for the chapters' content, it's divided between aliens dying in droves while Hubbard insists that humanity's survival hangs in the balance, and diplomats or bankers talking. When the Scottish pilots can down dozens of enemy ships all by themselves, and after all the one-sided engagements against the Psychlos, Battlefield Earth's battle scenes lose any sense of drama or meaning. They actually become less interesting than debates over the definition of piracy or a courtroom scene.

Then, once Jonnie saves the day again, we are treated to a protracted ending that shows how fantastically wealthy and venerated he's become, while Hubbard belatedly tidies up a dangling plot thread, shoehorns in some Psychlo backstory that would have been useful before the race had gone extinct, and waives Jonnie of any consequences for an act of genocide. There's the hackneyed "chooses the life of a simple outdoorsman" ending combined with the "he'll be back again someday" myth, and the book is finally over.

...Well, that was a refreshing trip down memory lane. What was the point I was making again? Ah, yes: this book is a mess. Like I said, Lord of the Rings was one plot told over three books, Battlefield Earth is three or more storylines crammed into a brick of a book. They share a setting, cast, and chronology, but it's more like reading an omnibus than it is an individual story.

The logical thing to do would be to chop this monster up into standalone volumes and make Battlefield Earth a proper series. Except this would be a disaster. Call it a hunch, but I doubt that after reading the first "book" of BE many people would be rushing back to the bookstore to read about the continuing adventures of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. And just how would you manage the convoluted middle section? Would anyone who enjoyed the comparatively better Book 1 find anything in Book 2 to make them want to buy Book 3?

L. Ron Hubbard has a reputation for craziness, but my guess is that even he could see that if Battlefield Earth was published as a series, there'd be a steep dropoff in sales for Book 2 on. But he had this huge, rambling (I am aware of the irony) manuscript sitting on his desk, not making any money. The solution, of course, would be to package it as "A Saga of the Year 3000," all 1083 pages of it. Get the consumer to pay for all of it, even if they give up a third of the way through it.

Of course, this raises the question of why Hubbard's other sci-fi adventure Mission Earth was published as a series and Battlefield Earth wasn't, though I guess ME is much too long to cram into one book... and I have the foreboding feeling that I'll be examining Mission Earth in greater detail someday.

The Problems With Psychlos

2011-01-18T20:08:00.004-06:00

Ah, the Psychlos. The "oh God, is he really being that blatant with the allusion to psychology?" Psychlos. The scourge of worlds, the overlords of universes, the bad guys of Battlefield Earth. And there's so much stupid about them.

I've already covered their bizarre biology as it came up in the book, but let's recap. These things respire something called "breathe-gas," which as we learned reacts explosively to uranium - or possibly radiation, since the terms might be synonymous in Hubbard's mind. Their eyelids and lips are "eye-bones" and "mouth-bones" respectively, and it could be interpreted that their hair is bone as well. Their skull is in fact mostly bone, with the brain smushed down against the spine like an afterthought. Their heart lies low in the torso near the belt buckle, and there is no mention of a protective boney structure covering it. They have an extra finger on their right paws, bringing their grand total of claws to eleven, not counting toes. And, in one was probably meant to be a symbolic gesture but instead makes the author appear an absolute idiot, they are supposedly viruses which have managed to form cells, organs, and a method of sexual reproduction, all in utter defiance of the very definition of a virus.

They're twice our height and strong enough to carry a horse under each arm, which combined with all the bones and whatnot would make them a lethal enemy to face in combat. Except it doesn't. Jonnie mops the floor with them in hand-to-hand, and their spectacular weakness to radiation makes them explode from one irradiated bullet. Even with the Psychlos' advanced technology, the battles at the minesites or in Africa go overwhelmingly in the humans' favor with kill ratios of at least fifty to one. Their supposedly invincible war machines prove susceptible to centuries-old bazookas or getting flipped by a mortar.

The question with the Psychlos is not how a bunch of Air Force cadets in Colorado could hold out for hours against the invading aliens, but why the rest of the world's military did so poorly. Yes, there was a gas attack, but apparently nobody made it to the fallout shelters or had a gas mask handy or bothered to make a phone call to a neighboring country to warn them about the gas drone lumbering their way. And I'm just going to mention once how achingly stupid it is for the gas drone to fly through a nuke unharmed but have its door hinges blown off by weapons fire from Jonnie's fighter.

I think Hubbard was wanting us to be impressed that Jonnie and the other humans could succeed against such a strong and dangerous alien species, but the ease with which they do so really undermines their accomplishment. Downing a Psychlo is about as impressive as watching a Star Wars character cut down Stormtroopers or those stupid Battle Droids by the dozen.

But that's just one aspect of what's wrong with them.

Consider the Psychlo Empire. The Psychlo civilization, as mentioned before, has a mining fetish. Cities are built like minesites. Public transportation looks like minecarts. They invade planets to mine them for metals which they sell or process to finance the next invasion to acquire more metals. Their very numerals are based on mining. They have no art, no literature, just an interest in digging and smelting. The Psychlos are one-dimensional, and their choice of dimension is an odd one.

That's just the Psychlo culture, though; what's really stupid is how the Psychlo Empire operates. They've built it around their teleportation technology, which they rely on nearly to the exclusion of all other forms of interstellar transportation. This would make perfect sense, since after all instantaneous travel is preferable to spending months on a space ship, if it weren't for the limitations of teleportation - the key one being you can't teleport near a location already undergoing a teleport. Limit one per planet, in effect.

So knowing this, the Psychlos come up with a plan. They'll use their homeworld and capital of Psychlo as the hub for the empire's teleportation network. It will only run one teleport at a time, and to avoid mishap it will run on a strict schedule, with each world in its vast empire only having a few hours per year to make contact with the homeworld, to exchange news and material and personnel.

How the hell would that work?

It abides by Hubbard's baffling and plot-convenient rules for teleportation, but is woefully ignorant of the kind of infrastructure required to run an elementary school, to say nothing of a city government, nation, or heavens forbid an interdimensional empire. The Earth outpost has three hours or so to get a year's supply of food and breathe-gas transferred, while sending off a years' worth of mined ore and exchanging workers and correspondence. If some disaster strikes the colony's food supply and they run dangerously low, or sickness plagues the workers, or a rival alien race attacks, they get to wait a whole year until they can send a message for help. If someone like the Tolneps took over a Psychlo world, the first the Psychlo capital would know about it would be when a stack of rocks didn't appear on the teleportation platform as scheduled. What would they do then? Send an inspector, or a note asking questions, and expect an answer the following year?

And speaking of years, the Psychlo and Earth calenders conveniently match up. Which means that, assuming 365 days in a year and an approximately three-hour window to make contact, the Psychlo capital would only be able to link up with 2,920 of its 200,000 planets. So some worlds were out of contact for more than a year at a time. And, of course, this leaves no room for military campaigns.

Empires don't run that way. Especially supposedly paranoid and dictatorial empires like the Psychlos', who are worried about its secrets being stolen or its population getting out of control. This also makes Jonnie's worries about an imminent Psychlo counterattack extremely pointless. They'd only have one chance to do so, for a few hours, at a predictable time. If they're dumb enough to pop in on the platform, you could just irradiate it and watch them explode.

And then there are the catrists, those charlatan mind-doctors who secretly run Psychlo society, are responsible for all their evil, and we only learn about in the last couple of pages of Battlefield Earth, long after they're dead. I'll do the whole Scientology angle later (though not much needs to be said, really, Hubbard's not being subtle here). The main thing is: they wanted to implant a safeguard to preserve the secret of teleportation, check. And they wanted to program their population to be happy workers, check. But something went wrong with the wiring and it turned all the Psychlos evil. And they put in the implants anyway.

Why? Why don't you, I dunno, fix the design so it brings about the desired result? Even if the catrists were utter morons and did the implants to everyone without testing or a control group, why would you continue to use them on subsequent generations? And if you're restricting the secrets of teleportation to "trusted" and "brilliant" individuals like Terl anyway, do you really need to implant every single citizen?

The answer is obvious, as Hubbard meant it to be: the catrists are Pure Evil, malicious for the sake of malice, causing misery even without the promise of personal gain. They want their people to be bloodthirsty and stupidly aggressive, rather than placid and happy. I can only assume it fits in with the "we're all nothing but animals" philosophy Ker mentioned the catrists pushing - the catrists are simply using mind control to ensure that society lives down to their expectations. Sort of like altruists using mass hypnosis to force people to help each other and cooperate, or Flat-Earthists using a superweapon to reshape the Earth into a rectangle. Stupidity combined with supervillainy. Stupervillainy.

Except - and here's the biggest problem with the Psychlos, the one that makes the book fall apart - the Psychlos aren't all that evil. We're told that the implants make them bloodthirsty, and that they have an addiction to causing pain and suffering. There's that incident with the captive Scotsmen the Psychlos tortured to death (in the process of evacuating, because they are idiots), and the Scots relate how they can't raid close to the Psychlo base, lest they be captured. There's corporate screwing over, and that one Psychlo whose name I forget sabotaged Terl's demonstration for the lulz. And wives can be purchased, so they're misogynist too, though nice enough to let females work as secretaries.

And that's it. When we see the Psychlos at the mine site off-duty, they're getting drunk or playing ring toss. In the very first chapter Char wonders why anyone would go through the trouble of hunting humans. We don't see the Psychlos flying out to find the ragged remnants of humanity and strafe them from a plane - not on company time, they aren't! When we see the Psychlo workers, they're not wondering when they'll be able to rip something to shreds, they're worried about pay cuts and downsizing. None of the Psychlo captives make suicidal attacks on their captors to sate their bloodlust, or tear each other apart in a frenzy of aggression. We don't see gladiatorial arenas on the Psychlo homeworld, or hear of the slave ships crammed with helpless sentient creatures for the Psychlo population to torture to death in the privacy of their own homes. They're pretty normal for twelve foot, explosive behemoths.

And Jonnie kills them. By the dozen, personally, and by the billion, indirectly and a little accidentally. He kills miners defending themselves against a sudden attack by creatures they had never heard of, or didn't know were sentient. He kills unemployed Psychlos trying to make a living on their overcrowded and economically-stratified homeworld. He kills Psychlo females who live in a society where wives can be purchased. He kills Psychlo children who haven't been implanted with the catrists' control units yet. In Jonnie's effort to subject planet Psychlo's teleportation nexus to a dozen or so planet-buster nukes, he sets off a chain reaction that ends in genocide, with the only surviving Psychlos all sterile workers. And he is lauded for it.

This is a race supposedly under mind control, remember? An empire ruled by a shadowy oligarchy, right? But there is no lamenting that more Psychlos could be freed, or that Jonnie could have somehow defeated the catrists to liberate the aliens. Instead the Psychlo Empire is equivalent to the Psychlos as individuals - since they are part of the machine that invaded Jonnie's planet a thousand years ago, they are fair game. The Psychlo Empire invades planets, so the Psychlo species must die.

Tolkien struggled with this. His Orcs were brutal and nasty creatures that ended up treated, to drop a link to TV Tropes, as Always Chaotic Evil and therefore perfectly okay for the protagonists to kill. But this clashed with Tolkien's beliefs of goodness and redemption, and he could never really justify why it was okay to slaughter orcs by the hundreds. He did better with the human tribes who ended up allying with the bad guys, and explained that they were largely misguided or lured by false promises or simply bullied into compliance. There's a lovely bit where Sam (in the books, Faramir in the movies) looks upon a dead soldier and wonders if he was truly evil, and what drove him to march from his home to die in a strange land.

Jonnie doesn't wonder, and Hubbard doesn't struggle. He expects us to feel elated when we learn of the utter destruction of a species who had the misfortune of living under a dictatorship, as if anyone would break out the champagne if a meteorite flattened North Korea. To Hubbard, the Psychlos are pure evil worthy only of extermination and it doesn't seem to occur to him that anyone would think otherwise. And that's pretty frightening, especially if you read Battlefield Earth as a Scientologist statement.

The Problems With Jonnie

2011-01-11T18:59:00.006-06:00

Terl is a lame villain, no big revelation there. What about the hero, then?

Jonnie's problems start the chapter he's introduced in. From the moment we meet Jonnie, we're given no reason to like him: he's sullen and angry, bullies a family member with cold stares, and ignores his girlfriend on his way to browbeat the village into doing what he wants. Now granted, this is right after his father's death and lack of a funeral, so you can excuse Jonnie's behavior due to stress (even though it doesn't change much afterward). But it's still a terrible first impression. We could have been shown him before his father's death to get a better look at what a normal, happy Jonnie is like, so the sulkiness would be meaningful and we could tell when he's recovered from it. Instead we meet a jerk, and then he becomes a stoic adventurer, and then he's an angry captive, and then he's an angrier resistance leader.

In the moments Jonnie isn't being angry or a bully, he's... well, hard to describe. Despite being the book's main character, there isn't a whole lot to Jonnie. Sure, he does plenty of stuff and has a staggering list of abilities and accomplishments - ace pilot, dedicated outdoorsman, unbeatable warrior, and so forth - but he has little in the way of personality. He's not a charming rogue, a wide-eyed idealist, a taciturn intellectual, or anything like that. He just spends the book doing things, going places, and killing.

We can infer some things about Jonnie from his actions, at least. He obviously hates Psychlos, and doesn't like any aliens meddling in human affairs. He finds those Brigantes disgusting and contemplates strafing their village without any exceptions for women or children. Jonnie has trouble with the idea of noncombatants in general, and doesn't lose any sleep over the uncounted Psychlo women or children he killed. Nor does he see anything wrong with joking about killing prisoners to let off some steam - or rather he is incensed when Psychlos torture a captive to death, but will laugh at the thought of doing the same to his Psychlo prisoners of war.

On the more positive side, I guess Jonnie cares for his fellow villagers, given his attempts to make them move to a less irradiated area. And every now and then he remembers to worry about his love interest. And he's humble enough to shy away from the fame he earns over the book. And he's nice to his horse. But that's all just the bare minimum of motivation, since otherwise Jonnie would be acting at random. Beyond that, there's not much of anything. Still more than Chrissie, at least, but Chirk is probably better-developed than Chrissie.

That's another thing - character development. Jonnie doesn't change. He's the same bland hero from the book's beginning to the end. Sure, he learns a lot about the universe and how to fly a spaceship, but there's no arc of Jonnie coming to terms with the burden of leadership, no meaningful struggle with the needs of humanity as a whole versus his desire to go home to his village, no culture shock from learning about alien civilizations. Jonnie travels all over the world, but has no comparative mental journey. He is a man who can blow up a planet and emerge unchanged.

But all of this does nothing to hurt Jonnie's popularity (at least in-story). Strangers are willing to follow him before they even learn his name, and there was that nauseating moment when he was elevated to demigod status by some tribes. You can tell who the bad guys are because they're the only people who dislike Jonnie or dare to go against him. To Hubbard, Jonnie is the embodiment of all that is right in the universe - and if this statement disturbs you, good, you're paying attention.

Now there's a concept I've thrown around before, that of the "Mary Sue" or her male counterpart "Marty/Gary Stu," which I should probably explain further. The term comes from fanfiction and is used to describe obnoxiously perfect characters, the ones who warp canon around them, tend to be princesses and/or half-elves, make the entire cast fall in love with them, and bear a striking resemblance to the idealized version of the 14-year-old girl writing the story. While Jonnie lacks paragraph-long descriptions of his lavish wardrobe or exotic eyes that change color with his mood, he does share some of the Common Mary Sue Traits:

No personality
Able to convince an entire Scottish village to do his bidding before they even ask him his name
Perfect physical condition, able to beat a bear to death without injury, even though his home village is blighted by radiation sickness and mutation
Elevated into pantheons by cultures who have never met him, attains a messianic status in multiple alien civilizations
Prince of Scotland (by blood transfusion)
Becomes wealthier than God
Blows up an entire species, but nobody blames him for it or considers it a bad thing, even the last survivors of said species
Allegedly, his portrayal on the cover of early editions of Battlefield Earth bore an uncanny resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard.

Now, it's not unusual for character in a story to achieve these things - defeat the bad guy, earn fame and fortune, marry the princess, and so forth. So is Jonnie a Gary Stu? I'd argue yes. As mentioned before, Jonnie's ability to earn others' slavish devotion is simply unbelievable, and things like the good-God-I-hope-Robert-was-joking-about-the-prince-part blood transfusion are just excessive. It feels less like Jonnie is being rewarded for his heroic deeds of genocide and thuggery and more like Hubbard is heaping praise and treasure on his character so we can properly appreciate how awesome Jonnie is.

And that's another thing - Jonnie has no flaws. Or rather, no flaws that are presented as such, save for those not-really-flaws like "he doesn't know when to quit" or "even if it's impossible he'll keep trying until he beats it." His decisions are always right, and his failures are due to sabotage or insurmountable obstacles rather than his personal failings. He's so good at everything he does that there's no drama when he gets in a fight or is presented with a challenge, just a wait until he achieves his inevitable victory.

Consider Luke Skywalker. When we first meet him, he's a whiny farmboy, but we can sympathize with him wanting to get out and see the world and make something of himself. He makes mistakes and rash decisions that almost get him and others killed, but he learns from them. The new powers he discovers are almost secondary to his personal growth. And I'll also point out that even though he learns that his sister is a princess, neither George Lucas or any expanded universe writer I've encountered has dwelt on the fact that Luke is technically a prince.

Consider Harry Potter. He starts out embodying a child's wish fulfillment, the understandable desire to be told that your mundane, unpleasant existence is illusory and that you're really someone supernatural, special. But his story is really about growing up, about facing your fears and taking on responsibility, even if you don't think you're ready for it. Harry makes mistakes - terrible mistakes that get his loved ones killed - but matures enough to surpass them and succeed, with a little help from his friends.

Jonnie starts out physically perfect and angry, and I guess we're supposed to empathize with him like we would a rebellious teenager, though really he's right (of course) and his fellow villagers are idiots. His story isn't about growing or changing because Jonnie's pretty much perfect already, though he does get taught how to fly a plane and do math by magical science. He has some struggles and setbacks, but they're always due to outside forces beyond his control, and he eventually outsmarts them or blows them up anyway. And he's heaped with praise and titles and treasure in case none of the explosions leave us suitably awed.

That's Battlefield Earth in a nutshell, really: some guy going around blowing up aliens and bullying the universe until it better suits him, and we get to watch.

The Problems With Terl, and Other Villains

2011-01-04T19:03:00.005-06:00

Since Terl is the first character introduced in Battlefield Earth, it's only fair to start with him. Though where to start with him is difficult to determine. I've already ranted about how stupid he is, and how as villains go he's pretty pathetic (in an entirely non-sympathetic way).

Just off the top of my head, some of Terl's low points include:

Nearly killing his captive by forgetting that the native lifeforms respire air, not breathe-gas
Neglecting and injuring the creature his big scheme hinges upon
Never bothering to learn his slaves' language, thus allowing them to plot against him even while he's present
Accepting that two creatures have psychic powers, even though said powers didn't help them avoid the traps that captured them
Taking hostages, then nearly letting them die through neglect
Setting his automated surveillance for regular inspections rather than constant surveillance or random inspections
Painfully unsubtle hints that he plans on double-crossing his "workers"
Taunting a corpse with self-incriminating statements
An inexplicable obsession with the idea of smuggling gold through fake coffin lids

And so on. Point is, Terl is hard to take seriously as a diabolical mastermind, and both his greed and stupidity keep allowing the protagonists to succeed.

Of course, to a large extent this is intentional. As early as Part One, Chapter One, Char tells him "you got your appointment because you are clever. That's right, clever. Not intelligent. Clever." This is also where Char expresses amazement that anyone would want to go out and hunt humans, directly contradicting the whole "evil bloodthirsty Psychlos hunting humans for sport" angle introduced later, but never mind. The point is, Terl is never meant to be as cunning as he thinks he is, and his ego surpassing his ability is his flaw.

Which is all well and good, I suppose, since characters need flaws to keep them believable (see: Jonnie), and there's the whole "evil sowing the seeds of its own destruction" thing. But Terl takes it to extremes, and most of his accomplishments come despite his best efforts (or completely out of nowhere, like how he cracks Numph's code). And like so many other things in Battlefield Earth, it's Terl's stupidity that allows the heroes to succeed more than the protagonists' own acts would allow. Terl undermines the heroes' accomplishments by inadvertently aiding them and devalues them because an idiot like him manages to be an obstacle to their success.

He's not a very good bad guy, when it comes down to it. Terl's a second or third tier antagonist like Jabba the Hutt or one of the named orc captains from Lord of the Rings. And yet, he's the closest thing Battlefield Earth has to a main villain. Because who else would it be?

Normally a story has a Big Bad, the incarnation and personification of whatever forces are opposing the hero. LotR had Sauron, Star Wars had Darth Vader and later the Emperor, Super Mario Bros. has Bowser/Koopa, and so on. These guys cast their shadow across the entire plot, and their defeat is usually a satisfying part of the climax.

Terl does not loom over Battlefield Earth's story. He's a major player for the first quarter of it, but he's dead halfway through. And he isn't the personification of those evil Psychlos, because he (one of the catrists' chosen, entrusted with the secrets of teleportation) is trying to swindle the Psychlos too. He's on his own side.

So who is the main bad guy(s)? Brown Limper, the jealous, power-hungry cripple? He's a pathetic imitation of dictators past and easily out-maneuvered by the heroes; the closest he comes to relevance is a few chapters in the middle. One of The Gray Men? They're only clearly antagonists towards the story's end, and never villains. One of the Tolneps, Arsebogger or Snowl or that captain whose name I can't be bothered to look up? Probably not. The Psychlo emperor? Never named, much less appearing in the story. The catrists? Jonnie only learns about them loooong after blowing them all up.

We can't even really say the Psychlo Empire is the force Jonnie is struggling against, since it never appears in the story aside from background exposition and a brief chapter set on the capital world. It'd be more accurate to say that Jonnie's opposing any hostile aliens rather than any specific character.

That is, if you view Battlefield Earth as a single story. However, if you break it into episodes, things work a little better - Terl is quite clearly the baddie of the "Jonnie in Chains" and "Liberation of Earth" arcs, while Snowl is the villain of the "Conference of Kariba" episode. Which I guess I'll have to explore further when I examine the story structure of Battlefield Earth.

This has been rambling a bit, so I'll try to wrap things up with: Terl is an idiot and not a very good villain, but Battlefield Earth doesn't have a consistent nemesis for Jonnie, so he's the closest thing to it. Which is sad.

It's Not Over Yet

2011-01-03T19:04:00.003-06:00

Just because I'm done going through Battlefield Earth doesn't mean this blog is over.

I've covered each chapter, summarizing them, quoting them, and complaining about them. Now it's time for the next step, to try and put everything together. I've often said that the book sucks, but I intend to take a closer look at why it sucks, so that we might learn from Hubbard's mistakes, thereby giving his book a greater value than as simply an object of derision.

My plans is to focus on the two main characters, Jonnie and Terl, as well as the Psychlos in general, as well as the book's pacing. I'll ruminate over whether this is "pure" sci-fi, pulp-era Flash Gordon sci-fi, or what. And I'll consider Battlefield Earth as a Scientologist piece, just to address the elephant in the room that pops up whenever one mentions L. Ron Hubbard.

So hey, could be interesting.

Epilogue - All Good Things Come to an End. Also, Battlefield Earth is Over.

2010-12-23T17:50:00.010-06:00

Finally, the last eleven pages.

Timeskip to "a few months later," with Jonnie hearing about Scotland's attempts to fund its reconstruction. There's talk of taxation for the first time in recent memory, which our hero scoffs at - "taxation, as a government way of life, was sort of silly business: couldn't a government earn its keep? Why did it have to go around robbing people?" I guess Jonnie's in favor of nationalized industries or campaigns for foreign plunder.

Instead of those abominable "taxes," Jonnie comes up with the idea for "contribution" boxes for the Scots to drop coins into (where did they get coins?) while Jonnie secretly pays for everything with his Buildstrong Inc. company. This leads to his Chatovarian workers deciding Edinburgh would be centered around the fields of "planetary government, extraterrestrial training, and Scottish handicraft," which ends with about a page dedicated to the layout and architecture of the new capital. Think medieval spires.

Edinburgh isn't the only city to feel the fury of Hubbard's fantasies of urban design, as the huge number of Chatovarian construction crews used to rush the Scottish capital's completion leads to a lot of workers needing something to do. So they set out refurbishing all those other ruins, even though they haven't been inhabited for "eleven hundred years" (I thought this was a saga of the year 3000?) based on future, potential uses for the city sites. Hubbard takes another jab at "modern" architecture with his report that America had "gone so madly modern and the Chatovarians couldn't abide it." Instead they copy the landmarks they like and apply it to the whole scheme.

So across the world the aliens construct gleaming metropolises with abundant parkland and super-fast public transportation, which are then are sealed up, waiting for a population. "Oh well, Jonie thought, when he saw all those empty cities going up, maybe somebody would live in them someday."

The man who came up with the economy that will save the universes sends his workers to build empty, unneeded cities so they'll have something to do?

What else, what else... Ker is head of an Edinburgh mining school, where the other surviving Psychlos help out as teachers... those Communicator folks start going out to other planets with former Psychlo slaves off hiding in the mountains and help them rebuild, since no other race in existence is capable of doing this without human help... Chiefy O'Nameless of Clanfearghus is declared king by the Earth government, but is benevolent enough to defer to tribal chiefs... "The Democratic Valiant Red-Army People's Colonel" Ivan gets Russia, natch... Chong-won rebuilds China into a center of intergalactic cooking where aliens learn to prepare cuisine they can't actually metabolize, with a side industry of silk...

Oh, Chrissie's upset by the new money again, because each issue looks increasingly more like a Selachee than Jonnie. Which is entirely intentional, since Jonnie wants his anonymity. In other bank news, the load from The Lode sits behind armored glass in the lobby of Galactic Bank's newest complex, with a sign reading "This gold was mined personally by Jonnie Goodboy Tyler and some Scots. He has left it with us because he TRUSTS us. So can you. If you start your new account today, you can reach through a slot and touch it!" This is both amusing and contemptible.

Blah blah blah, new teleport car, beings across the galaxies are awed by "pots and pans and suchlike" and demand these strange new "consumer products..." everyone's raving about this revolutionary new idea of not fighting war... urge to destroy universe rising...

Oh, Galactic Bank plants a report that's "leaked" by the Hawvin's intelligence agency, which claims that Jonnie's "if you fight I'll kill you all" teleporter platforms have been increased in number from twenty-eight to fifty-three, and hidden in the seventeenth universe. Since there's only sixteen known universes, this prompts a flurry of exploration that discovered a new universe, but not the Universe #17 Jonnie fabricated for that report. How clever.

All those emissaries who bent over backwards for the magnificent Jonnie become insanely wealthy by selling overstocked planets for settlement. Jonnie, on the other hand, has a minor gripe when his company's Earth division runs in the red making all those useless empty cities. Then that point is temporarily dropped when Jonnie and Stormalong and Dries go up to the moon to walk around, where they discover tire tracks and footprints and a gum wrapper and "the very faded remains of what might have been a flag." So yes, books in a moldering ruin keep better than a plastic-wrapped flag sitting in a vacuum.

Only when he's returning to Earth and spots a new inland sea in the Sahara does Jonnie discover how his company plans on running a profit. Those Chatovarians have been running around planting quadrillions of trees to convert the Middle East or the American Mid-West into forests to feed off-world and starving Chatovarians (they're beaver-people, remember). They admit that this will lead to climate change but overlook the fact that they're destroying millions of miles of grassland or desert habitat, thereby dooming countless species to extinction. Jonnie gives his general manager a pay raise.

There's a bit about Jonnie finding Pierre as a panhandling preacher describing how the former can walk on clouds and fight demons. Jonnie doesn't stand for it and flies him back to that mountain in Africa with the Psychlo cadavers to set the record straight. And then Pattie...

Ah, this part.

Now, Bittie MacLeod's sarcophagus survived the bombing of Edinburgh after "three beams of the collapsing cathedral [fell] across it almost protectively." So when Pattie turns sixteen, she goes to the crypt and demands that she be married to Bittie. The parson, "who could find no law against it," concedes, and she becomes Mrs. Pattie MacLeod.

She marries a corpse.

Let's examine this again - Bittie, whose age is not given to my knowledge but is described as a "boy" and never a "teen," meets nine-year-old Pattie. They decide they are in love and Bittie gets a "to my future life" pendent for a prepubescent girl. Then he dies. The nine-year-old is devastated, of course, but in seven years never gets over it, never rethinks their early relationship, never meets anyone else, and becomes set on getting married to a sarcophagus.

This is not heartwarming or romantic. This is ick. At least she founds the MacLeod Intergalactic Health Organization afterward, so something not horrifying comes out of this development.

Oh, and Jonnie and Chrissie have a baby they name Timmie Brave Tyler, proving that the tradition of silly middle names will continue, while disabusing any notion that such monikers are earned instead of given at birth as a kind of wishful thinking. When Timmie turns six, Jonnie "blew up" after concluding that the child, who's learning multiple languages and can do math in his head and drive a go-cart, is growing up "totally ignorant of the vital things in life." So he takes his wife and kid an disappears into Colorado to spend a year teaching him how to ride horses bareback and track deer, skills sure to serve him well in a world of trans-dimensional teleportation.

And rest assured, the legacy of hurling "kill-clubs" instead of figuring out the freaking bow and arrow for the love of God these people are defective will live on.

One day after this Dunneldeen and Robert the Fox fly over to explain how they've sent Thor (one of Jonnie's body doubles, remember) on a tour of the universes in Jonnie's place. But they also miss Jonnie and want him to come home. So he does, "and while Timmie learned to speak fifteen languages and do five kinds of math, while he learned to drive a ground car like Ker and drive and fly anything the company made, on any planet, including Dries Gloton's new yacht, his education was never finished. It was probably the one failure in Jonnie Goodboy Tyler's life."

So not that business with the gas drone or Chrissie and Pattie's capture or the death of Bittie. Just his son not being as barbaric as his father. That's the failure. Whatever.

Almost done... MacDermott the historian writes The Jonnie Goodboy Tyler I Knew, or The Conquer of Psychlo, Pride of the Scottish Nation (HE WASN'T A SCOT YOU MORONS) and sells 250 billion copies on its first day, though "it was not as good as this book, for it was intended for semiliterate people." And that may be my favorite line in the book, due to the possible interpretation that the people who would enjoy Battlefield Earth aren't quite literate. The good doctor goes on to found the Tyler Museum, and I'm just grateful it's not the First Church of Jonnie.

The book finally, finally ends with the news that a while after being called hom, Jonnie disappeared with "a pouch, two kill-clubs and a knife," to the concern of his family (!) and friends, though they understand that he never liked all the attention he got and kept saying he wasn't needed anymore.

But people in the galaxies do not know that he is gone. If you ask almost anyone on a civilized planet where he is, you are likely to be told that he is there, just over that hill, waiting in case the lords or the Psychlos come back. Try it. You'll see. They will even point.

He never went to an alien world, but he's right there. He's never even heard of my species, and indeed we weren't even sentient when he blew up a planet, but he's right there. He's surely been dead for hundreds of years, but he's right there. We only heard about him when our ambassador came back from a routine conference to announce that we'd been blackmailed into pacifism with the threat of annihilation by a species we'd never heard of on a second-rate rock who somehow managed to blow up the Psychlos, then we decided he was greater than any of our peoples' heroes and embraced him into our mythology, so he's right there waiting to save us from any danger because we're so damn incompetent we can't do anything ourselves, be it defeat a race of drunken morons or figure out an economic system that doesn't require constant warfare.

This book sucks.

Wait, scratch that. This book sucked.

Much better.

Part 32, Chapter 7 - No Hard Feelings About the Genocide

2010-12-22T19:13:00.003-06:00

Soth apologizes for not being able to personally build a teleporter for Jonnie, but is told that his help will bring prosperity to countless worlds. Soth finds the notion not just nice, but "very nice," and offers Jonnie a computer he's set up to solve Psychlo equations, and even has ideas of how to convert the Psychlo base eleven system (which they held onto because it was annoying to work with) to the sacred simplicity of the decimal system.

For all this Jonnie writes up huge checks for Soth, making the old Psychlo muse about how he'd have a dozen wives and start a noble dynasty, but of course that's impossible now. When Jonnie wonders at this, Soth explains that the catrists "long ago pulled back the only Psychlo colonies that had begun. They convinced the throne that colonies on other planets might mutate, might be able to live in other atmospheres, and constitute a threat to the crown."

I am at a total loss as to how having a branch of your species develop the ability to breathe a different atmosphere threatens your power structure. Then again, these are the Psychlos we're talking about...

Anyway, those dastardly catrists wanted all Psychlos to be born on their homeworld, where they could have those capsules implanted in their skulls. So all females sent to work on other worlds had to be sterilized. The Psychlo race will die out after this generation. Jonnie's sorta-accidental act of genocide is complete.

And yet Soth isn't angry at Jonnie for killing billions of his people and dooming his entire race to extinction, because "From the moment the catrists began to gain power, the race started to go bad." He says the catrists were the ones who destroyed the Psychlo empire, not Jonnie, and the civilization was doomed the minute they took over.

After this, Soth sighs at the heap of contracts and paperwork on his desk and tells Jonnie that it's been a privilege to work with him. End chapter.

What. The. Hell.

No wishful thinking about what the Psychlos could have been without those moronic catrists implanting pointless and defective mind-control devices. No regrets that more Psychlos weren't brought up like Ker. No tears shed over the deaths of friends and loved ones caught up as part of an oppressive empire, or women and innocent children murdered for the sins of others. Not even the barest flicker of hostility towards the man who wiped out your entire species. Instead Soth absolves Jonnie of any sense of guilt (not that he was feeling any) and carries on.

God forbid our handsome hero feel bad about destroying a planet and killing millions.

The scariest thing about Soth's speech has nothing to do with Battlefield Earth, but Hubbard's views on psychology. So if any civilization, any people are tainted by the catrists/psychiatrists' immoral teachings, it's okay to kill them? Like you're doing them a favor for ridding the world of such a hated scourge? They're acceptable collateral damage for the war against oppressive charlatan physicians? The destruction of those ideas is worth the price in lives?

This is twelve kinds of effed-up.

Part 32, Chapter 6 - Are We Done Yet?

2010-12-21T19:16:00.003-06:00

Jonnie is crushed with the news that he won't be cracking teleportation engines after all, but patiently waits for Soth to explain. The Psychlo tells how paranoid his government was that an employee might try to build his own teleporters, and so included fake equations and unclear sequences in their texts. Instead, the catrists groomed the most brilliant students to be masters of mining and the only employee on a given planet who would be able to build or repair a teleportation console. The other Psychlos called these elites "brain-brains," which is dumb, but not as stupid as the next bombshell: "brain-brains" were always appointed as Security Officers.

That's right. Terl was the best and brightest the Psychlos had to offer. I can make no greater condemnation.

Jonnie tries to look on the bright side, that with what he's learned about Psychlo math he can make anything but teleportation motors, but mentions how executives used to repair motor consoles. Soth takes this to mean that Jonnie is only interested in the circuit, not the math behind it, and takes him outside.

Remember how Jonnie popped the top off a motor console and the thing went dead? The solution is to stick it in a pressurized bag, because fuses inside the device blow out if someone reduces the air pressure by opening it up. There's also the now-expected dummy wiring and a hidden circuit in the cover plate. With some powdered iron, an electrical charge, and a metal analysis camera, Jonnie is able to get a picture of the true circuit. So Jonnie finally has what's he's after.

Even if he doesn't understand any of the physics behind it. Not that I'm complaining, really; I don't want to hear Hubbard try to explain how a box of wiring and buttons manages to tear space-time apart and enable teleportation.

Part 32, Chapter 5 - It's Possible to Like Mining Too Much

2010-12-20T19:27:00.005-06:00

Soth gives Jonnie a crash course on mathematics, discussing the Chatovarian binary system and others centered on intergers from three to twenty, but he admits that the decimal or "base ten" system is the best. "Whenever they discover it one some planet they engrave the discoverer's name among the heroes." So of course the Psychlos use base eleven.

Then he goes through the Psychlo numerals, explaining that they were originally pictographs. This is too good to summarize, so:

"Zero is an empty mouth; see the teeth? One is a claw; just one talon. Two is a being and a pick. Three is a being, a shovel and a rock. Four is a mine cart; see the four corners? Five is what we call the 'off' paw, the one with six claws. Seven is an ore chute. Eight is a pot smelter; see the smokestack and the smoke? Nine is a pile of metal ingots like a pyramid; nine of them originally; but now just the pyramid. Ten is a lightning bolt; symbol of power, now just a slash. Eleven is two claws clasped; that represents contentment.

"It's a little moral lesson, you see. If you dig and smelt ore, it lifts you from starvation to power and contentment."

Where to start...

First, this is probably the most effort Hubbard has put into fleshing out the Psychlos in a way that isn't plot-required. He's given us the bare bones of history, jack squat about their beliefs or mythology, but suddenly a whole paragraph about the reasoning behind their number design. Twenty pages before the book ends.

Second, Buddha on a pogo stick, MORE MINING. The magpie-like obsession with gathering minerals was one thing, and the city built like a mining base with minecart-styled public transportation was just sad, but now it's getting stupid. Like nothing the Psychlos came up with could compare to the importance of digging for shiny rocks in their collective psyche.

Can you imagine a whole culture focused on the primacy of pottery? An intergalactic empire seeking out new sources of mud and clay to make storage and artwork from? Glazed buildings? Ceramic buses? How about a civilization based around basket-weaving, or simple agriculture, or mammoth hunts?

Third, the alphabet suggests that the Psychlos got around to making a written language long after learning how to smelt ore into ingots.

Jonnie is amused by the Psychlo numbers, but presses on and asks about Psychlo force equations. Soth surmises that the human is after teleportation formulas, and after bargaining for a lifetime supply of food and breathe-gas, as well as private housing and access to compound books and tools, explains that some cryptography is involved - letters on the equations have a numerical value based on how the Psychlo numbers match up with the alphabet, as well as some stuff about the eleven gates around the Imperial Palace, each of which have their own name. So math + codes + ciphers + headache + disinterest + antipathy = the resolution to Battlefield Earth's last real plot point.

...Or is it? After four pages of lecturing, Soth admits that "all this will be of limited use to you." Oh no! Will Jonnie ever figure out the secrets of alien technology? Will he ever build those ridiculous teleportation engines? What a cliffhanger to end the chapter on!

Part 32, Chapter 4 - Even More Psychlo History

2010-12-17T18:44:00.003-06:00

Soth has his own room (his cough kept the other Psychlos in the dorms up at night), and that's where Jonnie finds him. The elderly alien immediately concludes that Jonnie is here to have him transferred again, and I have to boggle at him for a moment. The Psychlos know their planet got blown up, right? Their empire has collapsed, their entire civilization is gone. And they're all treating things like business as usual, as if Jonnie got promoted to their superior instead of taking them all prisoner. Their whole world has been turned on its head, and yet they assume everything's going to continue as normal. I mean, why would Jonnie transfer Soth? To where?

Jonnie evades the question, of course, and comments on Soth's collection of books, then asks how Soth's string of transfers got started. The answer, of course, is those damned catrists, who had him exiled for being impolite to one of their number. Or more specifically, one of Soth's students got yelled at by a catrist who insisted that they were all animals, but Soth shouted back denials. Soth's mom was in an "underground church group," you see, and taught him heresies like "sentient creatures have souls."

Soth goes on to describe the rise of the catrists from what he's pieced together of his people's history. 250,000 years ago they weren't known as the Psychlos yet, but there were fears of an invasion that allowed a group of "carnival performers--you know, mountebanks, frauds" who hypnotized people on stage--to gain the favor of the emperor. And "the next thing anyone knew, they were in charge of the schools and medical centers." The entire race was renamed the Psychlos after that original group of hypnotists.

We can only imagine how galactic history would have turned out if the ventriloquists or fire eaters had gained power like that instead.

Oh, and "Psychlos" means "brain" (or in an older dialect "property of"), while "catrist" means "mental doctor." What little subtlety that existed has now been kicked out the front door to sob in the rainy gutters. After this bit of preaching Jonnie flat out asks Soth if he'll teach him mathematics, and after a dazed moment of overcoming his lingering mental servitude, Soth agrees. End chapter.

Part 32, Chapter 3 - Talking About Math

2010-12-16T17:40:00.003-06:00

Jonnie goes through the old Psychlo personnel records and comes across an engineer named Soth, a 180-year-old former under-professor of "ore theory" who's been relocated every two to four years. Additionally, he'd been "cross-fired" each time he was moved rather than sent through the transit hub of Psychlo.

This raises the point that the Psychlos' insistence on linking every flippin' outpost of their empire to their homeworld slowed their expansion due to limitations of the single teleporter platform there. Jonnie's tried to avoid that problem by doubling up his platforms, dividing the duty into loading and receiving. This confuses me by implying that there are multiple teleporters running on Earth at the same time, or that while one platform is firing the adjacent one is receiving, both of which I thought were impossible due to Hubbard's rules. But whatever.

The reason for Soth's mysterious spree of transfers is a note from "Fla, Chief Catrist, Gru Clinic, Psychlo," declaring that Soth was "unsuitable for teaching profession." Jonnie rages how one "little slip of paper had condemned a being to obvious exile for a hundred thirty years!" Darn those catrists! I hope Jonnie... oh, right, they're all dead.

Jonnie doesn't go to this Soth immediately, and instead runs a test with a miner named Maz who Ker wants to get a tungsten mine started with. Jonnie brings up mathematics, but Maz doesn't try to kill him - instead he spends a long time thinking he shouldn't be talking about the subject, though he isn't sure why. Then Maz rambles about "somebody holding a whirling spiral in front of me," has a vision of his group's old catrist, and suggests that he do the calculations Jonnie was asking about for him. Two days later he hasn't tried to off himself, so Jonnie takes it as a good sign.

Jonnie also looks up the spinning spiral thing in a book called Hypnotism for the Millions and gives us another rant.

What a weird idea world those Psychlos had lived in! Imagine putting a whole population under a mental cloud! But the idea wasn't solely Psychlo's, for there it had been among the spider webs of the old man-library! And it had been a man-book which had led him on to the capsules.

How could any being consider itself so right as to think it should make all other beings into robots to do its bidding? He thought of Lars. Had Hitler been doing things like that?

No.

The scary thing about Hitler was not that he stole people away, held them captive, and proceeded to break their minds until they were unwaveringly loyal to him and his ideals. He just gave speeches. He ranted and raved and promised glory and revenge, and it was enough to make World War II happen. Sure, he tried to indoctrinate the youth and ran a mean propaganda machine, but those weren't his main means of recruitment or even exclusive to his movement. He never needed to brainwash.

Scientology, on the other hand...

Part 32, Chapter 2 - Dental Plan

2010-12-15T19:03:00.003-06:00

Yay, another dinky little two-page chapter.

Due to the danger of handling Psychlos, who are big stupid lummoxes that Jonnie can toss around in close combat three at a time, the humans devise a cunning scheme to get them to go through with the crazy capsule-removing surgery safely. It involves dentistry. Dead serious.

Jonnie comes up with a fake regulation requiring Psychlos to submit to teeth cleaning and repair. While the patient is under anesthesia they get their mind-scrambler removed as their fangs get cleaned. Though the aliens are unfamiliar with the concept of a company dental plan, an assembly line process is developed that sees all their capsules removed in twelve days. The Psychlos all admire their beautiful smiles ("A Psychlo admiring beauty was a major change in itself"), and Ker wants in on the action even though he lacks the implant.

MacKendrick warns that the Psychlos may still have residual Evil left over from tradition and education, and says it's all up to Jonnie now. Well, Jonnie and whatever Psychlos decide to hold his hand and teach him math, but let's not forget who The Hero is, eh?

Part 32, Chapter 1 - Roll Where?

2010-12-14T19:16:00.003-06:00

So it begins, the last Part to Battlefield Earth: seven more chapters followed by a ten-page epilogue. The end is nigh, and I'm not complaining.

An attempt is made to build suspense and urgency as Jonnie worries that without figuring out Psychlo math and therefore the secrets of teleportation-based engines, the economic prosperity he promised would never arrive, leading to another round of wars. I'm not sure if the Psychlos' ridiculous method of transportation is cheaper or easier than all the alternative engine types, so I fail to see what the problem is. Maybe it was explained back in Luxembourg or something.

The day after her surgery Chirk is still weak from illness and bedridden, and in case you were wondering about Pierre the Fainting Frenchy, he was last sighted "sky-hiking" his way back to Europe, far away from the big scary Psychlo corpses. And then Pattie shows up again, asking Jonnie if Bittie lived very long.

After the requisite "wave of grief" over the loss of the dearly departed wannabe squire, Jonnie nods, and Pattie concludes that if a doctor had been around that day, Bittie could have been saved. Jonnie doesn't have the heart to explain that Bittie was in two distinct pieces during his final moments. So Pattie snaps out of her depression and decides to become a doctor, an aspiration Jonnie approves of, but immediately sabotages by sending her to study under "Doctor" MacKendrick, who thinks Psychos are viruses.

The next day Chirk is in the library organizing things, and talks a bit about mathematics without going into a coma. So Jonnie rushes off to tell MacKendrick "they could roll."

I'm still trying to figure out if "laspin" is a cipher for something L. Ron hated. "Apsrin" is a bit obvious and nonsensical, but then again so was "Psychlo" and "catrists," so all bets are off.

Part 31, Chapter 9 - Chirk Wakes Up

2010-12-13T19:25:00.003-06:00

Finally, over five hours after her surgery, Chirk wakes up. Her first words after coming out of her months-long coma are about a library form Jonnie was supposed to send in, but once she figures out she's recovered from lapsin she gets spooked, wondering why those dastardly catrists haven't killed her yet.

"You're sitting there so they won't come in and vaporize me. Jonnie, that's brave and I should thank you, but you can't stop the catrists! They're the law. They're beyond any law! They can do anything they please, even to the emperor. Jonnie, you better get out of here before they come."

But Jonnie assures her that he "fired" the catrists, mentally adding "radioactively" like he's being clever. He tells Chirk it's her day off so she won't rush off to work, and has those two nameless Psychlo females take care of her. He tries to convince them that he's got paperwork exempting Chirk from vaporization, but "Whatever else he had said, he had a palm resting on his belt blast gun. They understood that." And so, as our hero threatens violence against captive females, the chapter and section ends.

Was there any good reason to drag out Chirk's awakening over three chapters? And then there's the whole "catrists" angle, that nefarious cabal of false physicians who wield absolute control over Psychlo society. Sounds like a good villain, right? Too bad we're only learning about them literally less than a hundred pages before the end of the book, long after they've already been killed.

Mind-blowing storytelling, L. Ron. Most writers set up the Big Bad early on and have the whole plot build up to the final showdown. You resolve the main plot less than a third of the way through your book, have an absolute dunce for an antagonist, and then explain how the hero accidentally and unknowingly defeated the real bad guys almost as an afterthought.

Part 31, Chapter 8 - Chirk Doesn't Wake Up

2010-12-10T19:13:00.003-06:00

While Jonnie's guarding Chirk's recovery room, Chrissie comes by and apologizes for losing Pattie, but quickly moves on to more important matters - the proofs of the new Galactic Bank currency. It's not the annoying Psychlo base-eleven math system that's bothering her, it's how Jonnie's portrait has an upturned nose, gray skin, and gills. Jonnie just laughs off how he's been turned into a Selachee and says he might bring it up next issue.

Once the girls leave, Ker shows up with a bunch of aliens who all shrink away from the sight of Jonnie, to the latter's confusion. Then there's a narrated paragraph mentioning Ker's actions during the attack on Edinburgh, I guess because Hubbard couldn't figure out a way to work it into a conversation. Turns out Ker was in a cave guarding some African children, telling them stories through a Psychlo-Dutch translator device (I guess the Chinkos were just anal-retentive about translating long-dead languages). After this heartwarming if random bit of character development, Ker asks about getting his mine running before leaving.

Aaaaand that's all that happens. Chirk doesn't wake up, and Jonnie talks to some people. Another exciting entry in the saga of Battlefield Earth.

You have to wonder how much Jonnie likes Chirk. On the one hand, he's trying to revive her first, but on the other hand, he's attempting a potentially dangerous, untested operation on her instead of some other Psychlo.

Part 31, Chapter 7 - I Think It's a Reference to "Psychiatrist"

2010-12-09T21:04:00.004-06:00

Next morning, it's time to try the mind control device-ectomy on Chirk, who is still comatose and near-death. MacKendrick sets the operation up in a completely different room from the one they played with Psychlo corpses in.

"We don't know enough about Psychlo diseases," he told Jonnie, "and their cadavers might be very infective to them when decayed. They are built of viruses and there may be a virus smaller than viruses. So change your clothes and get brand-new wires and equipment."

Mac has now gone from "obviously not a real doctor" to "dangerous to have around medical equipment."

Jonnie takes a minecart to pick up Chirk - y'know, the Psychlos are supposed to be the ones with a mining fixation, but every time Jonnie or another human needs to have something moved, they push it on a minecart. Psychlo corpses, hologram projectors, you name it, they never get a dolly or wheelbarrow. Always a minecart.

Anyway, the two Psychlo females caring for Chirk are incredulous at his claims of trying to take her in for surgery. They think he's here to torture her, or kill her - the only treatment the "catrists" allowed for "laspin." Some narration (not dialogue) explains that the "catrists" were "the medical scientist cult that really ran Psychlo," and "laspin" was a disease that Psychlo females could get, most commonly at young ages. It's explained that it was illegal to try to cure laspin, or for "an unauthorized person to trifle with the mind." Anyone who came down with it was simply executed.

Jonnie carts Chirk out anyway, hauls her in for surgery, and just under two hours later her mental wiring is extracted. Mac says it'll be another four hours until the anesthesia (Psychlos get conked out by methane, which just begs for a fart joke) wears off. The two other females are astonished when Jonnie brings Chirk back alive, but assume that he's going to order them to kill her instead. After kicking them out he ends up standing guard outside her room lest someone else get any "odd Psychlo ideas."

Oh, and Jonnie has a "Poor Chirk" moment when he sees how thin she is. Didn't he have fun getting her all terrified half a book ago?

Part 31, Chapter 6 - Pattie Goes Where She Wants

2010-12-08T18:58:00.003-06:00

MacKendrick shows up and Jonnie explains that "we're going to do it!" He's referring to the capsules implanted in Psychlos' skulls, but I'll take what amusement the accidental innuendo gives me.

Yes, Jonnie has an idea. He and Mac have known of a hole or gap a "thirty-second of an inch in diameter" where the Psychlo jawbone connects under the ear. Both of them dismissed it as being too small to fit an instrument through, even though it's aligned perfectly with those nefarious brain-scrambling capsules. But Jonnie has... well, it's unclear exactly how he cracked this medical mystery and what thought process allows him to advance the plot. But he's nevertheless figured it out.

The short version is that you can stick some wires through that hole and connect them to a molecular plating gun, which using electrolysis or something will allow you to coat your bit of cerebral short-circuitry with metal transmitted down the length of the wires. Jonnie and MacKendrick manage to implant and remove a device from one of the dead Psychlos, and they're eager to try it on a live one. End chapter.

There, I just condensed four pages of technobabble.

Two other things happen, though: first, Jonnie's magical singing button goes off ("Gone are the days/When my heart was young and gay/Gone are the days...") in the middle of the surgery, so he finally gets rid of the stupid thing.

Second, one of the nurses mentions "I don't think this little girl should be in here during all this," which is when Jonnie finally notices Pattie standing nearby. I almost burst out laughing - after she was overlooked and got to stow away on his plane, she wanders off again! Jonnie "put [her] down" somewhere at the beginning of the chapter, and then everyone forgot about her until she meandered her way into a hospital! And even then it took a while for anybody in surgery to notice there was a little girl hanging around!

But it's all okay, you see, because Pattie is finally acting interested in something (even if it is a Psychlo skull or a vivisected alien), so Jonnie convinces the nurses to let a ten-year-old stay and watch some surgery.

I just realized - if Pattie is ten now, after an indeterminate timeskip that was preceded by a year in captivity, then Chrissie took her into the unknown wilds when she was at best nine years old. She took her nine-year-old sister with her into lands filled with wolves and boars and bears and Psychlos, with no warrior escort, or even a weapon.

Chrissie is criminally stupid.

Wait, that's not fair, Pattie kept following her when she tried to leave. Which means that even at an early age, nobody cared to stop Pattie from wandering around. And since nobody came racing after Chrissie or Pattie once they left, they probably didn't notice Pattie missing back then, either.

Someone get that kid a leash. And maybe one of those collars with a bell on it.

Part 31, Chapter 5 - Fearsome Psychlo Corpses

2010-12-07T19:20:00.002-06:00

After a few minutes Jonnie notices that Pierre is unconscious. While he's hauling Frenchy into the plane, he is startled to find Pattie inside helping hold the door open, but reasons that "They must have overlooked her in their scramble to get through the rain. She made so little sound and motion these days she easily went unnoticed."

So Pattie's doting sister Chrissie completely overlooked her, nobody else amongst the passengers noticed the mopey ten-year-old getting left behind, and nobody realized she was missing after the plane took off and radioed Jonnie about it, either. Pattie's such a non-entity that even other characters forget about her.

Jonnie gets Pierre and the two frosty Psychlos loaded and flies back to the base, where there is, of course, a crowd of admirers. When they see two inert, damp Psychlos dropped by a forklift into the back of a truck like so many sacks of manure, everyone recoils in fear, because Battlefield Earth is full of frickin' idiots. Ker "explains" that the two corpses were Psychlo guerillas hiding in the jungle who attacked Jonnie's copilot, but Jonnie got mad and strangled both of the aliens at once. A former Hawvin officer breathes "No wonder we lost this war," totally buying the story that Jonnie is strong enough to lift two hulking Psychlos, each twice his size, at once.

The chapter ends with Ker trying not to laugh, and me wondering if there was any point to these scenes besides showing how timid and gullible everyone is. I mean, we could've cut right to the dissection table with a paragraph explaining that Jonnie retrieved the Psychlo corpses from the mountains. But nooooo, Hubbard wanted to spend time laughing at a cowardly Frenchman and stupid Hawvins.

Part 31, Chapter 4 - Now We Laugh at the French

2010-12-06T19:28:00.004-06:00

Jonnie flies everyone to the Lake Victoria. It's night now and there's a storm hampering vision, so he's flying mainly by instruments. And poor Pierre the French copilot is terrified the whole time.

On landing he finds Ker waiting for them. The usually friendly Psychlo is cranky over his own struggles with Psychlo math, as well as the mopey behavior of "all those other ------ ------ Psychlos" who have been depressed ever since they saw pictures of their home world aflame, the bunch of babies. Jonnie has him get Pattie and Chrissie settled in the compound, then he and Ker and Pierre are off for the snowy mountain peaks they'd stashed Psychlo corpses on from that ambush all those chapters ago.

Pierre, naturally, panics and babbles that Jonnie's "landing on a cloud!" His tribe had been under the "domination" of Jesuit priests who "controlled it by instilling a heavy fear of heaven and hell, mostly the latter," so poor Pierre's superstitious and easily spooked. He has to don a jetpack before opening the door and stepping out onto the "clouds," which he's sure Jonnie can walk on but not confident about his own chances.

I wonder how the Jesuits would react to all this Jonnie worship?

An unconcerned Jonnie uses a crowbar to pry a corpse out from the snow and ice. The sight of a "demon rising from out of the cloud," combined with "Ghost Riders in the Sky" playing from Jonnie's magic button at an inopportune moment, is enough to make poor Pierre faint dead away. Har har, the French are cowards, har har.

Keep in mind that Pierre just flew up there with a live Psychlo. A Psychlo who jokes and talks with Jonnie. And he still faints away at the sight of a dead one. But hey, we've got to maintain the stereotype, dammit.

And that's all that happens this chapter.

Oh yeah, we're told more about Fobia, which is a planet instead of a moon... I think. Anyway, it's got such an elliptical orbit that its atmosphere alternatively freezes, liquefies, and evaporates. Which explains why you can "mine" breathe-gas from it, though not how the deuce Psychlo produced it. Anyway, Ker found it, so he won't suffocate anytime soon, just in case anyone cared.

Part 31, Chapter 3 - That's Enough Luxembourg, Let's Go Back to Africa

2010-12-03T19:35:00.003-06:00

Now we're airborne somewhere near the Alps as Jonnie flies south with his new copilot, a young Frenchman just out of training named Pierre (of course) Solens, who (of course) is a little nervous at their low altitude. Along the way the plane is pestered by some of the Chatovarian-made security drones, part of Earth's new top-of-the-line defenses.

Drones with a really weird defensive measure:

Each one had a big eye painted on its nose. But those big, staring eyes were not a Chatovarian fixation on decoration: a pilot would instinctively shoot into the center of them, and if a pilot did, the drone used the shot as a return carrier wave to send a surge back that blew up the attacker's own ammunition and thereby his ship. Don't shoot at one of the eyes!

This is just one of those little details that becomes completely stupid with a bit of thought. So all alien races instinctively attack the eyes of their opponents? Every navy in the universes uses a sustained "beam" of energy to attack with that can be reversed somehow, rather than distinct "bolts" of energy or, God forbid, missiles or bullets? All of the myriad alien air forces will wait until they're close enough to see the markings on an enemy's plane before engagin, instead of firing missiles at extreme range using instruments only?

Well, points for creativity, at least. This is stupid in a way I haven't seen before.

Then there's talk about an orbital probes' "lens" that acts as a "light magnet" to create magnifications "into the tens of trillions," narration about how wildly popular the "peace or I'll kill you" treaty is, blah blah blah... Pattie is ten now, and still mopey and crushed from Bittie's death - oh, this will get worse, folks. Mr. Tsung's brother is starting a college of diplomacy, while Tsung himself is hiring Russian and Chinese girls to work as clerks and "vocotyper" operators - L. Ron Hubbard, feminist. Lord Voraz wants to come up with a formula for the validity of commercial loans...

I should just make a bullet point list of character updates. Nothing's really happening except we're being told how a bunch of third-tier characters are discovering commerce and industry.

Well, there is a bastardization of a Christmas carol. Dries gave Jonnie a Galactic Bank button that uses magical science to play music based on "old records of American ballads" once you hum a note. Jonnie clears his throat and the trinket plays, to the tune of "Jingle Bells:"

Galactic Bank!
Galactic Bank!
My friend so tried and true.
Oh, what fun it is to have
A neighbor such as you!

I guess this is some of the "humor" promised on the back of the book jacket. When Jonnie laughs the button switches to "Home on the Range," right around the time they spot Lake Victoria. Maybe next chapter we'll learn what revelation Jonnie had that sparked this excursion.

Part 31, Chapter 2 - Jonnie's Palace

2010-12-02T19:36:00.004-06:00

After accusing his horse of showing off, Jonnie arrives at his "palace," formerly the home of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. Jonnie and Chrissie found it as a collection of stone piles, but then Chrissie started running around, excitedly chattering about where they could put the cattle yard and the tanning vats and chimneys and how they could divert a stream to a kitchen.

So Jonnie got those beaver aliens to "restore" the ruins with a mix of Gothic and Neo-Gothic architecture, featuring armored slabs of rose and green and other-colored marble. They did divert a stream to the kitchen, but the place has plumbing, and they did build chimneys, though the fires are simulated and powered by "solar-driven infraheaters." There's even a drawbridge, but not a starship landing pad because Jonnie notices how Dries Gloton must have visited by the scorch marks on the lawn.

And... well, there's huge, rambling paragraphs describing how minor characters are all becoming successful and wealthy. The original Small Gray Man got a salary raise and spends a lot of time in Scotland. Mr. Tsung's family is living in Jonnie's palace, making lots of money by selling paintings or dragon medallions, when they aren't cutting Jonnie's hair or spraying a molecule-thick layer of metal on the furniture so the Chatovarians aren't tempted to eat it.

After coming home, Jonnie, who has been instinctively expecting a "nice thing" to happen today, suddenly realizes what it is without letting us know until next chapter. He has a Buddhist communicator order I-refuse-to-call-this-man-a-doctor MacKendrick to meet Jonnie for a medical conference in Africa. Chrissie is to bring Pattie along even though she doesn't feel well. And Mr. Tsung rushes to gather "a white coat and a pair of spectacles--which had no glass in them--in a sack. That was proper dress he had seen in ancient pictures."

I think that last bit was a try at humor, but it made me depressed.

The most random moment in this chapter comes while mentioning how Jonnie "was treated to a dissertation on architecture," allowing L. Ron Hubbard to offer a scathing critique on a certain style:

It was only then that Jonnie found that "modern" had been a type of architecture prevalent on Earth about eleven hundred years ago; that it consisted of plain, straight up-and-down walls on a rectangular base; that it often was a vast expanse of glass windows; that it had been conceived by somebody dedicated to stamping out all indigenous architecture of an area. In short, modern was an architecture that wasn't architecture, but just a cheap way to throw rubbish in the air and get paid for it.

It's weird: when Pratchett talks about building a box and gluing some cherubs and halved columns on the outside to create "architecture," I don't mind. But when Hubbard does it I find him arrogant and obnoxious. Maybe I'm prejudiced? Or maybe it's all about delivery. Pratchett makes his criticisms through wordplay and humor. Hubbard has his opinions presented as fact to characters a thousand years in the future, as if he's certain that history will vindicate him.

And for all his talk about ugly buildings, I'm can't imagine a "Neo-Gothic" palace with multicolored marble walls turning out pretty...

Part 31, Chapter 1 - Now We're in Luxembourg

2010-12-01T19:33:00.005-06:00

Earth is free of alien aggression and free of debt, the Psychlo menace is gone forever, Jonnie has gripped the collective cojones of the galaxies' races to enforce a permanent peace, and humanity is on track toward a new era of unprecedented prosperity. By most standards, the story is over.

But Hubbard has more to say. We've got to see exactly how ridiculously wealthy Jonnie is, and how much every sentient lifeform adores him. We've got to take another look at the Psychlos to see how eeeeeevil they are (were). And there's more Psychlo mathematics to ponder.

So the chapter opens with Jonnie riding Windsplitter along the Alzette River, Luxembourg, watching a bear go fishing and pondering recent events. Three months ago he bought the entire Grand Duchy and set up his teleportation console factory with Angus and Tom Smiley, and now they're able to pop out two hundred of the things in a day. Jonnie named the company "The Rig Industry," displaying laudable humility for not naming it after himself, and at the same time showing a breathtaking lack of creativity for a reputed genius.

He's also bought up eleven firms from an alien race called the Chatovarians, whose planetary defenses are so strong that not one of their seven hundred worlds has fallen to Psychlo invasion, and are even capable of downing gas drones. Now Earth's defenses are being built by the short, bright orange, buck-toothed, industrious... umm... well, if they were yellow I'd accuse them of being a Chinese stereotype, but since these Chatovarians are merely "bright orange" I'm just highly suspicious. Maybe it's just a coincidence - I mean, these guys have webbed hands and eat wood, and that's not part of any Oriental stereotype I've ever heard of.

So what's the tally now? We've had shark people, tree people, dinosaur people, and now beaver people? I wonder if the Psychlos were supposed to be a type of animal. Maybe bears?

Anyway, Jonnie is pondering the mystery of teleportation motors, which he can't figure out how to build because of "Those blasted Psychlo mathematics! Nothing ever balanced." So that's one of the lingering plot threads these last seventy pages will help clear up. And that's all there is to this chapter.

Random facts: Tom Smiley's wife Margarita is pregnant. I wonder if she ever learned English? Also, Windsplitter "sort of laughed" in this chapter, and when Jonnie touches his shoulder the animal mistakes the gesture for "run at full speed." I'm going to keep an eye on this horse.

Part 30, Chapter 5 - Because Nobody Likes Low-Income Heroes

2010-11-30T19:47:00.000-06:00

Most of this chapter is talking about various bits of paperwork and how MacAdam and Baron Firstnameless von Roth pulled off their scheme.

First Jonnie asks how they convinced the banking executives on the Selachee homeworld to go along with the plan. MacAdam reveals that they used the gold collected from The Lode to open their account, and due to inflation the stuff went for a half a million credits an ounce. Though for all its monetary worth, the alien bankers have decided to put the gold in an exhibit in the main bank's foyer, due to its historical value. I can imagine it now: "See! Shiny yellow ore that was mined by laborers supervised by The Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who brought happiness to all races!"

Then Jonnie ponders how they got Ker to sign the paperwork as Head of Planet, which implies that he thinks so little of his "shaftmate" that he assumes Ker wouldn't cooperate out of the goodness of his heart. The baron relays how Ker was relieved at Psychlo's death since it meant no one was after him, and put down his mark in exchange for a paycheck and promises of breathe-gas from the secret Psychlo prison-moon, Fobia.

Lastly Jonnie asks how MacAdam and Baron Anonymous knew how to word the Intergalactic Mining Co. sale contract for Terl to sign it. The baron admits that they took "a banker's chance" on Jonnie's attack on Psychlo being successful (wait, so did he or didn't he intend to blow up the whole planet?), adding that "You can't go very wrong putting your chips on Jonnie!"

But Sir Robert isn't happy. The two bankers are now controlling the most powerful and wealthiest institution in existence, but Jonnie has nothing. Stung, MacAdam begs forgiveness and shows off the Earth Planetary Bank's charter, which in addition to the bankers' names has Jonnie Goodboy Tyler on it. The baron explains that "Jonnie now owns two-ninths or about twenty-two percent of the Galactic Bank and a third of Intergalactic Mining Company," and MacAdam estimates that Jonnie's wealth lies in the quintillions.

So we can add "richer than God" to the list of Jonnie's accomplishments.

While trying to wrap his head around what to do with all that money ("Maybe he could buy one of those woven leather lead ropes for Windsplitter"), the thought of buying furniture suddenly reminds Jonnie that he has a girlfriend, an idea he'd "been keeping suppressed so he could keep on going." That very second a voice on the radio demands Sir Robert, who bursts out on the tarmac minutes later and interrupts Jonnie's attempt to leave for Scotland with news that everyone's okay. And then immediately after that Thor lands and out pops Chrissie. Here's their heartwarming reunion in all its glory:

It was Chrissie! Gaunt and pale, her black eyes flooding with tears.

"Oh, Jonnie! Jonnie!" she was saying. "I'm never going to leave you again! Never! Hold me, Jonnie!"

Jonnie did. He just stood there, almost crushing her ribs. He held her for a long time. He couldn't talk.

And that's the end of this Part. Nothing left to look forward to but a timeskip and drawn-out denouement.

Oh, and Chrissie, dearie: he left you, remember?

Part 30, Chapter 4 - To All Races Except the Psychlos, Anyway

2010-11-29T19:22:00.003-06:00

I like to imagine the reception those alien ambassadors got when they returned home from a conference over a backwater world. "Well everybody, we didn't get the planet, though we are getting a share of Tolnep's fine for bad conduct. Oh, and the guy who annihilated the Psychlo empire also blew up one of Tolnep's moons to make a point, threatened to do the same to our capital if we annoy him, and forced us to disarm and remodel our economies to suit him." Would they be sacked? Would there be riots? Would horrified leaders order swift preemptive strikes to keep their worlds from sharing Asart and Psychlo's fates?

In the real world, probably. But in Battlefield Earth everything is hunky-dory. The last plot point has been resolved, the conflict defused, and there's nothing left but to wrap up some loose ends and get to our happy ending.

This will take another eighty pages.

Dries the loan shark signs Earth's mortgage papers, with "PAID IN FULL!" prominently written on them. Lord Voraz the loan shark's boss is awed, explaining how Jonnie's plan will allow the unemployed to form an "independent working class," something that all those moronic alien economists can't produce on their own, and as a side affect force banks to focus on the "little creature," thereby robbing the alien nobility of its influence.

It's pretty amazing how all those dozens of extraterrestrial civilizations turned out to have near-identical societies.

Voraz was looking at MacAdam and the baron now. "Do you know what he just did? In that short period in that room in there he freed more people than have been freed in all the revolutions in history!"

It's not enough for Jonnie to liberate his home planet from alien overlords. It's not enough for him to become heir to the throne of Scotland (by way of blood transfusion). It's not enough for him to all but singlehandedly destroy a million-world empire. It's not enough for him to crack scientific secrets that have eluded countless alien races for hundreds of thousands of years. It's not enough for him to resolve war forever. No, he also has to be the great liberator of the common man, too.

At this point I'm impressed that Hubbard hasn't had these backwards alien deify Jonnie. OH WAIT. His fellow humans did that hundreds of pages ago.

Well, this book isn't done glorifying Jonnie yet. The Small Gray Bankers need to come up with a new banknote, so they decide that Jonnie is part Selachee (he has partially-gray eyes, you see) and should be on the new currency. They'll do a three-dimensional, full-color portrait of him in his formal garb, including the ridiculous dragon helmet and "a special ink that can make the buttons flash." At MacAdam's suggestion they decide to throw in an exploding planet Psychlo for the background, and the legend will read "Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who brought happiness to all races."

"The very thing!" said Voraz. "It doesn't relegate it to just destroying Psychlo. Because that isn't all he really did. People will know fast enough. His popularity will be not just in the stars but all over the stars and planets in sixteen universes!"

Jonnie is, of course, not happy with all the attention, though of course he doesn't refuse or anything. The chapter ends with the bankers, alien and human alike, laughing that they can work together just fine, and MacAdam once again telling Jonnie how awesome he is.

I think the only reason Jonnie isn't basking in the glorification like a pampered brat is because modesty is a virtue, and someone as incredibly awesome as Jonnie has to be virtuous, right? I mean, getting arrogant would be a humanizing flaw. And we can't have that.

Part 30, Chapter 3 - Pax Jonnie

2010-11-26T19:14:00.004-06:00

In this chapter, our hero will solve the problem of war once and for all.

Jonnie has the alien ambassadors and The Gray Men assemble in the conference room, and he and Sir Robert go in without a substantial bodyguard. Once again we're told how much danger Jonnie is putting himself in, this time by going into a room filled with not-so-secretly-armed emissaries who may react violently to what he's going to say, and how heroic and brave and handsome and smart the book's protagonist is.

When everyone's together, and Angus is done fiddling with the hologram projector, the show begins. As martial music plays Sir Robert reminds the aliens of the old search to find the one.

"There is the one!" and his hand shot out pointing at Jonnie!

The mine spotlight shifted to Jonnie and his buttons and helmet flashed fire.

It was dramatic. A sudden intake of breath from the lords.

It was not exactly as Jonnie had planned it. Sir Robert had let his own feelings change it. Still, it was very effective.

Sir Robert reminds the aliens who combined control five thousand planets that Jonnie, "with the help of a few Scots," annihilated an empire that spanned sixteen universes and a million worlds. The projector shows the fiery doom of Psychlo, a hellish act of destruction that stuns the alien lords into silence. Foxy tells them that they ought to be grateful to Jonnie for freeing them "from a monster," while the alien lords are understandably unenthusiastic about replacing the oppression of an empire with the terror of a man who destroys worlds.

Their fear is only made worse when Foxy rolls the tape of Tolnep's moon getting bombed and turned into a blob of gas that liquified in the "intense cold of space." But there's new stuff too, which I'll include so the scientifically-minded can boggle at it.

That moon was now a ball, not just of gas, but of uncountable quintillions of megavolts of electricity. The separation of atoms had generated enormous charge, but there being no oxygen and no second pole to cause flow, the intense cold of space had frozen the resulting electricity. Jonnie realized that was how Psychlo fuel worked, but it had no heavy metal in it, only the more base metals. And that moon would kill any ship that came near it, not by disintegration, but by huge powerful charges of electricity. Ah, there came a meteor! Lightning flashed out and melted it.

I don't know where to begin beyond "space isn't cold." I guess you could argue that frozen lightning is possible if Asart was in a different universe under different laws of physics, but Jonnie mentions Psychlo fuel, which functions just fine on Earth, working the same way. And hey, my interest in hard science died my sophomore year of high school. Maybe Hubbard's done his research and what he describes here is plausible.

Once the fate of Psychlo and Asart has sunk in, Foxy proves his worth as a diplomat.

Sir Robert's voice went into them like shock waves. "He can do that to your home planet at will!"

Had he hit them with a stun gun he could not have produced a more frozen effect.

"And," cried Sir Robert, "there is nothing you can do to stop it!"

Note that Jonnie hadn't planned on Foxy to be "this strong," but concludes that Sir Robert is getting his revenge for Edinburgh and doesn't worry too much about it. Foxy rants on that Jonnie will build twenty-eight teleportation platforms scattered on other planets, all ready to fire as one and annihilate the aliens' home worlds if they step out of line. Unless the aliens sign a treaty forbidding war, they will be exterminated.

The alien ambassadors, of course, are enraged and scream that "This is a declaration of WAR!" But Jonnie stands up, and his magnificent presence is enough to bring them to silence before he declares that it's actually "a declaration of peace!" Then the aliens threaten to launch fleets to destroy the humans, but Sir Robert is like "nuh-uh, your planets will still get blown up by teleported bombs!" and the the aliens are like "we'll assassinate Jonnie then!" and Sir Robert is like "nuh-uh, we've got body doubles and if any of them are hurt we'll blow you up!"

I'm gong to take a moment to wonder exactly when Sir Robert and Jonnie got together to come up with this plan. 'cause Jonnie's spent the last five days feverishly learning economics while Sir Robert coordinated things over the radio. Then again, threats of violence are pretty much up their alleys, so they might've thrown this together over breakfast.

Anyway, after the word force majeure is thrown around and those cowardly and self-serving diplomats become open to the idea of trying to influence it, one of them whines that their economies are still in trouble, and peace won't save them.

Jonnie looked at them. Then he began to realize what he was really dealing with. Every one of these lords and all their peoples had been bred for eons in the shadow of the cruel and sadistic Psychlos. They may have remained politically free, but they were stamped with the Psychlo philosophy--all beings are just animals. Greed, profit and corruption were understood to be the nature of every individual. There were no decencies or virtues. The brand of the Psychlo!

Such sentiments were the ideas of madmen. The Psychlos had tailor-made life in this way and had then said, see? this is the way life is.

Sorry, not buying it. The story has not explained why having the Psychlos as an aggressive neighbor is any worse than, say, having the Tolneps as an aggressive neighbor, beyond the superior tech of the former. Having a dangerous enemy does not necessitate a loss of cultural values. The U.K. did not become more German during the unpleasantness in the '40s. Vietnam did not become more American during the... well, that's not a good example. South Vietnam was trying pretty hard to fit in with Western modernity, while the North was fervently nationalistic and dabbling with communism-

Point is, this is one of Battlefield Earth's main flaws: the Psychlos are hyped as all-conquering, sadistic monsters that taint everything they touch. But they leave an astounding number of other races unconquered, most of the Psychlos we see are just average Joes working their shift in the mines, and what little oppression happens does so off-screen. Yeah, they took over Earth, but it's hard to work up the hate for them that Hubbard obviously feels, and they certainly don't feel like the scourge of galaxies.

Jonnie does some thinking, and concludes that the Psychlos preferred for these supposedly "free planets," which they could invade at any time but for some reason never did, remain at war with each other, the better to serve as a market for Psychlo metals. So Jonnie explains how they could gear their economies towards "consumer production," and make things for their citizens to buy like clothes and furniture, thus ushering in a golden age of prosperity.

Naturally, not a single alien in sixteen universes has come up with this idea. Kinda like how none of them think to use birth control to deal with overpopulation.

Jonnie goes on to talk about how the Galactic Bank will be able to give out loans to stabilize the aliens' economies and help them shake off the military-industrial complex, as well as stimulate private enterprises with "social banking" instead of dealing exclusively with governments. Oh, and there's a lot of new planets suddenly free of Psychlo control that would make good colonies.

Once Lord Voraz comes to terms with these radical new ways of doing business, he agrees that the bank will be happy to help make Jonnie's vision a reality. But the alien ambassadors are still hesitant to deal with the man who kills planets (no, I'm never going to let that go). So Jonnie has all the recording devices turned off and appeals to their baser nature by suggesting they go home and buy out all the war firms that will crash and burn after this treaty, thereby converting them into profitable peacetime businesses that will earn the diplomats fortunes.

Their heads were together again, whispering. Jonnie couldn't make it out.

Then suddenly Fowljopan stood up among the mob. "Lord Jonnie, we have forgotten what you said. None of it will be repeated by us."

Fowljopan seemed to grow in size. "Build your platforms! We are going to write the toughest, clawproof, iron-hard, most vicious antiwar treaty you have ever heard of!"

He turned toward the back. "Turn on the lights! Turn on the recorders!"

Almost as one being the audience stood. They began to shout. "Long live Lord Jonnie! Long live Lord Jonnie!"

The applause was enough to knock one down!

And so Jonnie uses the threat of annihilation to bring peace to the universes, the empires of which only go to war out to make money and distract their populations from unemployment, rather than to take territory, defend territory, force compliance with treaties, defend national honor, topple oppressive regimes, defend allies, or any of the myriad of motivations for "politics by other means."

I hate this book and everything in it.

Colonel Ivan, lead of the few soldiers running security for the conference, finally relaxes. "Knowing Jonnie, the reversal did not surprise him. That was life living around Jonnie Goodboy Tyler!"

Amazing how things always turn out well for the Gary Stu, isn't it?

Part 30, Chapter 2 - Bet Those Psychlos Feel Pretty Stupid Now

2010-11-25T18:59:00.003-06:00

With MacAdam's suggestion that Jonnie set up his own company to build teleportation consoles (I'm still awed that a control panel is the key piece of equipment, rather than whatever device is actually rearranging patches of space-time), Jonnie thinks of the implications of such technology's proliferation. He knows quite well the destructive capacity of teleportation, and wants to make sure humanity is never on the receiving end of what he's done to his enemies (and countless civilians or innocent bystanders caught as collateral damage).

After a bit of thought, Jonnie has the idea of building metal analysis detectors into the platforms to keep them from sending uranium or the mysterious element used for The Ultimate Bomb. Pretty simple and straightforward, really - if you don't want to teleport those dangerous substances, make your teleporters incapable of doing so.

SO WHY DIDN'T THE PSYCHLOS DO THAT?! Why didn't the paranoid, totalitarian empire with a ridiculous vulnerability to radiation come up with this defensive measure, instead of hoping a bunch of grunts with scanners could catch everything?! Why is Jonnie the only one who can have this idea?! Hubbard could still have had Jonnie teleport the bombs to Psychlo, he'd just have to disable this painfully-obvious safety measure somehow. It would give Jonnie a chance to show off how smart and wonderful he is, instead of having the plot rely on the villains being achingly stupid and lazy.

Jonnie addresses biological concerns with plans to scan for bacterial "traces" and disease "auras," and after resolving that his consoles would be built in fortresses by only the most trusted workers, concludes that he's designed a fool-proof console and agrees to build them for the bank. Though he adds that he'll only lease the devices for five years before swapping them with new ones, just to be safe.

The bankers are pleased, but there's still one last hurdle: all those alien emissaries, counting on war to save their economies (morons). Once word gets out the Earth controls a million habitable worlds the aliens will surely pounce. But Jonnie and Sir Robert already have a plan, though Jonnie asks that he be allowed to set bank policy for a couple of hours. And the next bit is priceless.

"You set bank policy?" gaped Lord Voraz.

"Let him do it!" said the baron.

"But he might commit us to some course of--"

"You just better say yes, Lord Voraz," MacAdam said. "That's Jonnie Tyler there who's talking."

Lord Voraz looked numbly from MacAdam to the baron. "I've not yet signed--"

"Nor have I," said Dries.

The baron reached over and made Voraz's head bob. "He said 'yes,' Jonnie. Go ahead."

Yes, that's Jonnie Tyler, the obnoxious character the book is written to glorify, the man who physics and biology bend over backwards to accommodate. His will is nothing less than divine mandate. To oppose him is to face annihilation.

The baron physically forcing Voraz to comply is just a lovely touch. Har-har, look how little regard the humans have for their new allies!

If you're wondering how Jonnie will deal with all those hostile aliens, you haven't been paying attention. He already blew up a moon to make a point. Now he just has to remind the idiots that they're planning the invasion of someone who can blow up planets at will. The next chapter wouldn't be necessary if those emissaries had half a brain among them, but this is Battlefield Earth, after all.

Part 30, Chapter 1 - The Battle of the Banks

2010-11-24T19:19:00.003-06:00

For whatever reason, MacAdam and the baron are wearing gray suits similar to the Selachee bankers'.

The four of them sat there at the table for a bit, just looking across it at one another. Jonnie was reminded of some gray wolves he had once seen, prowling back and forth, eyes alert, teeth ready, sizing each other up before they plunged into a snarling, slashing fight to the death.

Except the bankers are all sitting politely instead of pacing with bared teeth. But I can appreciate Hubbard's attempt to make finance sound exciting.

So the great battle of wits and numbers begins when MacAdam and von Roth ask for an extension for the deadline, citing economic upsets. The Selachee refuse, but the humans press on, describing how their questioning of alien prisoners revealed that most of the beings who attacked Earth were conscripts who are reluctant to return home, for fear of getting dragged into revolutions and unemployment and famine. Mac and the baron have even teleported to some of these worlds to witness things firsthand.

"There is economic chaos!" said the baron. "When Intergalactic Mining Company ceased to deliver metals, the scarcity caused their prices to soar."

Because none of these aliens can be bothered to dig up their own iron ore, apparently. I also have to wonder what these guys have been building that requires so much materiel. I mean, we've been spending all of human history building swords and guns and cars and whatnot, and to my knowledge there hasn't been any panic about running out of steel anytime soon. Is Earth the only mineral-rich planet in sixteen universes? Have none of the aliens figured or recycling?

"Factories are closed. People are out of work and rioting. To distract them, the governments are planning wars that are not popular."

Yes, when faced with economic disaster, start up a nice, expensive war to make things all better. Free tip for alien governments: you want to distract your unemployed citizens? TV. Or even better, give 'em free internet.

"To get metals to build weapons, they are even commandeering peoples' cars and the pots and pans of housewives."

Yes, all of the galaxies' races use basic metals for their wargear, as opposed to crystals or wood or bioengineered weaponized symbiotic organisms or psychic powers or whatever. And no matter what universe you go to, housewives stay in the kitchen.

Mac and the baron are on a roll, and reveal that a disgruntled former Galactic Bank employee told them how Dries made some high-risk loans to some high-ranking Psychlos, secured by property on the Psychlo homeworld. Now that the Psychlos are all asploded and no longer paying interest on funds or transfer fees, the Bank lost its main source of income, and Dries himself is trying to repossess Earth to avoid bankruptcy. This prompts an outburst from Dries where he quotes an aphorism about swimming and fins, just to remind us that he's a shark.

The human bankers still aren't done, and talk about how without teleportation there are now Selcahees scattered across countless worlds and universes, totally stranded, making their family members riot. No mention is made of how without teleportation there is no way for these transdimensional banks to communicate with each other and therefore function as a company. By all rights the bank should have collapsed months ago. Oh, and part of the bank's deal with the Psychlos was that all its cash reserves would be stored on Psychlo, which is now a sun.

The humans' next trick is to produce a copy of the Psychlo Imperial Royal (sounds redundant) Charter of the Intergalactic Mining Company, which has clauses stating that in event of an emergency a head of planet may dispose of company property. Then they reveal Terl's contract, selling the entire IMC and its nearly two hundred thousand worlds to the Earth Planetary Bank. MacAdam and the baron have even taken it to the Hall of Legality in the Selachee capital to put it on file. And while the aliens are still choking on that, the human bankers offer to buy two-thirds of the Galactic Bank, a controlling interest.

The baron said, "You'd have assets, then. You could back your currency with reserves which you don't now have. The Psychlos never let you own planets, but you can now. We will turn over eleven planets that are worth sixty trillion credits for ownership of two-thirds of the Galactic Bank, all its assets, debts, everything."

Lord Voraz was wavering. But he had not said yes.

MacAdam leaned back easily. "And we will put 199,989 planets and all company assets into a trust to be managed by the Galactic Bank. That gives you back your fund transfer profits. That lets you lease out mining rights. That surely saves your bank!"

Let's dwell on this for a moment. The humans, who have only recently freed themselves from an alien overlord, who so bitterly complained about having their fate decided by all-powerful outside forces, are now signing over entire worlds, two hundred thousand of them. And we know that some of these worlds had previous inhabitants held in servitude by Psychlo "regencies."

There's no thought that these previously-subjugated people might own their home planets, or have a right to self-determination. There's not a flicker of interest from Jonnie or any others about the issue of indigenous races, or if they ought to make an exception for such worlds. Jonnie's mostly worried about the other alien races attacking Earth.

Well, there's still twenty or so chapters. I'm sure Hubbard will explain how his heroes aren't selling aliens into slavery.

The Selachee are happy with the idea, but say it'd take a board meeting to ratify such a deal. MacAdam and the baron, of course, have already secured and filed the directors' signatures, and even have a pre-typed resolution for Lord Voraz to sign. Dries interrupts with questions about his money, but MacAdam breezily explains how there was over two hundred trillion credits ready for transfer before Jonnie blew up the Psychlo teleportation network last year, which wound up in the Earth Planetary Bank's account at the Galactic Bank and can be used to pay off Earth's mortgage. So I guess if a bank is about to transfer your paycheck, but it suddenly can't deliver it for a year, it gets to keep it? I don't understand this at all, but I'm sure it's legal if our heroes are doing it.

The only remaining matter is the Bank's reliance on teleportation, and Lord Voraz asks for Jonnie's help. And with that this bloated chapter comes to a sudden end.

The short version: the Galactic Bank was broke and on the verge of collapse, but Terl's phony contract let Earth sell off hundreds of thousands of worlds to take control of it, bail it out, and pay off Earth's debt. Yay banking.

Part 29, Chapter 7 - That Nutter Keynes

2010-11-23T19:18:00.002-06:00

Over the next five days many many mysterious "things" are teleported to and from the platform, while Jonnie furiously studies economic theory from textbooks liberated from a ruined library in Salisbury.

It was a highly specialized subject. And when one went wrong, like some nut named Keynes they had all become mad at, it really messed things up. What Jonnie got out of it was that the state was for people. He had suspected that was the way it should be. And individuals worked and made things and exchanged them for other things. And it was easier to do it with money. But money itself could be manipulated. The Chinkos had been great and patient teachers and Jonnie knew how to study. And with a mind like his, he got things as quickly as a traveling shot.

Yes, Jonnie learns principles of government from economic texts. Yes, the book is once again reminding us how wonderful and intelligent Jonnie is.

So the day of the big bank meeting sees Jonnie and Sir Robert square off against Dries Gloton and Lord Voraz. The aliens mention the dozens of soldiers hanging around the base and reminds them that aggression against the emissaries would make Earth an outlaw nation. Sir Robert responds that "We ha' sma' truck wi' the money changers i' the temple" and it's "Better to fight fleets than be a' cut up with bits o' paper," but "There's na thrat i' the Roosians if you tell the truth and behave. We ken this be a battle o' wits and skullduggery. But it's a battle a' the same and a bloody one!"

Yep, his dialect's back. I hesitate to call it a Scottish dialect though, since it seems to be doing whatever it bloody well feels like, and is popping in and out at random.

The alien bankers assure them that they're really the humans' best friends; since all a world's technology is liquidated when it's auctioned, they have plans for a department in the Galactic Bank for Jonnie to be head of. Jonnie sarcastically remarks that money must be everything, and when the aliens agree he insists that virtues like decency and loyalty can't be bought. The aliens talk about how scientists should work for companies instead of themselves, while Jonnie talks about how banking and governments should serve ordinary people instead of money and profits, and it's obvious that neither side can understand the other's viewpoint.

And then suddenly MacAdam and Baron von Roth burst in, exclaim that the aliens showed up early, before getting down to business. And so the chapter and section abruptly ends.

It's pretty much more talking and banking for the next five chapters.

Part 29, Chapter 6 - Jonnie Finds His Bankers

2010-11-22T19:07:00.003-06:00

Jonnie steps outside to see rescue workers reunited with their families, and a brief flicker of positive emotions segues into his hatred of the gub'ment.

Watching fathers in happy chattering exchange with their youngsters, watching mothers anxiously verifying whether this or that had been done properly as to feeding and naps, Jonnie thought of those disdainful and arrogant lords and the soulless haughtiness of government. What did they care what happened to people like these? Yes, such governments might go through gestures of justice and perhaps even social work, but they remained cold, hard forces that could disrupt and shatter lives and people without conscience, and without a second thought.

Jonnie is by most standards a barbarian who took a crash course in flight, mining, and electronics. When the heck did he learn about social programs, or the basics of public administration? And what's his alternative, anyway? Anarchy? Or does he prefer the tribal structure of the Scots, with a hereditary strongman issuing orders?

After this mental rant Jonnie literally bumps into Stormalong, who has come back from a "wild time" of chasing down and rounding up alien prisoners. Not all by himself, of course, but all he had for help was "half a dozen bank guards. And they're French, Jonnie. They're not soldiers. They can maybe guard a vault or carry valuables--" Yes, even a thousand years from now, the French's stereotype as cheese-eating surrender monkeys still endures.

Stormy came here with MacAdam and the German banker Baron von Roth, who all have been flying around, collecting and interrogating alien prisoners under radio silence, which explains why Jonnie couldn't hail them. They also have a cargo of mysterious baggage, which isn't explained this chapter. So Jonnie has his experts ready to try and figure out a way to deal with Earth's crippling debt. "The final confrontation, the last battle, was all too near."

If banking is a battlefield, does that make me a commando or something for slogging through all this?

Fun fact #1: Dunneldeen's kill count while flying air cover over Edinburgh was at least thirty .

Fun fact #2: Baron von Roth is huge and red-faced and loud, as all Germans are, and Jonnie knows him somehow. "Although he had made a fortune in dairy and other foodstuffs..." wait, what? But I thought everyone had been reduced to barbarism from those oh-so-oppressive Psychlos? And how the hell do you corner the dairy market in a neo-medieval setting? Anyway, the baron "was descended from a family that was supposed to have controlled European banking for centuries before the Psychlo invasion." So yes, not only are governments cruel and repressive, but a few powerful families dominate the world of banking.

Part 29, Chapter 5 - The Treaty of Kariba

2010-11-19T19:22:00.002-06:00

The following afternoon is the big treaty signing ceremony, with Jonnie and Sir Robert, the Selachee bank representatives, and all the alien emissaries attending. The signing itself takes an hour due to the number of people involved and all the pomp, which of course Jonnie and Foxy are dismissive of.

But the document is signed and copies transmitted to all the alien ships, and then it's time for the prisoner exchange. In all the fighting across the planet, only thirteen humans have been taken prisoner, and though they weren't abused none of the aliens who held them captive had the right food for them, so the ex-POWs are rushed to the hospital for intravenous feeding.

Strange how only the Psychlos have had to use masks to survive on Earth, but all the other aliens who don't are still unable to metabolize terrestrial food.

Once that's done the alien fleet departs to escort those dastardly Tolneps home, and a naked and bound Lord Schleim is teleported to his homeworld's slave markets as promised. A lengthy footnote "excerpted" from Galactic Bank, Customer Service Summaries, Vol. 43562789A (I'm rolling my eyes at that number) mentions how Schleim's ignominious return prompted the late Arsebogger's newspaper to run a smear campaign against Capt. Snowl, which culminated in Snowl's death by angry mob, the assassination of Schleim and the whole House of Plunder, and the collapse of Tolnep's economy due to its inability to continue its slave trade or pay its fine. So the whole race ended up imprisoned for tax reasons, defanged, sterilized, and sold as slaves, with the Hawvins left ruling Tolnep.

And so another species is exterminated, and this genocide is presented as satisfying and just. After all, some representatives of the race opposed the glorious Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. It is only right for every last man, woman and child of these disgusting aliens to be wiped from the stars, never to trouble humanity again.

With humans the undisputed owners of Earth, Dries Gloton triumphantly serves Sir Robert with a notice of delinquency of payment, and the week-long deadline to pay off the bank begins. While all the aliens are assembled, Dries mentions that if they are interested in Earth, there's no need to fight for it.

The lords shrugged. War was the surer method, said one. The mental health of the people depended upon war, said another. How was a state to demonstrate its power without war? said Browl. The Galactic Bank would have a hard time surviving without making war loans, quipped Dom. Rulers only became famous when they prosecuted war, laughed another. They were in a jovial mood.

Jonnie listened to all this with a kind of horror. The impersonal cruelty of large government was brought home to him.

This is a preview of what's to come, as well as some more of the "government is bad!" theme. Also note that the aliens all seem to be in pre-WWI mindsets when it comes to warfare's causes and justifications, and it's an open question whether or not Hubbard thinks this is an accurate summation of international conflict.

Dries starts passing out brochures touting Earth's value as real estate, and explains that the planet would make a good colony and will almost certainly be up for auction once the week is up. The aliens all decide to stick around, and Jonnie is of course horrified by Dires' actions.

Jonnie said to Dries Gloton, "So it was all just a question of money!"

Dries smiled. "We have not the slightest feeling of hostility toward you. Banking is banking and business is business. One must pay one's obligations. Any child knows that."

And now we're officially in the endgame. Just over a hundred pages to go.

Part 29, Chapter 4 - Two Characters Change Locations

2010-11-18T19:28:00.003-06:00

Dunneldeen flies over to Kariba, noticing Jonnie's newly-trimmed beard even as Jonnie worries over the bandages wrapped around 'deen's face - injuries earned while fighting fires. He brings word from Scotland, about how the blazes are out and the Small Gray Man has been traveling all over the place asking questions and gathering data from old libraries. The alien also ended up saving the chief of Clanfearghus' life with knowledge of a treatment for hemophilia, so I guess the bankers aren't irredeemably evil.

Oh, and Sir Robert's in the plane too, and is so exhausted that Jonnie and 'deen haul him out and hand him over to the Tsungs for a bath, haircut, and bed without him waking up. When Jonnie notices how Dunneldeen is similarly tired, he has him get the same treatment. Then he gets on the radio and tries to find Stormalong and MacAdam, but keeps getting that French girl in Luxemborg.

And... that's pretty much it. A sparse amount of character interaction that was inexplicably given a two-page chapter. But at least we've still got the exciting meeting with the bankers to look forward to, right?

Part 29, Chapter 3 - What Is It Good For?

2010-11-17T19:15:00.004-06:00

As he leaves the conference room, Jonnie gets mad and starts mentally ranting.

War! Any one of those lords in there, or their governments, merely had to say the word and their fleets pranced off to bash somebody's head in!

While all Jonnie has to do is say the word and entire planets die.

And when they'd bashed it in, they could just sail off tra-la,without a thought of what they'd done to people's homes and lives, and then maybe come back another day to bash some more!

When's the last time you mourned for the deaths of billions of Psychlos, Jonnie? Or all those Brigante women and children who were incinerated when Denver went up in flames?

Jonnie takes a walk outside, passing by children sitting in camouflaged "rifle pits" happily eating lunch. I really, really hope they aren't expected to be defending the base. And of course Jonnie thinks of the children and how they deserve a peaceful future.

War! What right did cold, impersonal nations have to murder and rampage, to smash and crush and gut their more helpless, fellow beings?

Only Jonnie and hot-blooded Scotsmen have the right to murder and rampage.

Call it "national policy," call it "necessities of state," call it what you will, it still amounted to an action of the insane.

The Scots' clan-based feuds are exempt from this criticism, I'm assuming.

Psychlo! What right did Psychlo have striking this planet down? Couldn't they have bought what they wanted? Couldn't they have come in and said "We need metal. We will exchange this or that technology for it." No, it suited them better to murder and steal it like a thief.

I'm tempted to call this an example of lampshade hanging, when an author acknowledges the ridiculousness of something that threatens to destroy the audience's suspension of disbelief, then ignores it. Here Hubbard is actually admitting how moronically aggressive his villains are. The Psychlos could indeed have gotten Earth to willingly hand over shiny rocks in exchange for something like blaster technology. Heck, the Psychlos could have made a show of force to coerce Earth into doing the mining for them. An invasion was pretty unnecessary (especially if you could just teleport chunks of ore from the comfort of your own home, but that's an old gripe of mine).

But, since this entire lousy story hinges on Jonnie saving the world from big, stupid aliens, they have to invade. I just have to ask: if your story depends on everyone being morons, is it really worth telling?

With one last glance at the children, Jonnie resolves that "Whatever happened, there would be no war. Not anywhere." Yes, it's not enough for Jonnie to liberate a planet and destroy a pan-dimensional empire, he's also going to solve the problem of war once and for all.

Chong-won manages to get Jonnie's attention and drags him into the command center, where there's some good news on the radio. Colonel Ivan and his men are in the process of being dug out, and the Russian says to "Tell Marshal Jonnie the valiant-Red-Army is still at his command!" At that very second, Tom Smiley Townsen comes in with the message that all Jonnie's old villagers are safe, which makes our noble hero sit down in a chair and weep with relief.

There's a few big paragraphs of infodumps about a hospital in Aberdeen and the alien prisoners being sent to Balmoral Castle (seriously, what the hell is with Hubbard's Scotland obsession?), before Jonnie is reminded that Sir Robert needs to come over and sign some paperwork. When he gets Foxy on the radio, the Scot is annoyed at the idea of abandoning his efforts to dig some two thousand people out from partially-collapsed bomb shelters, but eventually concedes ("with considerable blasphemy") and agrees to fly over.

The chapter ends on the ominous note that "The small gray man looked very pleased when Chong-won told him Sir Robert was coming."

Part 29, Chapter 2 - The Day After The Worst Two Days

2010-11-16T19:26:00.004-06:00

Lord Dom comes into the operations center the next morning to tell Jonnie that the trial's results will be announced in two hours, and Jonnie is invited due to his role in arresting Lord Schleim. There's also talk about possible reparations for Earth, which Jonnie seizes upon as a way to deal with the Galactic Bank.

With the help of manservant Tsung, Jonnie gets bathed and dressed. The newly-promoted Mandarin even has a new toy, a box on a cord around his neck that translates Chinese into English - a gift from the original Small Gray Man for starting a bank account, after the Tsung family started making money selling paintings and dragon sculptures to the alien ambassadors. Yes, the Selachee banker's library had data on "court Mandarin Chinese" and the equipment necessary to convert it to English. Of course one of the aliens took the time to visit Earth during the Psychlo occupation, meticulously gather data on an ancient, complicated, and nigh-extinct language, and figure out a way to convert it into another ancient, complicated, nigh-extinct language, as well as the Psychlo tongue.

Basically I'm running on the knowledge that there's only 130 pages left at this point.

Jonnie takes his seat amongst the audience in the impromptu courtroom, with all the alien lords assembled on one side and Schleim sitting in the middle, wrapped in chains and placed in a minecart for reasons that surely make sense to the aliens. The emissaries vote unanimously that Lord Schleim did "willfully and maliciously" order an attack on the conference, that he personally attempted to paralyze and attack the delegates, and that the entire Tolnep nation be branded outlaws due to Schleim's actions. The other races' militaries are absolved of guilt but charged with seeing any Tolenp prisoners of war deposited in a holding area on Earth, escorting the surviving Tolnep fleet home, and informing the Tolnep homeworld of its outlaw status. Shcleim in particular is set to be deposited naked and in chains in Tolnep's slave market as a sign of the conference's intense displeasure.

Our hero is called up and exonerate for bonking Schleim with a thrown scepter, and is given the Crimson Slash in recognition of saving the emissaries' lives. Lord Voraz whispers the meaning behind the honor (it's about a guy who saved an alien princess' boyfriend from being killed and earning a superficial wound in the process. Obviously the critters involved had red blood), and also informs Jonnie that he's now officially a Lord, and one who gets a two thousand credit yearly pension. Jonnie is impatient for reparations to be discussed and plans to put the sash on his horse.

Tolnep is fined a trillion credits, to be split among the ambassadors who weren't part of the coalition over Earth. The humans themselves get pretty much nothing - Voraz explains that next to the thirty-nine trillion Chatovarians spread across seven hundred worlds, thirty-three thousand humans don't earn much of a cut. I'm wondering if having 33,000 organisms qualifies a species for "Endangered" status.

Jonnie asks about all the (abandoned and ruined) cities the Tolneps "destroyed" and if that could help them get some reparations, but Voraz explains that he mentioned them to increase Earth's property value, but that this is a trial, not a peace conference. As consolation, he tells Jonnie that Tolnep's economy will crash from this fine, and that at least there aren't any hostile aliens around anymore. The emissary in charge of the "trial" tells Jonnie to either get Earth's representative Sir Robert, or be ready to sign some paperwork himself.

The chapter ends with a mournful Jonnie heading out of the conference, too crushed about the lack of reparations to notice the Small Gray Men (Dries came back at some point) smiling at each other at the idea of Jonnie signing papers.

So, that was the "trial," a bunch of aliens voting on sentences that will destroy an entire civilization and a distinct lack of evidence, cross-examination, lawyers, or defense of the accused. I'm wondering what this tells us about the author's view of the legal system, and if he's in favor of or against it. But I'm grateful that we only spent this chapter on it instead of an entire Part.

Next time, Jonnie loses his temper.

Part 29, Chapter 1 - The Worst Two Days

2010-11-15T19:11:00.002-06:00

This section starts with the narration informing us that "The next two days were the most horrible in Jonnie's life--cage, drone and all!" Jonnie's stuck at Kariba with only Angus and Chief Chong-won for company, while everyone else is trying to dig out the survivors in Scotland and Russia. Jonnie can't even call up MacAdam the banker because the only person he can raise in Luxemborg speaks French.

What's weird is that the book insists that camping out in the operations center makes Jonnie "the only one defending the planet." If he were flying air support or holding a gun pointed at the sky, maybe. But I don't think listening to the radio counts as "defending."

Angus keeps busy by sending a camera to keep on eye on the moon Jonnie exploded, checking to see if there's any earthquakes on Tolnep. Conveniently, there isn't, even after Asart is reduced to a cloud of hydrogen by the ultimate bomb. It's confirmed that the Psychlos never used T.U.B. offensively because it doesn't leave behind any useful metals to mine.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The Psychlos had sixteen universes' worth of resources to collect, but they couldn't bear to deny themselves the opportunity to mine a single world, even if said planet was an enemy capital or hosted a military base. They were so greedy, so obsessed with digging up junk, that it overrode their (informed) bloodlust and mindless aggression. They could have held reality hostage by demonstrating their power to snuff out planets at a whim, but preferred to conquer the universes the hard way so they could potentially maximize the amount of minerals in their stockpiles.

I don't have a way to express my disdain for Hubbard's villains without resorting to a string of profanity. Just imagine the result of smashing my face against the keyboard a few times and you'd get something close.

Come to think of it, the whole Psychlo economy doesn't make any sense. We've got multiple universes with hundreds of billions of galaxies in them, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, each of which could have formed planets. That's a lot of potential gold or tungsten or whatever you're selling, and given the number of species in Hubbard's setting there's a lot people digging stuff up. So how do you sell the Hockners gold if they've probably got in on their home planet, several neighboring systems, and several neighboring galaxies? Are the other races so lazy that they're willing to fund the eeeeevil Psychlos by purchasing gold from them, instead of doing their own prospecting and mining?

Well, I'm no economist. It's possible (but I'm quite cynical) that there's a good explanation for how this could work.

Oh, and Angus also informs Jonnie that asploding Asart hasn't screwed up all their coordinates by messing around with mass and gravity. Fortunately the super-light hydrogen cloud (with a liquid hydrogen center) hasn't dispersed or anything.

There's news from Scotland, in that Clanfearghus' nameless chief is found barely alive and rushed to a hospital, but nothing about Chrissie. The Russian base is still on fire from all the coal that the morons decided to store around the entrances. Meanwhile in Kariba, Small Gray Man Dries unexpectedly disappears, while there's nearly an incident when a gunner opens fire on a craft containing Capt. Snowl, called in as a witness for Schleim's ongoing trial. Jonnie is heroically rude to him and is just able to keep from letting the gunner "accidentally" shoot Snowl's ship down afterward. Oh, and Lord Voraz of the Galactic Bank offers Jonnie a job making teleportation consoles, which he turns down and again heroically restrains from violence.

So in conclusion, nothing much happens, which I guess it the point, so Jonnie gets to angst about inaction being harder to handle than battles and stuff.

Next chapter, the non-awaited courtroom scene.

Part 28, Chapter 6 - Do Not Store Coal in Doorways

2010-11-10T18:46:00.004-06:00

After wrapping up his chat with the Selachee, Jonnie bursts into the operations center and shakes awake Tinny the Buddhist radio operator, who is near exhaustion after working for days without sleep. Jonnie is trying to reach MacAdam and the Earth Planetary Bank in Luxemborg, but Stormalong tells him how everyone there is over in Russia trying to get into the missile base.

The Scot explains that the Russians had been gathering "some black stuff, inflammable," from a nearby mine for the winter, which Jonnie recognizes as coal. So there's walls of flames blocking the entrances to the Russian base, and the Luxemborg base has flown water-filled tankers to do some firefighting, leaving them with nobody at the radio and no pilots.

There's the usual "Jonnie wants to do it, and the supporting characters have to talk him out of it because he's too important to risk" dialogue, and Stormalong ultimately ends up going to retrieve MacAdam to handle Earth's debt.

"A debt?" said Stormalong.

"Yes, a debt. And if we don't pay or handle it, we've lost this whole war! Even if we win it!"

Remember in Star Wars when, after the Death Star got blown up and there was that victory celebration, we got to watch the heroes of the Rebel Alliance come up with a payment plan for their starfighters and supplies? Or when Indiana Jones haggled over life insurance after retrieving the Ark of the Covenant? Or when Sarah Conner had a tense phone conversation from her hospital bed to discuss a missed interest payment at the end of The Terminator?

No? That's because it isn't a very good way to end a story, especially after a war sequence or two (no matter how unimpressive).

This book is basically over. Earth was liberated hundreds and hundreds of pages ago, no matter how long Hubbard tried to draw it out. We've had the "find the hidden Psychlo outpost" plot, the "takeover of the world government" plot, and the "unlock secrets of teleportation" plot. And after all that, L. Ron's grand finale is another "scramble to come up with an alien's money" plot.

This is why Battlefield Earth was printed as one thick brick of a book rather than a series - because what is the market for a novel revolving around planetary debt?

Part 28, Chapter 5 - Strictly Business

2010-11-09T18:57:00.004-06:00

Jonnie finally cuts to the chase and asks why the Selachee are here. Dries explains that the sixteenth universe, which is to say our universe, was the last to be discovered around twenty millennia ago, and hasn't been fully mapped yet.

Take a moment to laugh at the idea of completely mapping one universe, let alone over a dozen.

Anyway, after the Psychlo government's surveyors found one of NASA's probes and followed it back to Earth, the aliens claimed its title based on their right of discovery, sold the rights to Intergalactic Mining, who took out a loan from the Galactic Bank to pay for it, as well as a second mortgage to cover military expenses for the invasion.

Jonnie is visibly upset upon learning that the Gray Men financed the gas drones, and Lord Voraz assures him that "It is just business. The bank tends to banking and the customers tend to their own affairs. It does not mean the bank was ever hostile to you. Actually we are not hostile now. This is all just routine. Ordinary banking business."

I guess this fits with the Brigantes' backstory of a military coup being financed by international businesses. Bankers, psychologists, doctors, politicians, journalists... is there any profession Hubbard approves of? He seems to like soldiers, at least. Probably because he was one for a bit, at least until that whole "unauthorized live fire exercise in Mexican waters" thing.

Anyway, the Selachee insist that the mortgage on Earth still stands despite the war and the change in planetary ownership, so the only question is who will be paying it. That's why they called the conference and the ceasefire - it looks like the humans are holding on for the moment, so the Grays are going to serve a Notice Of Delinquency to the world government. If they can't pay, then Earth gets auctioned off and its population either exterminated or sold as slaves.

Jonnie suggests that any aliens trying to take Earth will find it difficult, but Dries the regional manager assures him that the forces the humans have held off are "just a buzzing of insects" compared to a proper invasion, and that there are too few humans using too poor quality of weapons to survive. He has completely forgotten about Earth's ability to teleport planet-destroying superbombs to anywhere in the universe, it would seem.

So the world government has a week to come up with 40,960,217,605,216 credits to cover Earth's debt, though the Grays are willing to accept a down payment of five trillion and come up with a payment plan. Earth's current funds stand at just over two billion. And that's our final obstacle before the story's over - making a bank payment.

Strangely enough, the plot summary on the book jacket only mentions the struggle against "the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire," not humanity's struggle to pay the bills. Wonder why.

Shortly after posting my summary of the last chapter, I realized that a statement I made about Psychlos not using birth control wasn't quite correct. But that'll be explained later.

Part 28, Chapter 4 - Introducing the Selachee, and Further Psychlo History

2010-11-08T19:16:00.004-06:00

So now we're formally introduced to The Gray Men, henceforth known by their species name, the Selachee. In an amazing coincidence, the superorder that terrestrial sharks are classified under is called Selachimorpha.

Anyway, these loan sharks are native to "the only three habitable worlds of the Gredides System," which I guess means that they evolved simultaneously on three separate planets? All predominantly water worlds, of course. And the entire species has devoted itself to banking, in much the same way the Tolneps are dedicated slavers, and the Psychlos are mining enthusiasts. Because only humans are capable of producing a multifaceted, nuanced society instead of a species-wide stereotype.

His Excellency Dries - Jonnie is suddenly on a first-name basis with him - explains that "We're ideal bankers. We can eat anything, drink anything, breathe almost any atmosphere, live on almost any gravity." This is pretty damn ludicrous, but par the course for this book. "By tribal mores, we worship total honesty and the righteousness of obligation." I'm not sure what to say to that.

The Selachee have been a space-faring race for nearly five hundred thousand years, but the major event in their history was meeting the Psychlos over three hundred thousand years ago. Back then the Psychlos weren't homicidal morons, and had no interest in the Selachee's worlds since they were mostly water and therefore too much trouble to mine. Instead the shark-men traded their computer technology for Psychlo metals, and became the big dumb aliens' financial tutors. The Psychlos were in financial ruin, you see, plagued with overpopulation and economic depressions and unemployment, until the Selachees revealed that they could sell the metal they were accumulating, leading the Psychlos to prosperity.

So yes, the species that invented teleportation across universes never figured out birth control and didn't think to sell off what they were obsessively mining. Every time we learn about these guys they manage to get even dumber.

Dries gives us more information about Psychlo history: their species underwent a great change some two hundred millennia ago, when the Boxnards of "Universe Six" invented teleportation of their own and militarized it. The Psychlos, in just under four (Earth?) years, conquered the seven worlds of the Boxnards' system, and then any other races in close contact with them just to be on the safe side. There was economic ruin, then the Psychlos wiped out over half their own population in a bout of in-fighting, and emerged the sadistic, artless race that we know and tolerate.

Jonnie deduces that this is when the Psychlos started implanting those mind-control capsules to protect the secret of teleportation. I'm still awestruck that in two hundred thousand years he's the first to make this discovery.

This teleportation war left the Psychlos destitute, so they begged the Selachee for help and struck a deal - the Galactic Bank would handle all the Psychlos economic and diplomatic functions, and the Psychlos would guarantee the Selachee's safety.

Jonnie realizes that he is now dealing with the Psychlos' overlords, and senses a hidden danger behind their words. He casually mentions the issues of teleportation or conference fees, but the Selachee are disinterested. The chapter suddenly ends before their true motives are made clear.

Though this section is mostly Dries talking, Lord Voraz's contributes with lots of interruptions where he supplies a name or precise date in the middle of Dries' infodump.

Part 28, Chapter 3 - Feeding Frenzy

2010-11-05T19:01:00.003-05:00

Jonnie and the two Small Gray Men sit down for a fancy Chinese dinner, complete with paper lanterns, paintings, "some very subdued but kind of squeaky music," and a golden brocade tunic for Jonnie to wear. Half a page is devoted to the courses served, which I'll skip - basically anything you'd see on a take-out menu at the average Chinese eatery. Sucks to be those aliens with specialized diets, I guess.

The Grays manage to tear through a banquet meant for thirty people, making Jonnie wonder about their ancestry. The Gray Men's rough, hairless skin, gill-like ears (what), sharply upturned noses, dull eyes, and double rows of teeth lead Jonnie to conclude that they're descended from sharks.

So yes, these beings from another planet are the end result of an evolutionary process that created lifeforms indistinguishable from Earth's. Given that every species in Hubbard's 'verse is man-shaped and that even the separate universes are functionally identical, this comes as no surprise.

After eating everything, the Grays finally start talking. They deride the Psychlo equipment the humans are forced to use, revealing that the suicidally idiotic Psychlos preferred to blow their money on "half a dozen new females or a ton or two of kerbango," then purchase discount, inferior base defenses.

And those chuckleheads were still the dominant power in the galaxies. What's the other aliens' excuse?

The Grays mention that a quality defensive weapon costs over 120,000 credits, while the AA guns the humans have were only five thousand credits a piece. Jonnie casually asks how much it would cost to properly defend Earth, and the aliens put their heads together before coming up with five hundred billion credits for parts alone.

He asks how they know this, if they're arms traders or something, and only then do the Grays bother to introduce themselves: His Excellency Dries Gloton, branch manager, and Lord Voraz, "Central Director, Chief Executive Officer and Overlord of the Galactic Bank." It is the financial power and prestige of the Galactic Bank that is keeping the conference-going aliens polite, out of fear that the Grays will call in their debts and destroy entire worlds' economies so that "their whole planet could be sold right out from under them."

So those are our new antagonists: bankers. Bankers who give loans, and who are descended from sharks. Loan sharks.

Ha. Ha.

Part 28, Chapter 2 - Planning a Future Conversation

2010-11-04T19:36:00.003-05:00

Jonnie's mountaineering huntsman instincts light up, and he spins around to see two of the Small Gray Men in the room with them. Well, his instincts had been warning him for fifteen seconds before he actually looked over his shoulder, so maybe "spun about" is the wrong way to put it.

The Grays explain that they knew about Psychlo's fate weeks after the bombs went off, and that there are no Psychlos left anywhere - they big morons stored all their breathe-gas next to the transshipment rigs, and built their quarters next door so they wouldn't have to walk far. The Grays once again confirm that the Psychlo empire lacks the infrastructure and communications network to function, and that the other Psychlo planets only learned something happened to their homeworld when they tried to teleport there.

So the Psychlo executives are gone (apparently that mining company is interchangeable with the Psychlo civilization), no Psychlo engineers have built a new teleportation console, and the aliens' breathe-gas supplies would have run out six months ago. Presumably the only reason the Earth-bound Psychlos' supplies have lasted this long is because of all the aliens Jonnie killed.

Psychlo was the only planet known to produce breathe-gas (in sixteen universes), but the Grays reveal there is another that was stricken from the Psychlos' records: Fobia, a... huh. Phobia. Hubbard's paranoia strikes again. Anyway, Fobia is the only other planet in the Psychlos' home system, a world so distant that "you can't even see it from the home planet with an unaided eye." How impressive. Fobia is a cold world with frozen lakes of liquid breathe-gas, and a little dome where the Psychlos exiled King Hak 261,000 years ago, before getting scared and assassinating him anyway. And no, don't expect an explanation about who King Hak was, why he was exiled, and what form of government the Psychlos had before Jonnie asploded them.

The Grey Men mention the humans' teleportation console, and suggest that they have "A talk about having a serious talk." Jonnie suggests that the the Grays join him for dinner in half an hour, and the aliens assure him that they can eat anything.

Now maybe he'd find out the threat that these two posed. He wasn't imagining it. These two were dangerous!

Note that during the Grays' exposition, there's lots of little moments where the senior alien subtly hushes the junior Gray for saying too much. And once again, Jonnie doesn't ask them their names. There's just "the original one" and "the newest one."

Part 28, Chapter 1 - Jonnie Accidentally the Psychlo Empire

2010-11-03T19:12:00.003-05:00

Psychlo, an empire that sprawls across two hundred thousand worlds and sixteen universes, a civilization 302,000 years old, has had no reaction to the uprising on Earth. Unable to accept the possibility that such a vast empire might simply not care about one little mining planet, or that the Psychlos didn't notice the planet-buster bombs Jonnie tried to teleport to their homeworld, Jonnie and Angus work to discover what happened last year.

That night they get their gyrocage and camera ready to inspect other Psychlo minesites. The rig brings back images of a vast hole and a leaning transshipment pole at the base on planet Loozite, while Mercogran in the "fifth universe" shows signs of an avalanche, and a towering metropolis on Brelloton has been toppled "like dominos." That last one was an inhabited world whose natives were ruled by a Psychlo "regency," but there's no sign of life in the city the Psychlos built their teleportation platform in. Neither Jonnie or Angus shows any interest in their fellow subjugated lifeforms.

So the humans have what is an admittedly clever idea, albeit a very implausible one. Light travels at "approximately 5,869,713,600,000 miles a year" (my attempts at math come out a 5,8745,891,520,000, while Answers.com gives 5,865,696,000,000 - but hey, it's not like this is rocket science). So if you park a camera rig that far away from Psychlo, and set the camera to six trillion times magnification (!), you can effectively look a year into the past. So Jonnie and Angus, two primitive screwheads who only became aware of physics and such a year or two ago, calculate where to teleport their camera to avoid interfering planets and what angle to aim it at and so forth.

After fifteen minutes in space the camera rig comes back, and Angus has to warn Jonnie to let it warm up before handling it, since space is cold. Then they hurry off to look at the pictures, and astonishingly there is no chapter break before they see the results.

There was the Imperial City of Psychlo. Circular train rails, streets down from its cliffs like conveyor belts. They even carried the idea of mining into their city design.

Why? Do they only situate cities next to excavation sites, instead of things like food or water? Or did these morons build mines before they built cities? Why is this civilization so obsessed with digging?

Huge, bustling Psychlo! The center of power of the universes. The hub of the great, cruel claw that raked the bones from planets and peoples everywhere. There was the three-hundred-two-thousand-year-old monster itself, spread out in its sadistic and ugly might!

Are the buildings tall? Angular? What color are they? Are there monuments? Parkland? Great open-air markets? What does the city look like besides "sadistic and ugly" and "inexplicably designed like a mine?"

Neither Jonnie or Angus had ever seen a live city of that size before. A hundred million population? A billion? Not the planet, just the city above the lower plain. Look at the trams. Rails that ran in circular spirals. Cars that looked for all the world like mine cars but full of people. Mobs in the streets. Mobs! Not riots. Just Psychlos. You ever see so many beings? Even in such a tiny size one could see mobs!

So the city's crowded and uses public transportation. Thanks for the vivid description, Hubbard.

Then it happens. There's a puff on the transshipment platform that makes the workers flinch and a forcefield come up. A minute later the coffins' "planet buster" nukes and dirty mines go off. The fiery explosions of the first, second, third, and forth bombs are held, but by that last one nearby trucks are being knocked around and the glass in the surrounding buildings shatters from an earthquake.

The fifth bomb went off!

And seen in slow motion, first narrowly, then more broadly, the entire scene went into a churning, boiling mass of atomic fire.

No, something more! Molten, flaming fire

Good Lord.

No, something more! Molten, flaming fire was erupting in spots all over the plain.

They widened the angle quickly.

The whole Imperial City of Psychlo was sinking and all about it sprayed up rolling oceans of molten fire.

The circular trams, the mobs, the buildings, and even the towering cliffs were drowning in a tumult of liquid, yellow green fire.

They hastily widened the view.

And they saw the entire planet of Psychlo turn into a radioactive sun!

The recording ended. They sat limp.

"My God," said Angus.

I like how they're widening the view of a recording. As in, the camera zoomed in to show the mobs in the streets, then zoomed out to take in the whole planet. Fifteen minutes ago, when it was actually filming. Angus' controls go back in time.

Also, suns do not work that way. Suns are supermassive fusion-powered hydrogen furnaces. You can't just set off a nuke and suddenly make one out of an ordinary planet.

Jonnie is actually feeling sick from guilt for being personally responsible for the annihilation of a planet, to say nothing of xenocide. He had only intended to blow up the transshipment platform, not the whole planet (then why did you use ten planet-buster bombs?!). Despite uncharacteristic sympathy for other life forms, Jonnie explains what he and Angus just watched happen.

The first little puff on the platform was the tags to the bomb fuses that Jonnie dropped, which were irradiated enough to spark a little breathe-gas reaction and engage the emergency force fields. Those shields forced the bomb blasts down into the tunnels and mine shafts in Psychlo's crust, right into the planet core, so that fifth nuke stimulated a fusion reaction in Psychlo's core, turning the planet into a sun in a violation of physics.

Angus catches on, and posits that when all those other Psychlo bases linked to Psychlo during their annual transshipment firings, they got blasted by fusion fire. This pretty much confirms that the Psychlos have no communications network, since none of these other bases noticed that their capital planet blew up, or that their neighboring minesites suddenly blew up.

This also means that Terl tried to teleport himself into a sun, which makes Jonnie feel sorry for him.

That's what it took to yank Angus out of it. "Poor Terl! After all the rotten things the demon did? Jonnie, I sometimes wonder about you. You can be cool as ice and then all of a sudden you come out with something like 'poor Terl'!"

"It would be an awful way to die," said Jonnie.

Angus straightened up. "Well!" he said, just like he had popped up out of a dive in the lake. "Psychlo is gone! The empire is gone! And that's one thing we don't have to worry about anymore! Good riddance!"

So that's that. Billions and trillions of lives ended in a fiery cataclysm, creatures who were at best simple workers like Char or Zzt or the Chamco Bros. who worked during the day and played ring toss while getting hammered at night, or who were at worst driven to acts of violence by mind-controlling implants. A civilization destroyed because one company convinced its government to sanction an attack on Jonnie's planet a thousand years ago. Countless subjugated Psychlo females slain, untold innocent Psychlo infants annihilated, and who knows how many "client species" caught as collateral damage.

And after that brief "wow, did I do that?" moment and some unexpected remorse for his nemesis, Jonnie carries on with a clear conscience, happy to have this niggling detail cleared up.

Well, let's be fair - there's over a hundred pages left in the book. He might feel something later. We'll have to see.

Next time, The Gray Men return! Well, not really, since they haven't gone anywhere. But the rest of the book deals with them, and the exciting matter of planetary finance. So strap in for blastoff!

Part 27, Chapter 10 - The Punchline

2010-11-02T20:42:00.000-05:00

So there's a moment of calm as the Scots rush off to Edinburgh, and the aliens hit their apartments for a break, leaving Jonnie to wander into the ops center. He's got a lot of concerns to keep track of - Schleim's trial, how long the ceasefire will last, Edinburgh, Russia - but he remembers that book he read's advice to take things one at a time... wait, what book? I don't remember a book. When'd Jonnie get a book?

Eh, I'm not going back to look for it.

There is one question Jonnie can get an answer to, at least, and he tells Angus to get ready to teleport a camera to check on Psychlo and see if those aliens are ever going to get around to that counterattack. I'm still not sure how they could launch a counter-invasion, if Psychlo is stuck on a strict teleportation schedule that leaves it with only a few hours each year to link to Earth, and they didn't exactly try to send anything through during the most recent scheduled firing, but that's all a moot point, as we'll see next chapter.

Jonnie goes to the hospital on his way to his room, gets some sulfa powder and a shot of B Complex, is told he's perfectly fine thanks to his impressive physique and willpower-fueled healing factor, and lifts the spirits of the wounded Scots left behind with but a sentence because Jonnie is a Leader of Men. Then he meets Chief Chong-won who complains that a feast of Chinese cooking for the alien diplomats is going uneaten, and then Mr. Tsung shows up to compliment Jonnie on being a fast pupil. Turns out someone recorded the antics in the conference room for a "Best of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler" DVD... this is not an exciting chapter.

Tsung humbly requests Jonnie's "chop" (signature) to approve his family's un-exiling and reinstatement as chamberlains to the world government, plus a promotion to mandarin for Tsung's relatives. Jonnie points out that he doesn't actually belong to the world government, but Tsung says via translator "you don't know what you are." I'm inferring that Jonnie's performance as a pompous twit has made him a fully-qualified emperor in Tsung's eyes, and now wish to inflict violence upon Tsung for being a disgrace to human dignity.

Jonnie signs the papers, and finally reveals what Tsung told him back in Part 26, Chapter 6 that gave Jonnie so many ideas.

"Oh yes," said Jonnie as he left. "One more thing. Tell him how much I enjoyed that tale about the dragon who ate the moon."

So it took a Chinese folktale to remind Jonnie that he had a planet-destroying bomb?

Next chapter, the fate of Psychlo revealed!

Part 27, Chapter 9 - Yes, He Can Blow Up Worlds AND Fly a Plane

2010-11-01T19:12:00.004-05:00

Last time on Battlefield Spork, Jonnie earned a ceasefire after threatening to unleash unimaginable devastation on the free peoples of the universe.

This chapter, not nearly as much happens. While Schleim is being taken into custody, Sir Robert and a bunch of Scottish doctors and engineers rush off to Edinburgh to dig their kin out of collapsed bunkers and tunnels. Uncharacteristic thoughts of Chrissie and Pattie are enough to make Jonnie feel "like a cold hand had gripped his heart," but he's urged to stay and manage the conference.

Lord Dom, he of the "big, liquidy face," warns that redeploying forces during a truce could be seen as suspicious, but Jonnie has "had just about enough of being Chinko polite" - ah, that easygoing, natural racism - and explains that the Scots are all noncombatants, and that it wouldn't be wise to try to stop them.

After that "Lord" Jonnie hits the operations center and learns that the Singapore garrison is being redeployed to check on Russia, and Ker is being left in charge of the Psychlo prisoners at the Victoria base while the humans there go to Scotland. Lord Dom wanders in and points out that with most of the Scots gone, there are now only Jonnie and Stormalong to provide air cover for the conference (don't they still have the not-a-force-field up?). Stormalong jokes "Why, that's twice as many as there used to be! Not long ago, there was just him!"

Lord Dom blinked. He stared at Jonnie. The young man didn't look worried at all.

Lord Dom went off and told his colleagues about this. They discussed it considerably among themselves.

They decided they had better keep a careful eye on Jonnie.

The bastard just blew up a moon and NOW you're keeping an eye on him?!

Next chapter, an old mystery solved.

I just had another thought: the Tolneps are slavers, yes? So after hundreds of thousands of years of galactic history and dozens of interstellar civilizations, nobody has come up with an automated alternative to slave labor. It's more cost-effective to launch planetary invasions and ferry prisoners countless lightyears to work in Tolnep's chocolate mines or whatever than it is to build a robotic arm holding a pick.

This universe sucks.

Part 27, Chapter 8 - So Much For the Tolneps

2010-10-29T19:30:00.004-05:00

Schleim is relieved to hear the distant whine of the approaching Tolnep fleet, so is in a good mood when he tells Jonnie to turn on the projector and show "the latest picture of your fake model!"

It's shot at a new angle, so Schleim has a clear view of the Tolnep insignia sculpted into the planetoid. He spots a hangar entrance:

The moon had deflated further now. It resembled a blue balloon with one side being poked relentlessly in, a great pucker that was growing bigger now and at a more rapid rate.

What appeared to be black gases were eddying up to fill the sunken part.

And then out of that yawning hangar bolted a war vessel! Although it must have been traveling very fast, the enormous size of it caused it to seem to move in slow motion. At least thirty thousand tons of Tolnep capital ship was seeking to escape into space.

But it was too late. It had already been touched by the pucker within the moon. A whole back section of the ship was gone!

Before the fixated eyes of the delegates, the vast space vessel was eaten up from tail to nose, its massive metal turned to gases.

Schleim has had a terrible day. The holoprojector hurts his sensitive eyes. He's been mocked for his accent, and his dirty shoes. His government has been accused of employing a loathsome journalist. And now someone imploded his moon.

So he screams, pops his earplugs, strafes the audience with his paralyzing scepter, and tries to sabotage the atmosphere armor. But the pistol he draws doesn't fire, Jonnie breaks his visor with his thrown "knobkerrie" - oookay, I'm just going to assume Jonnie was always carrying it, whatever - and the tree-person gets Schleim in a full nelson.

I think there's a goof here, because suddenly the nameless emissary from Fowljopan has become simply Fowljopan. Whoever he is, he uses a presumably very sharp knife to cut the metallic skin of Schleim and extract a suicide capsule, then asks if there's going to be a trial "under Clause Thirty-two, threatening physical violence to the conference!"

Jonnie comes over to taunt Schleim, explaining that the reason the paralyzing scepter didn't work was because the humans swapped it out for a decoy. If you're wondering when the hell they found the time and materials to do this, just assume it came from whatever factory mass-produced the limpet mines they seeded the atmosphere with.

There's an argument over whether or not Jonnie is in any position to make threats or demands of the future defendant, until he invokes Clause Forty-one and his role as the one responsible for the conference's security. After a "bulbous creature from a mostly liquid world" named Lord Dom suggests that calling a ceasefire would play well at Schleim's trial, the Tolnep fleet is called off. Or rather, it is once the Tolnep admiral is assured of Schleim's safety by one of the Small Grey Men.

And so ends the wholly uninteresting and unnecessary "Tolnep attack" subplot. While the event has the benefit of getting the other aliens attacking Earth to give their forces a similar ceasefire order, now Jonnie's worried about the clout of the grays.

And who was this small gray man who exerted such power over these? Where did he fit in? Who was he? What would he want out of all this? Another threat?

You know when would've been a good time to get answers to these questions? Before you signed The Gray Man's document and took his advice without so much as asking his name!

Now. Let's talk ethics.

Jonnie just blew up a moon housing a vast naval shipyard, belonging to a civilization of slavers that was attacking his people. It'd be easy to make a comparison to the classic Star Wars and Luke Skywalker's destruction of the Death Star. Both actions destroyed massive planetoids and killed countless thousands, if not millions. Both were arguably acts of self-defense, even if there were certainly some civilian contractors or good men trapped in a bad situation amongst the death toll. But there are some important differences.

Luke torpedoed a moon-sized weapon, an instrument of terror designed to blow up planets. Luke didn't do this with some superweapon of his own, but by taking advantage of a design flaw.

Jonnie blew up a moon currently serving as a military base, but a naval installation can easily be refitted to accommodate civilian traffic. Furthermore, he blew up a planet's moon, which is going to have all sorts of consequences on the planet's tides and whatnot, to say nothing of whether or not that black hole thingy is going to stick around. And Jonnie didn't plug an exhaust port with a photon torpedo, he used a planet-killer weapon on Asart in front of an audience of other aliens, with the implication being "if you oppose me, I will use this on your planets, too." Even in this chapter, while he's trying to get Schleim to call off his fleet, Jonnie nearly threatens to annihilate the Tolnep homeworld and every last lifeform on it, good Tolnep, bad Tolnep, and slave alike.

Jonnie could have made his demonstration on an uninhabited world and it would have been just as effective. But instead he went for the huge body count. So Luke was a hero, albeit one with a lot of blood on his hands, while the only thing stopping me from calling Jonnie a terrorist is the fact that he picked a (predominantly) military target.

Part 27, Chapter 7 - OM NOM NOM

2010-10-28T20:32:00.003-05:00

If nothing else, you can say that things definitely happen in this chapter. Boy do they ever...

So the alien delegates are outside around the transhipment platform, enjoying the night air and chatting amiably amongst themselves. The representative from Splandorf offers to buy a dog from a Chinese refugee for six thousand credits. They have no idea what Jonnie has in store for them.

After apologizing once more for getting sidetracked by Schleim and piracy, Jonnie takes the stage and vows to settle the Tolnep issue once and for all with "a demonstration of excessive appetite." Two techs roll out a minecart (I guess they laid tracks?).

And on the cart sat a dragon like the one on his helmet. It was about five feet long. It had wings. It had a neck. And it had a very ferocious head, a gaping fanged mouth, glaring red eyes and horns. And from head to tail it had spines jutting out all the way along. A gold-scaled, scarlet-mouthed dragon.

Schleim states the obvious: "That's just a painted figure made of clay!" But the other aliens are impressed by Jonnie's theatrics and shush the Tolnep. Jonnie explains that the "beast" is a dragon, and gestures at its "mother," the dolled-up teleportation console, as well as the dragon on his helmet. But he goes on to point out the key difference - the beast on his helmet has been fed. The one on the cart "is an imperial dragon! It eats moons and planets!"

The assembled ambassadors chuckle at the joke, and how the technicians "pet" and "catch" the "wild animal" to be hauled onto the teleportation platform. Jonnie walks over, leans down, and whispers into the statue's ear: "I know you are hungry. SO GO EAT UP ASART!"

And so the "ultimate bomb" within the dragon is armed, and it is teleported away.

A few minutes go by, then Jonnie borrows a "picto-recorder" from the emissary from Fowljopan - foul Japan? - and teleports the recorder away. When it comes back a short time later, it's freezing cold. The recorder is uploaded to the projector, which implies that if nothing else these diverse aliens have agreed upon a universal media storage format. An image of the harbor moon of Asart materializes in the air, but...

They didn't see anything strange for a moment. And then as the picture rolled off the disk, they saw a hole. A hole occurring in the upper right surface of Asart. Just a hole. No, there was a bit of black around the edge of it.

Schleim, still listening for the Tolnep fleet, dismisses it as more of Jonnies theatrics, but the other aliens are now afraid. Another camera is teleported away and back, and the resulting screens show how the hole is growing.

A breath of terror trembled through the gathering. But Jonnie was not going to let it become a riot.

"You see, my lords, the dragon was hungry." He laughed lightly. "He is also a very obedient dragon. Told to eat the moon, he is eating Asart! A very controllable dragon after all!"

Had he hit them with ice water he could not have produced a more chilling effect. Their eyes focused on him in growing horror.

Jonnie has now become a more effective villain than Terl.

Schleim declares that this is just a trick, that Jonnie is showing them pictures of a model or something. But he offers to use his own recorder to verify things, which gives him an excuse to go to his room and grab a hamper loaded with spare weaponry (has he noticed he's been pickpocketed yet?). When he returns, Schleim reveals that there is a diamond emblem on the "back" of Asart done with "hyperband nullifying material" that can only be seen with special Tolnep equipment. He puts his camera on the teleportation platform, confident that he's about to uncover Jonnie's deception. All the while awaiting reinforcements.

The really depressing thing- well, more depressing than the "good guys" blowing up a planetoid - is that by the aliens' reactions, there's no indication that the Psychlos ever did this. Which means that 1) the big bad Psychlos have once again improperly utilized their technology and 2) the depraved and thoroughly evil Psychlos have nothing on Jonnie.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong later. Maybe Jonnie is merely just as vicious as the Psychlos, rather than more so.

Random fact for the chapter: Schleim mentally explains "Theatrics, good Lord" at one point, and wonders "what in the name of fifty devils was going on" at another, which raises some fascinating theological questions that unfortunately go unanswered.

Another random fact: one of the alien diplomats is some sort of tree-person, with bark for skin and leaves for hair. Why the hell not.

Part 27, Chapter 6 - Just In Case You Were Wondering How the Wider War Was Going

2010-10-27T19:17:00.002-05:00

While Jonnie has been wearing a dragon on his helmet and generally making an ass of himself, the secondary characters have been locked in fierce combat for days. This chapter is nothing but three little vignettes from the battlefield (for a given value of "battle") that is Earth (fighting not guaranteed to be truly global in scale).

Colonel Ivan's all blistered and singed from his flamethrower, resting in the tunnels beneath the Russian missile base. The blast doors are glowing from a sustained barrage, his planes are all recalled due to running out of fuel and ammo, his radio is down, and all of the thousand mines... where did they come up with a thousand land mines? Were they in the bunker, and somehow survived the centuries when ammunition didn't? Or did the humans somehow produce their own off-screen?

Anyway, the minefield is depleted from the aliens using the time-honored tactic of throwing soldiers at the obstacle until it went away. No mention of hovering vehicles to float over the minefield, air transport used to circumvent the minefield, or alien battlefield engineers safely destroying the minefield.

Stupid aliens.

And then we cut to Chief o' Clanfearghus, who to my knowledge has no name, in the ruins of Edinburgh, which were already ruined from a thousand years of neglect but is now also on fire. The bunkers and tunnels have collapsed in places, their anti-air is down to one gun now being used for perimeter defense, and the only pilot left is Dunneldeen, who I thought was their only pilot in the first place. And no, 'deen hasn't been shot down yet. Chiefy is wounded and cursing his foolishness for making his stand in Edinburgh out of sentimentality, instead of relocating to the better-defended Cornwall minesite like Jonnie suggested.

And in Singapore, A Scottish Officer Hubbard Can't Be Bothered To Name is boggling at the aliens' tactics. The Tolneps have blown a gap under the "atmosphere-armor" dome with sustained artillery fire, even though it cost them twelve tanks and five marines... argh... guys, you have a warfleet. You don't need to land artillery in a combat zone. You bombard the shields from orbit until you open up your gap, then send in the marines. There is no reason to lose soldiers beforehand.

Why are all the aliens so hopelessly incompetent with their arsenals? Why do I get the feeling that anyone who's played a game of Command & Conquer could annihilate these guys? Why is everyone in this book so freakin' stupid?

Well, A Scottish Officer Hub - you know what, his name's Steve - was fully expecting the Tolneps to send in more marines to disable his force field, but they didn't. Instead the other alien ships are headed towards Edinburgh and Russia, while the Tolneps have left the field for their own vessels, which are now heading towards Kariba at great speed. Steve would have been overrun in twenty minutes, but instead the Tolneps are hitting Africa. He has his men send a warning message to Kariba.

Again, I have to wonder: is any of this necessary? Was the "conference to decide the fate of the planet" not enough? Why another obstacle, another delay? Can't this story just be over with already?

At least next chapter things get back on track.

Part 27, Chapter 5 - Tolneps Need Those Hannibal Lecter Masks

2010-10-26T19:25:00.004-05:00

Schleim's extremely cunning plan is near fruition, and he hangs behind while Jonnie leads the other aliens out. But the Tolnep's plot to lock the conference room door is foiled by the lingering elderly Chinese host, forcing Schleim to pretend to be looking for something he dropped. And then two technicians come in to move the projector, and bump into the alien.

A technician caught a glimpse of fangs right in front of his face and raised his arm. Unable to check its forward crush, the technician's heavy sleeve banged into Schleim's mouth.

The reaction of a Tolnep was inevitable. He bit! He bit hard and repeatedly, hissing in rage as he struck!

Because when you think of an alien descended from dinosaurs, you think "venomous spaz."

So one techie clutches his critically-wounded shirt sleeve, the other apologizes frantically and gives the alien his scepter, and the host apologies some more while brushing Schleim off. Then after the alien leaves, the three Chinese men go to the hospital to visit Dr. Allen, who extracts the Tolnep's venom from the fake techie's reinforced sleeve to develop an antivenom. The host shows off the knife and gun he pickpocketed from Schleim. The whole collision was planned, you see.

Aaaaand that's the chapter. Schleim bites someone and we get to see how incredibly three-steps-ahead-of-everyone the humans are. Boy, that sure puts my mind at ease, I though this whole conference might be dangerous or exciting or something, since we spent entire chapters playing up how out of his league Jonnie was. The whole "which moon is your least favorite" plot is going to have to wait a bit longer, too, since next chapter we get to see a Russian try and inject some tension into this story.

Part 27, Chapter 4 - Astronomy Lesson

2010-10-25T19:34:00.002-05:00

This whole chapter is a big build-up to Jonnie's plan for galactic peace, as he shows off some holograms taken while all the diplomats' credentials were being verified. The projector displays an image of the binary system Sirius, known as Batafor to the Psychlo. Jonnie asks Lord Schleim to verify what he's looking at, but the suddenly calm Tolnep is being a twerp so the Hawvin representative gives a visual tour.

Nameless Hawvin Guy gives a nice walkthrough of Sirius/Batafor, which the Hawvins call Twino ("mother and child"). It's not really important, but there isn't much else to the chapter, so...

More Than You Need to Know About the Sirius System:
Planet 1: Jubo, uninhabited due to high gravity and heat.
Planets 2-5: Just as uninhabited as Jubo, but unworthy of being named for whatever reason.
Planet 6: Torthut, former Psychlo mining outpost, population "annihilated"
Planet 7: Holoban, owned by the Hockner Confederacy
Planet 8: Balor, a CR 20 Demon... er, Hawvin world
Planet 9: Tolnep, has five moons in a system where most worlds have none
Planet 10: Tung, another Psychlo mining base, before which the Tolneps removed the native population.
Planet 11: At this point Jonnie's had enough and shows a new picture.

The hologram now displays Creeth, the Tolnep capital. Landmarks include the Tolnep legislature, the House of Plunder, and the slave market/public park Grath, famed for a clock built of slave bones (?!). "It is said that fifty-eight thousand female slaves were killed to make up the border you see." You know, just in case you didn't hate the Tolneps with all your being yet.

...Seriously, a clock made of bones? Why would you do that? If you're a slave-trading civilization, why cut into your own profits for a gratuitously EVIL timepiece? And why single out females? Wouldn't it be more efficient to use larger male bones - assuming these aliens follow human sexual dimorphism, which let's face it, they probably do since they're basically humans with rubber foreheads.

I bet the streets of Creeth are paved with babies and each night for dinner every Tolnep eats a kitten. This is just awful writing.

Anyway, by the time on the pointlessly macabre timepiece, Jonnie's hologram was taken two hours or so ago by the teleportation rig. Which was one point of this display. Next Jonnie does something that quite rightfully makes Schleim worried, and asks him "as a native of Tolnep and someone undoubtedly fond of its moons, could you tell me which moon you like best?"

This is like when the bald guy with the underground lair and stolen nuclear missile asks the hero which is their favorite city, or when the mad doctor asks the guy strapped to the table which is his favorite organ.

Schleim tries to evade the question by saying he likes "any of them" the least, so Jonnie picks for him - Asart, the moon that serves as the base for the entire Tolnep fleet, a closely-guarded, high-security Tolnep secret. Then Jonnie ominously asks for the alien delegates to join him outside. He does not give a worrying chuckle or sinister smile, but he really should.

Random fact for the chapter: did you know that the Tolneps are nocturnal, and are rumored not to be indigenous to Tolnep? If Hubbard tries to pass them off as transplanted dinosaur descendants I'm gonna be cranky.

Another random fact: Sirius is known for its higher-than-normal amount of infrared light, which could be responsible for the Tolnep's infrared-based vision... I guess. I'm impressed that Hubbard did that much research on Sirius, though it does make me boggle why he could get so much wrong when it comes to radiation.

Further note: The Tolneps control exactly one planet in the home system, with four others in alien hands. This is absolutely pathetic, and yet they're in the Big 30 intergalactic races. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Battlefield Earth's aliens suck.

One last note: Asart also serves as the Tolneps' shipyards, because "the mighty nonatmosphere ships of Tolnep could not even taken off from a planetary surface." Instead all the parts are flown up to Asart and assembled there. Flown up. From Tolnep. By Tolnep freighters. Flying in atmosphere. Also, Asart is supposed to be a state secret, even though there's literally three other alien races in-system that just have to look through a telescope to see the ships coming and going.

Part 27, Chapter 3 - A Duplicitous Diplomat

2010-10-22T19:39:00.003-05:00

Having been humiliated in front of the other diplomats, Lord Schleim is trying a new tactic. Using a device hidden in his scepter he's sent Captain Snowl a coded, scrambled message on a "hyper-nondirectional" radio band that only the Tolneps know about and only specific receivers can pick up, ordering the newly-promoted officer to gather the Tolnep fleet currently over Singapore and move on the conference site.

Schleim, meanwhile, will use the "paralysis beam" built into the other side of his sceptor to incapacitate everyone around him, while he will be protected with "deaf-flaps" over his ears. From this we can gather that this "beam" is not in fact a focused stream of particles, and though its operation is based on hearing it's somehow able to affect a diverse array of life-forms in the same way.

With the conference-goers at his mercy, Schleim will go out and deactivate the "atmosphere armor" and let the Tolnep marines in. The alien actually acknowledges the humans' teleportation console, but is more interested in seeing it destroyed than seizing its secrets for himself. Widespread teleportation could only cause trouble for slavers like the Tolneps, after all.

Schleim even has a back-up plan: if his fleet is defeated, he'll just claim they turned pirate too. And though his actions risk the ire of The Small Grey Men, the Tolnep thinks their power has weakened in these "very troubled times" and that he should be able to pull this off. Once he gets everyone outside, that is.

At least this promises some upcoming events that aren't Jonnie being overly-theatrical and alien diplomats being stupid, even if those events will be "Jonnie saves the day" again.

Part 27, Chapter 2 - Further Accusations of Piracy

2010-10-21T19:08:00.004-05:00

Jonnie shakes his sad and apologizes to the other aliens on behalf of this stubborn Tolnep, who is forcing the assembly to linger on the issue of piracy. He asks Schleim to produce the orders issued to the Tolnep forces on Earth, which Schleim, as an ambassador, does not have. Jonnie interprets this as meaning the Tolneps had no legal orders pertaining to Earth, which Schleim objects to.

Two techies wheel out a, I kid you not, gold-plated minecart bearing a gilded projector. Turns out that "atmosphere-armor" technology can also be used to make incredibly lifelike holograms. Naturally, the assembly of seasoned intergalactic diplomats has never seen such technology before and are "enthralled" by the device.

Let me just remind everyone that these diplomats were teleported to this conference.

The projector... projects an image of that diseased, pock-marked, rotten-toothed slob, Roof Arsebogger, whose disfigured visage disgusts the assembled aliens and makes Schleim declare that such a revolting journalist would never be chosen to represent Tolnep. As to where this picture came from, we're told that it was compiled by "pilots flying air cover at the Purgatoire River," using their "radio telephoto camera(s)." Since Buttswamper never to my knowledge left the Capture, they must have been aiming their cameras through the capital ship's viewports.

On that note, Jonnie rolls some footage of the Capture's bridge, in which Arsebogger is giving orders to Quarter-Admiral Snowletter. "Smash the place. Seize the people and sell them for your own profit. I will cover you. And like it or not, this is what you must do! The power is mine! And we will split the profits! Understood?"

As to where this came from: somehow those "radio telephoto cameras" were able to not only record the images but the sounds of this conversation through the bridge window. There are two possibilities here: firstly, that this was captured while the ship was in the atmosphere (which Tolnep ships don't handle well), and that the recording equipment was able to enhance the sounds of distant, muffled alien voices while editing out most of the engine noise of the surrounding fleet, to say nothing of all the other conversations going on in that ship. The alternative is that these words were somehow captured across the soundless void of space.

I guess a third option would be that Jonnie has a magical camera.

Anyway, Schleim is indignant that he's been verbally pantsed by this barbarian, and insists that the images must be doctored. Jonnie's argument is that they're "too clear" to be fake, and the other aliens, who are completely unfamiliar with this type of audio-visual equipment that for all their knowledge could easily put words in somebody's mouth, are in full agreement.

With all the Tolnep forces over Earth thus proven to be pirates, Jonnie demands that Schleim get his comrades to surrender. The previously-bored aliens are happy with this diversion from the real issues of the conference, and The Gray Man and his kin, who have been watching worriedly from the sidelines, change their ships' broadcast to one warning that any ships entering the intergalactic conference zone will be subject to "penalties," just in case Schleim tries something. Which he will.

I'm actually missing the days Jonnie beat bears to death with his gun.

Part 27, Chapter 1 - Let's Talk About Pirates

2010-10-20T19:22:00.003-05:00

So it begins.

Music began to be heard in the conference room. It was slow, dignified music. Ponderous. Impressive. The emissaries looked about with some interest, wondering what was going to happen.

In walks a huge beefy Mongolian stripped to the waist, carrying something invisible, a "glassine electronics table used by Psychlos for small electric work that required light from every angle. It had been sawed down and sprayed with lens spray that passed light one hundred percent and so reflected nothing." Yes, Hubbard's 'verse has spray-on invisibility, just in case you were still taking it seriously.

After that comes two "beautifully gowned Chinese boys" carrying pillows bearing a Dictionary of the Psychlo Language and Intergalactic Laws By Treaties of Governing Nations. Then the boys leave, the music stops, and a drumroll accompanies someone announcing "Masters of all planets! Lords of the great and powerful realms of sixteen galaxies! May I now introduce to your august presence, LORD JONNIE! He who embodies the spirit of Earth!" And with a fanfare, Jonnie enters.

Jonnie came walking down the aisle. He was walking slowly, heavily, commanding, as though he weighed a thousand pounds. He was dressed in black and silver and he carried a silver wand. But it wasn't silver; it looked so, but when the light caught it on the slightest movements it flashed with blindingly bright rainbow colors.

A costume so fancy Hubbard had to describe it twice.

He came to the platform, stepped up, moved behind the table, and turned.

At that instant a mine spotlight placed just above the door flamed on. He stood there in black and silver and yet a blaze of living color.

He did not speak. Feet apart, not blocked from their view by the table, he held the silver wand between his two hands and simply looked at them with a stern and even disdainful expression. Dominant.

The gilded and bejeweled alien diplomats are impressed despite the usual pomp and pretentiousness they have to deal with, partly because of Jonnie's helmet.

That beast on the helmet! It looked alive. The trick of the light, the play of the silver metal that flashed, the glowing red coals of eyes, whatever it was, it looked alive. Was he wearing a live winged beast on his helmet?

No, it's a sculpture you morons. These guys are seasoned political animals used to ceremony and gaudy wardrobes, yet are still intimidated by a garish helmet? And so what if the "dragon" was alive - sixteen universes and they've never encountered a species that wore a pet while at a conference? It's just... arrrgh... everything Jonnie does has to be impressive and awesome, even if it's something these aliens should have been used to.

Lord Schleim, on the other hand, is snidely pleased after Jonnie is introduced as "the spirit of Earth," because the Psychlo term for "spirit" could mean "mind," "angel," or "demon." Wait, what? One of those things is not like the others, and the other two are diametrically-opposed. What a great language.

So Schleim questions this "devil"'s credentials, but Jonnie makes a big show of having him repeat himself because of his "uncouth Tolnep accent," which gets the other aliens laughing at the rustic representative ("Tolneps were really quite rural; they had only one planet, and that was quite distant from the center of things.")

So one of the Top 30 species that dominates interdimensional affairs never founded a single colony.

To add insult to injury, Jonnie uses his wand/flashlight to illuminate Schleim's dirty blue booties, stifling a laugh. But he moves on, using all the deferential and polite words and mannerisms from those Chinko instructional discs, and explains that such an august assembly shouldn't be meeting for a minor dispute - such as, say, piracy.

Jonnie looks the term up in the provided dictionary and finds the expected definition, but when he checks the book of law he finds that the Psychlos defined "pirate" as "one who feloniously steals or mines minerals." Everyone laughs at those greedy Psychlos, and Jonnie suggests that the conference pick a definition to determine if "the Tolnep fleet officers and crewmen are to be slowly vaporized individually as pirates or simply shot as military men when court-martialed."

This makes Schleim spit venom as he protests such a prejudiced slander, and Jonnie explains that he believes the other aliens were coerced into following the Tolnep's lead on their attack on Earth. Schleim counters that the other Tolneps were following government orders and that this talk of pirates is just a waste of time they could be spent negotiating Earth's surrender. The chapter ends on this... well, it's not a cliffhanger so much as it is an impasse or pause in a conversation. Maybe it's a commercial break.

If nothing else, this chapter makes me regret that there won't be a sequel to the Battlefield Earth movie. It'd be hilarious to see the result of trying to film this chapter as it's written...

Part 26, Chapter 7 - Sir Robert is Not a Diplomat

2010-10-19T19:17:00.002-05:00

The plan is for Sir Robert the Fox to go in and do his best as a diplomat for as long as he can, then call in Jonnie as reinforcements when things inevitably go south. And so a sleep-deprived, stressed-out warrior with no inclination for conferences, whose home town is being pressed hard and whose wife is missing, is sent to trade words with a bunch of alien emissaries representing the Tolneps, Hawvins, Jambitchows, Bolbods, Drawkins, Kayrnes, and more.

Remember the Tolnep who "looked like trouble?" His name's Lord Schleim, which sounds like both a Captain Planet villain and a Jewish caricature. Subtle Hubbard ain't. Schleim is wondering why so many "august persons" have been called by "an upstart lot of barbarians involved in a petty, local dispute," and all the jewel-encrusted and gilded aliens with him are inclined to agree.

This is mind-boggling. The invitations were teleported to their capitols. They were teleported to this planet. And the people doing the teleporting weren't Psychlos. The long and inexplicable Psychlo monopoly on the god-like power of teleportation has been broken, and these aliens are wondering what the big deal is.

Sixteen known universes and no signs of intelligent life.

There's a heart-pounding moment where they question Foxy's credentials, and then the tension rises when Schleim wonders if the humans can afford the monetary costs for holding a conference. Next Sir Robert loses his temper at the Tolnep's suggestion that they're meeting to discuss terms of surrender, and has to remind Schleim that the Capture is a blasted hulk just a few miles away. For Schleim is, like all diplomats, an arrogant, condescending twerp able to ignore unpleasant facts when convenient... sarcasm aside, how do you run a galactic empire if these are the chuckleheads you send to negotiate treaties and foster good relations with your neighbors?

Lord Schleim goes on to run a video of the twenty-five (abandoned, ruined) cities that alien bombers have set aflame, which he claims as proof that the war for Earth is practically over. He offers "very liberal terms," moved as he is by pity: Earth's population will be sold into slavery to cover the costs of the invasion ("over fifty percent survive such transportation on the average"), Earth's "king" can go into exile on Tolnep, and the other aliens will divvy up the planet's loot as restitution for "this unprovoked attack upon their peaceful ships." And the other aliens go along with it, convinced as they are that "they had been called here just to witness some surrender terms in a petty war."

YOU! WERE! TELEPORTED! HERE!

Sir Robert stubbornly insists that the meeting is to discus the aliens' surrender, but knows that he's beaten. So gives the signal to summon Jonnie to save the day.

He knew he had failed miserably. He hoped he had not hurt any chances Jonnie might have. Forlorn hope. It was all up to Jonnie now. But what could the poor lad possibly do?

Like I said: save the day. Now brace yourself. It's about to get really stupid.

Part 26, Chapter 6 - Jonnie Gets a Haircut, Gets Dressed, and is Told a Story

2010-10-18T14:45:00.003-05:00

And now, Jonnie gets a haircut from Mr. Tsung's daughter.

I guess it's not a complete waste of time because it gives Jonnie longer to fret over how he's supposed to deal with this alien overlords controlling hundreds of worlds and trillions of lives, all more experienced at the art of diplomacy than he, a humble warrior relying on ancient Chinese secrets to survive the upcoming conference.

This pretty much assures Jonnie will be triumphant - the only reason the odds against him are ever brought up is to beat the reader over the head with how awesome Jonnie is for winning despite them. A bunch of humans against the Psycho empire? How can he possibly hope to oh, that was anticlimactic. One man trying to crack a secret that aliens have been failing to decipher for thousands of years? Surely there's no way he could huh, that's it?

For reasons known only to L. Ron Hubbard, Tsung's daughter gives Jonnie a haircut based on pictures of "somebody named Sir Francis Drake that had defeated somebody called the Spaniards long, long ago." Maybe we're supposed to view Jonnie as the heir of that Sixteenth Century explorer and privateer? Given some of the controversy surrounding Drake. i.e. slave trading and massacres, this may be more appropriate than Hubbard intended.

Jonnie suddenly takes a moment to listen in to the base radio, and hears Stormalong complaining that the aliens are firebombing Detroit, which is both recognizable enough to be targeted despite a thousand years of neglect and also completely uninhabited. Oh, and Dunneldeen's downed sixteen Hawvin aircraft. On his own. While dodging Edinburgh's anti-aircraft fire. Isn't it exciting when the bad guys are so stupid they bomb uninhabited ruins, and so incompetent that one B-list character can cut them down by the score on his lonesome?

Then it's time for Jonnie to get dressed, and there's over a full page spent describing his fancy new outfit: black silk with lots of buttons coated in "a one-molecule-thick metal spray of an iridium alloy" that sparkles with all the colors of the rainbow. Even Jonnie's boots are coated in the sparkly stuff. And it's topped off with an iridium-plated helmet with a golden-winged, blue-spined, ruby-eyed dragon sculpted onto it, holding a white orb in its mouth.

Point of order: eastern-style dragons don't have wings.

Jonnie asks Tsung about the dragon, and is told a story. It's a story we'll have explained later after some major plottage, but for now all we know is that it invigorates Jonnie and gives him an idea that he rushes to tell Sir Robert about. Poor Foxy only gets a paragraph describing his new digs (a kilt, what a surprise), and warns Jonnie that this new plan is dangerous and might antagonize all the aliens. Which, again, ensures that it will succeed.

Part 26, Chapter 5 - Jonnie Takes a Bath, Learns Some Manners

2010-10-15T18:29:00.005-05:00

Jonnie goes to his room, feeling dizzy as the heroic willpower that has been keeping him going for so long starts to falter from worry about Chrissie. This is exacerbated when he runs into Mr. Tsung and his family along the way, forcing Jonnie to bow in greeting to each one before they get back to work on a mysterious Something.

Jonnie's room now has viewscreens showing feeds of the headquarters, empty conference room, and the teleportation platform, where he watches a Tolnep arrive.

He was in shimmering green; even his cap was green. But he had on dirty blue boots.

Would you be surprised to learn that the boots are a plot point?

Huge glasses hid his eyes. He carried a sort of scepter with a large knob at the top and a green hamper on green wheels for his food and supplies. A reptilian creature although he walked upright and had a face and arms and legs.

I like how "reptilian" apparently precludes having arms and legs. Also, weren't Jonnie and the other humans mistaken for Tolneps by some of the Psychlos? Despite being, y'know, hairy mammals?

A genetic line from dinosaurs that had become miniature and sentient?

1. How the flaming frak does Jonnie know about dinosaurs? Were they part of his tribal legends, or did the Psychlo educational machine include data on long-extinct species from a backwater mining world?
2. How the flaming frak is an extraterrestrial race supposed to be descended from a terrestrial species that went extinct sixty-five million years ago?
3. How the flaming frak would a species of reptiles evolve into a venomous, super-dense lifeform with vaguely-defined "time freezing" powers?

He made his speech much like the Hockner, accepted the reply with an evil smile, folded his shimmering green cloak about his steel-hard body, and was led away to a private apartment. He looked like trouble.

Yeah, since we've kinda killed off all our named antagonists by this point, it's time to come up with a new villain: Evil Tolnep Diplomat.

Suddenly Mr. Tsung barges in, notices how filthy Jonnie is, and demands that our hero take a bath. Jonnie caves, and not only enjoys a hot soak, but gets scrubbed down by his Chinese manservant, then put in a comfy robe and fed some soup. Then Dr. Allen and "Psychlos are Viruses" MacKendrick show up with "that false joviality doctors assume just before they take you by surprise and do something gruesome" and inject Jonnie with some "B complex." I'm left wondering if there's any profession Hubbard has a favorable opinion of.

Feeling better, Jonnie orders Tsung to bring him his buckskins, but the Chinese man refuses, because "They lords!" A translator is brought in to help figure out what Tsung is agitated about. Turns out the Tsung family served the Ch'ing dynasty as chamberlains up until the time of Mao, and even after the communist revolution and through the thousand years since the collapse of civilization they've scrupulously kept records and retained the lessons of protocol befitting a mandarin. All because they were patiently waiting for a dynasty to emerge for them to serve.

...Yep. Over the past ten centuries at no point did a young member of the Tsung bloodline say "shouldn't we be worried about getting enough food to survive the winter, instead of how a feudal ruler should behave in the presence of a foreign power?" None of the Tsungs even thought to apply what they'd learned about pomp and authority to their own bid for power - after all, if you know how an emperor is supposed to behave, what's to keep you from passing yourself off as one? They've just slavishly maintained the old traditions, content in their role as servants to greater people.

I'm depressed now.

So, through the translator, Tsung gives "Lord Jonnie" a crash course in how to act regally and what to expect at the conference table, all with lots of ellipses:

"'Do not,'" the Scot obediently translated, "'agree or seem to agree to anything. . . . Your words can be tricked into seeming to agree . . . so avoid the word yes. . . . They will make preposterous demands they know they cannot attain . . . just to gain bargaining points . . . so you in

You get the picture.

Then there's a lesson on deportment, that is to say the proper stance and motions of a commanding leader. How to hold or waggle a scepter, how to walk, etc. But before Jonnie's ready, there's one mysterious other matter left to attend to... next chapter.

Part 26, Chapter 4 - Enter: Blan Jetso!

2010-10-14T19:26:00.003-05:00

After all that intense repairwork from last chapter, this three page section seems like an anticlimax.

Someone (probably The Gray Man) has found a record - not a CD, or tape, or MP3, but an actual vinyl record - of The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra to play in the background for the arriving alien diplomats. TGM has also worked with Dr. Allen to set up a mesh screen around the platform for "disease control," thus negating any questions about the health risks of linking drastically different worlds through the miracle of teleportation with a single handwave. All the Chinese workers have cleaned up the base, a multinational uniformed honor guard is in place, and Edinburgh is on fire.

In light of the Psychlo-made defensive weapons making a mockery of their attempts at bombing, the attacking aliens have switched to munitions that sometimes aren't exploded in mid-air. The news is enough to make Jonnie feel a "contraction of his heart" and think of Chrissie. The Scottish officers are understandably distracted, and leave the handling of the xeno diplomats to Jonnie.

Cue the Hockner representative arriving on the platform. Despite the muddled explanation in Chapter 1 of this Part, you can retrieve objects, even life forms, using a teleporter. Those invitations Jonnie sent out included instructions for their representatives to stand around in the spot the note appeared in, as preparation for being yanked to Earth a few hours later. And I'm not exaggerating when I say the Hockner's greeting takes up close to an eighth of this chapter.

In a supercilious tone of voice, the Hockner emissary said in Psychlo, "I am Blan Jetso, Extraordinary Minister Plenipotentiary of the Emperor of the Hockners, long may he reign! I am empowered to negotiate and arrange final and binding amendments to agreements or treaties in all things political or military. My person is inviolate and any molestation cancels any agreements. Any effort to hold me hostage shall be in vain, for I shall not be redeemed by my government. At the threat of any torture or extortion, you are warned that I shall commit suicide instantly in ways unknown to you. I am not the carrier of any disease nor weapon. Long live the Hockner Empire! And how are you today?"

The chapter ends shortly after, with Jonnie suspecting that the 29 other aliens are going to be pretty much the same, and worrying about how he's going to deal with them. But let's talk more about how that Hockner got here.

There's two possibilities. The first is that nobody's ever done something like this before, sending an invitation promising future pickup for a distant conference. And that despite this being unheard of, all thirty alien races went along with it and sent their diplomats to wait around in front of their centers of government. This implies incredible trust or incredible naivety, and gives me some ideas of how to prank the Tolneps.

The other possibility is that this is routine, and that the Psychlos regularly brought alien dignitaries over for conferences. And that these talks were civil and polite enough for the aliens to consider them both legally-binding and worth repeating. Which is a bit unexpected for a backstabbing, bloodthirsty race that drips with self-indulgent eeeeeevil, isn't it?

I can't remember which is correct, or if it's even commented upon later. My memory of these upcoming chapters is a blur because they're that dull. And stupid, but that'll be later.

Waaaaay back at the start of the book, I complained that drone miners would make the whole "humans mine gold" plot unnecessary, and then I learned that the Psychlo had drones, they just didn't use them on Earth. And recently I whined that teleporting things to you would make mining in general unnecessary, and now I've learned that you can grab things with a teleportation platform, but the Psychlos apparently didn't think to apply that to resource acquisition.

It's mind-breaking. It's not just convenient natural laws preventing an action from happening, in the case of the "samespace" garbage. This is a supposedly intelligent species not making logical, beneficial actions they are fully capable of, just so that the plot can unfold a certain way. The universe of Battlefield Earth, from the evolution of alien races to the physical laws of reality, exists so that Jonnie can take a specific series of steps to become everybody's hero.

Part 26, Chapter 3 - Dam

2010-10-13T19:12:00.004-05:00

The question of how the diplomats would arrive actually kept me up last night, until I turned on the lights and flipped through the book to answer my questions. The solution was, in retrospect, obvious, in that it's both simple and raises a whole heap of further questions.

But that's later. Now there's eleven pages of Jonnie and the others repairing the Kariba dam in under two hours.

Why? Why can't we just get to the intergalactic conference? Why does every action the characters take have to be faced with an obstacle to overcome? First there was Terl trying to convince Numph to authorize training humans for mining, then there was the sabotage of Terl's demo, then there was Terl having to come up with a way to blackmail Numph, and then there was that earthquake affecting The Lode, and so on. You know what the Battlefield Earth movie did? Terl gets Jonnie, blackmails Numph, the humans acquire Terl's gold while preparing for the uprising, and that's that. None of this padding. The craziest part is that the things that should require lots of effort, like Jonnie walking into a Scottish village and convincing them all to fight for him, happen in a heartbeat with no difficulty.

I'm getting sidetracked because this is an incredibly boring chapter. Maybe I'm just jaded, but after those heart-pounding sections involving mining The Lode, it's hard to get excited about silt and erosion.

The short version is that the charred hulk of the Capture (containing fifteen hundred dead Tolneps and the remains of one suicidal Scotsman) is blocking the river, so Jonnie has some new channels blasted around it. "Blowie! Blowie! The sharp cracks of blast cord exploding." Then he has to get in a plane and blow up a pile of explosives to destroy the impact crater and get the river flowing back to normal. There's constant talk about how dangerous and impossible the task is, and how nobody's done x before, but in the end, with 33 seconds before the deadline, the teleportation platform has enough power to fire. Yaaaay.

Note that the levers and wheels of the dam controls haven't been moved for a thousand years, but don't crumble away to rusty powder when someone tries to move them. Also note that the power requirements of rearranging the very fabric of the universe sixty times in an afternoon can be met by one hydroelectric plant on the Zambezi River.

Part 26, Chapter 2 - Pitch-Black, Cavernous Plot Holes

2010-10-12T19:01:00.003-05:00

So Jonnie meets The Gray Man under the pagoda near the teleporter platform, and notes that the alien is indistinguishable from a human save for his gray hue. He also only comes up to Jonnie's shoulder, and is wearing a Scottish-knit sweater. TGM notices that they only have one console, which makes Jonnie defensive and he insists they can build more.

That small talk done with, they get down to business, conversing in Psychlo since the translator device The Gray Man uses occasionally "miswords critical clauses that lead to disputes." They get Chief of Clanfearghus on the line to empower Jonnie and Robert as acting on behalf of the government, i.e. the Scottish chieftains, and then TGM asks if the humans have any galactic credits, at least five hundred of them. 12,000 GC is quickly gathered from the human pilots, who "had been taking them off pilots they shot down."

Yeah.

While fighting for their lives against an alien foe that badly outnumbers them, the human air force is taking the time to search the wreckage of downed enemy aircraft for loot. That, or they've been industriously capturing aliens who ejected, who for whatever reason were carrying their wallets. Now I'm not a military man, but it seems strange to me that a pilot about to go on a mission over enemy territory would have any reason to bring along some currency. Were they expecting to have to bail out and wanted to be able to buy a sandwich afterward?

The small gray man - I shoulda abbreviated him to TSGM, since that's how the book always names him -writes up a document for Sir Robert and Jonnie to sign. After they become his paying customers, TSGM/TGM launches into his role as legal counsel, breaking out a big "address book" of teleportation coordinates and telling the humans to act fast and contact the home planets of the attacking aliens, declaring a temporary truce over the Kariba base for a conference over the planet's future. Since it'd take forever to enter the coordinates by hand, The Gray Man gets a crewman to bring out a computer that'll help with all the firings needed, and runs through the seven-hour process of sending a form letter to the twenty-nine "basic civilized nations" (and Lord Voraz).

Jonnie asks if TGM knows how to work a teleportation console, and the alien says no. He just has detailed information about how to operate an add-on computer to manage the teleportation. I guess the Psychlos didn't mind other races learning how to use peripherals for their top-secret technology?

So letters requesting an intergalactic conference are sent to the front steps of the Hockner Imperial Palace, the Tolnep House of Plunder, and so forth. And now you might be wondering "wait a tick - the Psychlos can send objects right to their rivals' capitols, and can build bombs capable of obliterating planets, so why haven't they annihilated those stupid Tolneps and Hockners already?" And neither I nor Hubbard have an answer for you, even though Jonnie just wished he could do something similar to the orbiting warships. There's no BS about the limitations of transshipment or some technological defense to such an attack. It's a plot hole, another oversight concerning the implications of the miraculous teleportation technology this book uses. Maybe, if my memory is failing me, there will be an explanation or excuse in a later chapter. But I'm not optimistic.

His job done, The Gray Man steps aside, saying the rest is up to Jonnie and Foxy, who exchange a concerned glance when they realize that "six and a half hours from now authorized ministers of twenty-nine races, which apparently made up about five thousand separate planets, would be here!"

How?

Jonnie just teleported pieces of cardboard across the vastness of space and into different universes. How are the aliens going to read the note and dispatch diplomats to reach Earth in a matter of hours if they don't have the Psychlos' teleportation technology? Do they possess some form of instantaneous communication? Do they have their diplomatic corps scattered across the galaxies, in unimaginably fast vessels ready to streak off to the nearest international crisis?

Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe there's a perfectly good explanation in the coming chapters.

In any event, the next plot point is set up - the dam is damaged, and unless it's repaired will lose power in a matter of hours. Oh no. Whatever will our heroes do.

Also note that despite hiring him as their legal advisor and working with him to send those summons, at no point do the humans get The Gray Man's name. We're told he initialed his part of the document, but not what those initials are. Given that the Scots all but agreed to serve as Jonnie's army before someone wondered who he was, this should come as no surprise.

Part 26, Chapter 1 - 834 Pages In, a Breakdown of Teleportation Rules

2010-10-11T19:23:00.004-05:00

Lots of teleportation mumbo-jumbo this chapter, as Hubbard attempts to answer questions in a way that raises further questions.

Jonnie and Angus have successfully test-fired their shiny new teleporter by sending a "gyro-mounted camera" to the moon and Mars. They do this because a teleportation rig can be used intwo ways, and I'll let Hubbard explain how:

The rig could "cast" an object out and bring it back or it could "cast" one out and leave it. You moved "this space" out there and brought it back in order to just send out an object and recover it. Or you moved "this space" out to the coordinates of "that space" and "that space" now would hold the object and you brought "this space" back empty. Actually nothing moved through space at all. But "this space" and "that space" were made to coincide.

Once again, let me boggle at the idea of tearing sections of the universe apart and somehow relocating them. Even assuming such a thing is possible, the logistics of it is staggering - you'd not only have to devise some standard of coordinates in an infinite, three-dimensional, ever-expanding operating area, but you'd also have to compensate for the fact that any two points in said area were hurtling away from each other. I can't imagine the processing power you'd need to run those numbers and keep a link open between Earth and Psychlo (which is, on top of everything else, in another universe) for hours at a time. The energy requirements, the computing requirements... the Psychlos can do all this, but they can't synthesize gold? They can't come up with a radiation-proof suit for them to wear for mining in dangerous conditions?

Also note that (and I'm going to feel real stupid if a later chapter proves me wrong), while it is possible to send "here" to "there," there's no mention of bringing "there" to "here." So Terl can't sneak off to that back-up platform in Africa and beam the gold from Colorado right into his lap. ...That's really it, the reason for this inexplicable limitation in how you can use teleportation: because otherwise the plot falls apart.

Speaking of plot-related limitations , there's also something called the "samespace" phenomenon. Transshipment is dangerous if you try to send things too close, since the locations being swapped are too similar to each other or something. The short version is that you don't teleport within 25,000 miles of your rig if you want what you're sending to be recognizable at the end. This is annoying Jonnie, who wanted to beam nukes aboard the orbiting alien cruisers.

Anticipating your outbursts, Hubbard explains that teleportation motors are completely different:

A motor ran on the principle that "samespace" resisted distortion heavily. The shorter the distance, the more the distortion. Thus the motor thrived on the refusal of space to distort. But here one was not moving an object; one was moving merely the position of the motor housing. You could even run a dozen motors in the same room and though they would cross-distort, they would function.

How is "moving the position of the motor housing" not "moving an object?" For that matter, wouldn't this just shoot the engine itself along its course and leave the rest plane behind? I can't wrap my head around this, and I really shouldn't bother trying to. The reason teleportation-based engines run under different rules is so that Hubbard can keep using them. Because by god, his spaceships don't run on plasma or dilithium or any of that nonsense, they're powered by teleportation, dammit, which is original and visionary and awesome and pure sci-fi.

So while Angus and Jonnie are fretting over all this, they suddenly receive a message in English from that ship that was sighted on the Scottish coast ages ago. After The Gray Man names what it was the old lady gave him (yarb tea), Jonnie cautiously agrees to a meeting. And so the endgame begins.

Part 25, Chapter 5 - I Suppose This is the Turning Point

2010-10-08T19:44:00.003-05:00

The Gray Man tagged along with the bulk of the aliens to assault Singapore, where he hung back and wondered at what cheap defensive weapons the Psychlos used, and why there's no orbital weapon batteries, which is something I'd overlooked. He puts all the incompetence down to the Intergalactic Mining Company's pursuit of profit over all else, though in fairness the humans are kicking tail with these budget weapons. Not that it's much of an accomplishment, given these aliens, but still.

TGM also notices something that all the distinguished military commanders of the other races have missed - there's no teleportation rig at Singapore. While there's something that looks like a console (it's a burnt-out spare), the fact that there's weapons fire and aircraft operating nearby means that there's no way anything can be teleported from the site. This doesn't stop the invaders from enthusiastically blowing up everything they can, and The Gray Man tsks-tsks and wonders why the military would level an undefended city that might contain the very loot they covet. Because we all know the military only exists to pillage and revel in destruction, and is incapable of grasping a more complicated objective than "kill stuff," right?

While the other aliens blow up the crumbling ruins of Singapore, The Gray Man goes on a tour. He arrives in Russia just in time to see five hundred Hawvin marines blunder into a minefield before getting strafed by aircraft. The American minesite is abandoned, still burning, and irradiated. Edinburgh is burning both from bombs and from the wreckage of bombers falling onto it. But nowhere is the teleportation trace that The Gray Man is searching for.

After chastising himself for feeling worried about that Scottish biddy who gave him something for his stomach, TGM takes a nap. When he wakes up he realizes that maybe those planes that went to Africa were carrying something of interest. He flies there just in time to see the Capture belly-flop, and while inspecting the area his scanners pick up that teleportation trace. For the first time in all of recorded history, a captured Psychlo teleportation console has fired twice.

The Gray Man, unprofessionally jubilant, sends a radio message in English towards the base, requesting an interview.

The small gray man waited. He hardly dared breathe. An awful lot of things depended upon the reply.

Get ready for some white-hot, pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat diplomacy.

Part 25, Chapter 4 - Vengeance for USG

2010-10-07T19:58:00.003-05:00

Glencannon's back, and this time, it's personal.

In his mind he could still hear the voice of his Swiss friend, "Go on! Go on! I will shoot them down! Keep going!" And then his scream when he was hit just before he ejected. And back of Glencannon's eyes [sic] he could still see the viewscreen of his friend's body being shot to pieces in the air.

Already mad with survivor's guilt and the thought that if he hadn't followed orders to flee he and Unnamed Swiss Guy could have won that fight, when Glencannon saw the Capture approaching and realized it was the the same ship that launched the fighters that killed his friend, Glencannon snapped.

So he stole the only aircraft on base, heavily-armored and carrying a payload of bombs each of which is capable of destroying "half a city," and went off for some sweet, sweet vengeance. Glencannon ignores Stormalong's voice on the radio and flies up out of the atmosphere to meet the Capture, downing a fighter on the way. Once he takes some defensive fire he moves out of range and sits for a while, studying the capital ship. As it continues dispatching bombers, Glencannon notices that past the constantly opening and closing hangar doors, there's a lot of fuel and ordnance sitting about.

So Glencannon waits until the doors are open, swoops forward through the defensive fire, and enters the hangar, guns a-blazing.

From the ground, Jonnie and Stormalong watch the Capture suffer catastrophic damage and slowly begin to fall. Now I've tried to do the math and figure out if this is possible given that the ship was "fifty miles above the termination of the Earth's atmosphere," but I'm not sure how stable an orbit that would be and if suddenly losing engine power would cause the ship to fall. Dammit Jim, I'm a political scientist, not an astrophysicist.

....Waaaaait a minute. Two chapters ago, according to the Psychlo guide to alien races: "No Tolnep vessel can operate in atmosphere due to the great inefficiency of its star energy drives which, being essentially reaction engines, use up too much of their power in atmosphere." So that's why the Capture is falling faster once it's in the atmosphere. Yet it's launching fighters. Wave after wave of fighters, flying down, dropping bombs, flying back up for reloading, and going out for another mission. Fighters which are handling the atmosphere just fine.

And why do they need fighters anyway? Why not just develop smart bombs? Or, again, laser batteries. Ah, bugger it.

So down comes the Capture, right into the lake next to the hydroelectric plant, wiping out the (evacuated) Chinese workers' village in the shockwave and battering the dam. The generators are still running, and wouldn't you know it but that dam is practically indestructible, but the lakebeds on either side of the dam are eroded enough for water to leak through. In a matter of hours, there won't be enough water to run the dam. Dun-dum-duhn!

But on the bright side, at least they aren't suffering the annoyance of a harmless bombardment, right? And now they have a window to fire that teleporter. That's why Jonnie clings to after Glencannon's heroic but problematic sacrifice.

But the best thing about it? At no point was that dead Swiss pilot named. Not even in Glencannon's thoughts. He killed himself over a nameless chara- no, not character, that implies characterization. Glencannon was driven to grief-fueled suicide by a vague idea.

How are we supposed to react to this? Should we be upset that Glencannon, whose characterization so far has been "pilot" (he might have been a Jonnie body double, I can't remember), died to avenge someone we're never introduced to? Why not have someone, let's say Angus, get killed in the bombing, and have Glencannon avenge him? At least Angus the mechanic is easy to keep straight; all those Scottish pilots are pretty much interchangeable...

I hope you enjoyed that bit of action, because it's all downhill from here. Two hundred pages of talking, scheming, theatrics, legal wrangling, and jaw-dropping stupidity. I think someone may try to shoot someone later, and there's another round of bombing, but that was the last "battle" in Battlefield Earth.

Part 25, Chapter 3 - Not So Much a Siege as an Annoyance

2010-10-06T19:25:00.003-05:00

After getting dressed, Jonnie doesn't rush to take command or head outside to take a look at the situation. Instead he goes to the hospital to check on the wounded from the last operation, because he's all heroic like that. A rousing speech isn't necessary, however, since the Scots are all buoyant from wiping out the Brigantes and settling that blood feud.

I'm trying to remember if there's any Brigante survivors mentioned later, but I'm not optimistic.

Jonnie goes outside after that, where everyone's gathered under the not-a-force-field, and marvels at how inspiring and multinational everything is - Italian-Swiss electricians, Scottish officers commanding Russian and Swedish soldiers, Sherpa hunters, and Chinese laborers. The free peoples of the Earth, all fulfilling their national stereotypes.

The Chinese chieftain and designer of the base, Chong-won, shows off the tricked-out teleportation console - it's been reinforced with armor in the shape of an eastern dragon. Then, as the ground occasionally shakes from distant explosions, he takes Jonnie on a tour of the facility, showing off apartments, an auditorium, and eventually the operations center. By the displays and viewscreens, Jonnie can tell that Singapore, Russia and Edinburgh are all "really catching it."

No, we don't actually see the battles raging over Scotland and Asia. We're not told how the skies boiled with laserfire, how swarms of alien fighters blotted out the sun, how alien drop troops battered at the humans' defenses like a tide of monsters. We're just told that the antiaircraft fire in those areas is pretty heavy, and that the situation is so bad that they have two pilots flying air cover for two separate bases. Seriously: Thor is overhead in Kariba, and Dunneldeen's flying over Edinburgh. That's it. That's how dangerous this invasion is.

Oh, and Glencannon's acting unstable, all shaky hands and unresponsive, staring at pictures from the mission that cost him his friend, and scans of the carrier headed towards them. What could this mean?

Jonnie wants a tour of the defenses, and checks out the Psychlo AA guns they're using outside of the force field dome. They're push-button devices - a computer tracks a target, you hit "fire," the target explodes. Exciting. The aliens are dropping bombs from above the guns' range, but the guns are good enough to blow up the bombs in mid-air. And before you ask, the reason that these guns weren't used to blow the humans out of the sky a year ago was due to the attack being "a total surprise," and Terl letting the defenses go neglected.

My question, though, is why the aliens aren't trying energy weapons. I'm assume blast rifles are analogous to lasers or something, right? And a capital ship could field some pretty big blasters? And those blasters could be used in conjunction with those super-detailed scanners to rain death upon the enemy from high orbit? But no, they're going with bombs that are being intercepted in mid-air, even after seeing how useless the attack is. Heck, the only times the ground's shaking is when the bombs hit so far off target that the humans don't bother shooting them. So not only are these bombs impotent, they're wildly inaccurate and are hitting things ten miles away.

Stupid aliens...

And then, so that something actually happens this chapter, Glencannon jumps into a Mark 32 battle plane and takes off! And so we end on an exciting cliffhanger, a prelude to the last gasp of what passes for action in this book.

Oh, and to give Jonnie credit, when he sees how "bad" things are in Edinburgh he does spend a second to worry about Chrissie, before being assured that she's safe in a bunker.

Part 25, Chapter 2 - Back in Africa

2010-10-05T19:22:00.002-05:00

We're back in Africa, in the bunker the Chinese built next to the teleportation platform. Jonnie wakes up to feel the ground shaking, and is quickly attended to by Dr. Allen and some of the named Scots. The doctor assures Jonnie that he's nearly made a full recovery from the heart-exploding venom, Angus explains that the control console for the platform is hooked up and ready to go, Thor tells how they only lost Andrew and MacDougal (whoever they are) in the fighting in Denver, while Foxy is being suspiciously nonchalant about what's happening outside.

Thor also has a package. While searching for bodies they found a scorched, mangled corpse with a pellet of matter in it - the core of Jonnie's duplicate bomb, which Terl tore out and threw like a bullet to kill Brown Limper. Terl's bomb was apparently recovered and disarmed by Angus, I guess while he was sitting in a coffin-foxhole hiding from the recoil?

Oh, and Terl's recycling has been rescued, which includes gems such as a pamphlet titled "Known Defenses of Hostile Races and Surveys of Their Homelands." An excerpt reveals that Tolnep vessels' engines are too inefficient to work in atmosphere, which is a rather convenient bit of foreshadowing.

Jonnie realizes that his henchmen are trying to paint a rosy picture for him and demands a true report. The aliens are attacking the false base at Singapore, but also Russia and Edinburgh. Oh, and there's a carrier approaching Africa that's been bombarding them for hours and could launch a thousand Tolnep marines at any minute. So a still-dizzy Jonnie gets up and heads to his room to get dressed. He now has a Chinese manservant named Mr. Tsung who in broken English tells Jonnie to have some soup, then helps him put some clothes on. Though initially worried due to all the bombing going on, Tsung quickly feels better now that this shining Aryan hero is here to save the day.

Aaaand that's about it for this chapter. A lot of exposition, and Jonnie gets dressed. In case you're curious, he's in a fancy black sling for his still-wounded arm, but positioned so he can quickly draw his Smith & Wesson if he needs to.

Part 25, Chapter 1 - This Time Will Be Different!

2010-10-04T19:21:00.003-05:00

This chapter starts on page 801. There's only 280 pages to go. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The aliens are in an uproar over the huge, non-planet-destroying explosion they saw. Except for The Gray Man, who for the first time is feeling hopeful after catching that trace of a teleporter, though he's the only one who caught it.

Instead his fellow xenoforms are discussing the next course of action. They conclude that the explosion was a nuclear bomb going off as part of that yellow-robed priesthood's takeover of the planetary government, making now the perfect time to strike, while the enemy is disorganized. But then someone floats the idea of this world being the one and not even realizing it, which adds the extra incentive of reward money to an invasion of Earth.

While the other aliens argue over who would be in charge of a coalition of the greedy, The Gray Man watches a human convoy go to a river and wash themselves off to decontaminate themselves. "Radiation! The way to get rid of contamination was copious use of water. The particles could be washed down and away due to their weight."

I'm going to float a theory here: L. Ron Hubbard didn't like the idea of subatomic particles or rays of energy or anything like that. To him everything needs to have concrete substance, be it gamma radiation or alien souls. Hence his conception of radiation as a sort of dust that you can just wash off, rather than something invisible and insubstantial that gets soaked up by matter and remains dangerous for generations. And the whole Thetan thing.

We're also told that the Psychlos have viciously suppressed knowledge of nuclear weapons, making them "a nearly forgotten chapter of ancient warfare." Even though the aliens just mentioned one and obviously know what an A-bomb is. I'm also curious as to how these advanced, spacefaring species would have been able to develop without discovering atomic theory, splitting some atoms, and realizing the military applications. I guess this is to handwave why no other species has nuked the Psychlos into oblivion yet.

The Gray Man keeps watching his screens, noticing the teleportation console being loaded up into a plane and correctly surmising what the recent battle was over. Unfortunately the other aliens see it too and get even more excited. But then the six planes that are loading up all of Jonnie's men and the console do a confusing bit of tight flying, which with the static makes it impossible to figure out which plane is carrying what.

Then two planes start flying northeast, racing along a course that takes them to the "pagoda place" in Africa. The other four craft head towards Singapore, where the aliens know there's an old Psychlo minesite. The aliens conclude that the two ships headed to Africa are a feint, and set a course to Singapore and presumably the humans' headquarters... except for Quarter-Admiral Snowleter of the carrier Capture. He starts towards Kariba in Africa, the "pagoda place."

The reason was that he hated all religions. Religious people were zealots and upset governments and always had to be crushed. This obviously was a religious revolt and they even had evidence of it. A religious order had upset the government of the planet and had now stolen a console. This planet was the one and he ordered them all to head for the pagoda objective.

Aw, someone was feeling persecuted when he wrote this part. Hubbard, honey: America loves religions. We're one of the most faithful Western countries. We were founded by religious zealots. Our political parties routinely pander to the devout when it comes time for elections. We've got Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Wicca, Deists, Agnostics, Atheists, Pastafarians, and a myriad of denominations and sects within those categories. There's no government conspiracy trying to suppress your movement. It's just that Americans know religions, and they can tell the difference between a spiritual movement and a cult-like attempt to get tax-exempt status.

Well, most of us, anyway. There's something in the water in Hollywood, apparently...

Anyway, here comes the last lurching gasp of action in this wartime epic, as the aliens try a full-blown invasion instead of sending their men in convenient waves of three to six. At least for a few chapters. Then there's over a hundred pages of talking. And talking. Also, a makeover.

Part 24, Chapter 6 - Where's the Kaboom? There Was Supposed to be an Earth-Shattering Kaboom!

2010-09-27T19:19:00.004-05:00

I just noticed that last chapter was post 200. That's... pretty terrifying.

No time to reminisce, this chapter's a whopping eight pages long. Our viewpoint character is Sir Robert, under the dome with an unconscious Jonnie while the whole world is exploding around them. Not that he notices. "He had only one idea in mind: to get his hands loose and help Jonnie."

There may be more chemistry between Jonnie and his henchmen than between Jonnie and his love interest.

Well, first Robert has to finish hacking through "the cord." I think this refers to the cable for the force field, but if it wasn't severed two chapters ago how did the dome come down? After that it's first aid time. To summarize one and a half pages: he sucks the poison out of Jonnie's wound and ties off the arm.

What you're missing:

It was hard to find the wound because of the blood.

He found it.

He took the edge of the hatchet blade and cut an X across the wound hole.

He got out of his arm mask and put his mouth to the wound-

And so forth.

While waiting in the darkness for rescue next to his buddy, Robert remembers his capture. Turns out he went on a hill one night to take a look at the compound and got jumped by some Brigantes. Given the Brigantes' Mook status and the Scots' record against everything, there's really no excuse for why Robert got captured instead of effortlessly killing a dozen Brigantes at once with an empty pistol or Slinky. He was tortured, but he's too awesome to crack, though when it looked like he was going to be taken to Psychlo he started to get nervous, what with the aliens' penchant for slow murders. But mostly Sir Robert feels bad because Jonnie may have gotten himself fatally poisoned to save him.

Then there's a crackle on the radio. It's Thor! Who's Thor again? And then Dr. Allen! Wasn't he the historian? Anyway, they explain that Jonnie and Foxy have to sit tight for a bit longer because of all the radiation outside the dome.

...From where? Not the teleporter, since the Psychlos were using it without, y'know, exploding. Terl's bomb? Then how did he handle it? Jonnie's bomb, presumably the one with the beryllium core? Again, how'd Terl handle it? There were some nukes on standby in case more Psychlos showed up, but they weren't used.

The humans are confused, too. But the answer to this riddle lies in Terl's destination. It'll be explained later.

Then a new voice chimes in: Quong, the Littlest Buddhist Radio Communicator. I like how "Tibetan" and "Buddhist" are interchangeable in Hubbard's mind. The kid asks about Jonnie (of course), and Foxy tells everyone not to worry, then learns about the situation: the "visitors" have now broken formation and are waiting directly above Denver, watching closely. Meanwhile the minesite has been reduced to a smoking crater, and some of the Scots in their foxhole-coffins are having to be dug out by forklifts. And while Robert just wants some serum to cure Jonnie's poison, he's told that everything in the area has been contaminated and will have to be "hosed down to get rid of the radiation."

Presumably, then, Chernobyl will be ready for refurbishment once the Ukrainians get off their fannies and tell the fire department to give the place a good soaking. Just try to spray all the "radiation" into the Pripyat and you'll be fine.

After much worrying about Jonnie's initially fast, then fading, pulse, finally a "blade scraper" comes by to pick up the teleporter platform, dome and all, and then it's on a flatbed and off to an old highway to take them to a river to wash off all that nasty radiation. After a shower, the dome is removed and Jonnie is grabbed by a nurse. Sir Robert looks north to see a glowing sky. "They had just come from hell."

Or a major city at night. This would be a good place for some apocalyptic imagery, maybe mention how the trees are all blasted and twisted like the fingers of the damned, or how the blood red clouds swirled and roiled and mixed with the pitch black smoke, or how the ruins were bathed in a glow like from a furnace, or how ash drifted down like a bleak parody of snow. But all we get is a crater and glowing sky.

So much for looking like "the world had been torn apart!"

Oh, and the Brigante tribe that fled from the battle? Dead on the plains. No response at all from the characters to this news, good or bad. They're all too busy worrying about Jonnie.

Part 24, Chapter 5 - L. Ron Hubbard vs Journalists

2010-09-24T13:20:00.005-05:00

I guess the apocalyptic showdown between Mary Sue and the forces of Stupid is interesting and all, but I'm just dying to know: what are those aliens up to?

Tolnep Half-Captain Rogodeter Snowl has returned from his homeworld with a fleet of five ships loaned by his uncle, the Quarter-Admiral Snowleter, which includes the carrier ship Capture. And a journalist.

Roof Arsebogger considered hims

Sorry, I need a minute.

...

...

...

Okay. Let's try this again.

Roof Arsebogger considered himself the ace reporter of the Tolnep Midnight Fang. Even among news media of other systems, the Fang was envied as the very epitome of inaccuracy, corruption, and biased news. It always printed exactly what the government wanted even while pretending to be antigovernment. And Roof Arsebogger enjoyed the reputation of being the most poisonous reporter on a staff that specialized in them.

"Arse" is, as many people know, British slang for the buttocks, a more vulgar variant of "bum." Similarly, "bugger" is a British colloquialism for sodomy. Now, Hubbard had a reputation as a globe-trotting adventurer, so it's highly unlikely that he was unaware of the connotations behind a name like "Arsebogger."

So why did he use it? There are a few possibilities:

Roof Arsebogger is a strawman journalist, a corrupt government puppet, whose very name is supposed to elicit scorn and disgust.
Hubbard was in a drug-addled fugue when it came time to name his alien characters, and threw together whatever sounds caught his fancy.
Roof Arsebogger is a clue that Hubbard secretly thought Battlefield Earth was a colossal joke, a way to laugh at all the gullible dopes who treated his book as a serious work of fiction instead of a way for L. Ron to get more of his brainwashed sycophants' money.

I may have to explore the third option in a later essay.

Anyway, Buttswamper is having an interview with Snowl about that man on the "counterfeit one-credit bank note," that "defiler of established governments," Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. The other aliens, including The Grey Man, are idly listening in as they keep their scanners pointed at Earth.

"Would the description, 'He is a known pervert,' fit him?"

"Oh, worse," replied Snowl.

"Good, good," said Arsebogger. "We must keep this to a totally factual interview, you understand. How would 'He steals babies and drinks their blood,' do?"

Sounds like a certain author has a grudge against those lousy, snooping reporters. Also, the "pervert" and "babies" remarks bring up important questions about the commonalities of human and alien reproductive systems and societal norms concerning sexuality and child-rearing. The implication is that humanity's values are universal, but this is both lazy and unrealistic for a supposed work of "pure" science fiction, and should at least be explored in a little more detail. They won't be. This is just an off-hand statement to show how loathsome news reporters are.

The Grey Man is watching his viewscreen with distaste, due to his resentment of journalists in general and Fannymarsher in particular, what with his how his fangs are "stained nearly black, there were blotches of some disease on his face, and one could almost smell his unwashed condition over the viewscreen."

Hubbard hates journalists. Slimy bastards, telling stories about brainwashing or mass infiltration of the U.S. government or deaths under mysterious circumstances...

But the bigger development is that The Gray Man's courier ship arrived yesterday with news that the one has not yet been found, and the hundred million credit prize offered by the Hawvin Interrelated Confederation of Systems has been doubled by the Bolbod Equality Empire. Across the universes everyone is scrambling to find one particular planet, and The Grey Man's superiors are quietly pointing out that he's not doing a lot of good waiting over "a twelfth-rate rim star's only planet."

...So do I rage at the imaginary aliens or Hubbard for suggesting Earth is the only planet in the Solar System?

But then sensors suddenly pick up interference from the Denver area, cutting of the interview with the telltale signs of a teleportation trace. Then the viewscreens are overloaded by a massive explosion!

A fireball was climbing heavenward. Spreading, rolling masses of coiling smoke and flame were rising to incredible heights.

Daylight was dimmed by the flash.

It looked like the world had been torn apart!

If only we were so lucky. The Gray Man's just being deceptively over-dramatic.

Part 24, Chapter 4 - The Final Countdown

2010-09-23T15:58:00.004-05:00

Buh-da duhn duh... da-duh duhn-duhn-duhn...

I guess this is the story's second climax, or something. Certainly a lot happens in this six-page chapter.

On Dwight's third alert Jonnie "slid" out of his platform-side coffin and immediately has a spanner thrown in his plans: General Snith is suited up for a trip to Psychlo, and has six guards with him standing next to Terl. Jonnie readies his flamethrower to burn them all down unawares, but spots the bound hostage before he opens fire. He recognizes Sir Robert and adds a rescue operation to the day's agenda.

Terl sees Jonnie and is confused as to how the "Jonnie" on the other side of the force field got over here. Before the Psychlo can charge, Jonnie scatters all the phony contracts Terl signed across the platform. "Don't forget to record these on Psychlo!" That gets Terl busy scooping up the incriminating evidence, and Jonnie goes on to distract the Brigantes by shouting "Grenade!" and tossing a "beryllium ultimate bomb," which weighs eighty pounds mind you, directly at Terl.

So the Brigantes are running from the grenade and bouncing off the force field, and Terl's mind is blown by a teleporting Jonnie somehow stealing his bomb from Brown Limper, and his efforts to get rid of it are hampered by the same force field, so he desperately starts clawing at the bomb's casing to open it up and defuse it. The villains are, scientifically-speaking, completely bamboozled, hopelessly wrong-footed by our super-strong, super-smart protagonist.

Well, one Brigante manages to take a shot at Jonnie and misses, purely for the sake of drama.

Jonnie rushes to Sir Robert who of course is all "Leave me and save yourself!", which is something heroes simply don't do. While Jonnie drags Sir Robert to safety he kill-clubs two attacking Brigantes with two mighty blows, breaks another's neck with a thrown club, brains a forth who tackles his legs, hits a fifth with a thrown club that breaks physics by sending the victim "catapulted backward," and then parries a sixth Brigante's bayonet with a wooden club and crushes the enemy's skull.

And yes, every blow Jonnie deals instantly incapacitates, if not kills, his target.

In an effort to make the fight something other than pointlessly lopsided, General Snith pierces Jonnie's arm with a poisoned arrow while the latter's back is turned. I'm just impressed with Jonnie's restraint in not killing Snith while he was butchering the rest of the Brigantes.

Jonnie stabs Snith in the heart with a dirk, pulls the arrow out, grits his teeth, and carries on, assuring himself that it's a "slow poison" even as he feels his heart speed up. So it's a neurotoxin that makes your heart beat faster until you die, I guess. Maybe the "speeds up your nervous system" comment last chapter was simply badly-worded... or else Hubbard thinks the heart is part of the nervous system. I'm not sure how much I'm joking.

Dwight's voice on the radio says "Ten seconds to withdraw!" and Jonnie still hasn't shut off the force field. He drops Foxy off by the console and notices that his vial of antivenom has shattered (drama points +2). Jonnie's vision starts flashing and his hands shake as his heart beats ever faster, but he notices that the console switch is in the "up" position now. Then he gets the dome over the console, starts to lower it, and hacks at the force field cabling.

But then he notices two approaching threats! Terl has popped open the bomb and extracted the core, which Jonnie realizes can be thrown like a bullet "straight through him." And then he sees that Brown Limper the club-footed cripple is "rushing" at him with a Tommy Gun, and if he fires everything will go boom!

Jonnie shouts a warning to Terl, who hurls the bomb's core at Staffor, ripping through his spine. The sad little man's last words are "Damn you, Tyler! Damn you!"

So, bullets from a gun: disastrous interference with the teleporter. Projectile thrown with bullet force: no problems.

Terl taunts that "I still win, rat brain!" But Jonnie shouts back that the coffins Terl thought were full of money were swapped out last night for sawdust. And that the earlier set of golden-lidded coffins from last year were too.

What.

How? When? And why didn't Terl notice the weight difference?! Why didn't Terl check the contents?! WHY EVEN GO THROUGH THE TROUBLE IF YOU'RE SENDING A PLANET-BUSTER BOMB ALONG WITH THE COFFINS?!

An utterly gobsmacked Terl shimmers and vanishes from the platform, along with the sawdust-stuffed coffins and a bunch of dead guys. Jonnie finally severs the force field cable and drops the dome over him, Sir Robert, and the console. He unties Sir Robert, realizes somehow that there must be a bomb under the console, extracts and defuses the explosive, and tells Sir Robert that the console toggle needs to be in the "down" position for the next firing.

The outside of the dome was struck a blow so hard the whole platform rocked!

It was as though a dozen earthquakes had hit at once. As though the planet had been torn apart.

Jonnie stiffened out into blackness. He no longer heard the chaos going on outside.

And so we end with a cliffhanger. A cliffhanger that won't be resolved until Chapter 6, since the next one concerns those idiotic aliens.

...Isn't it possible to inject antivenom before you get poisoned? Or does that only work with antidotes to poison?

Part 24, Chapter 3 - And All Was Laid Unto Burnination

2010-09-22T19:07:00.005-05:00

Dwight, Dwight... wasn't he Stormalong's copilot? Or was it Dunneldeen's? Eh, like it matters.

Dwight is now our viewpoint character, the commander of the raiding force about to attack the teleportation platform, chosen because "he could be depended upon to follow orders exactly, without deviation, and as one of the lode mine crew chiefs, he could handle men." I guess that's characterization.

He and his men... oh. Seriously, Hubbard? The coffin trick again? This really is a full repeat of Part 12. Yes, last midnight the Scottish attackers got into lead coffins Ker and the cadets placed around the perimeter, and were then buried by dirt and snow. There is no explanation as to how they got out once buried, or if there were any side effects from being buried in a lead box for hours in freezing weather.

Wait, Dwight did go numb - from worries about Jonnie. Our hero was buried in a coffin right next to the platform, since he insisted on being the one to check the position of that critical switch on the control console, cut the atmosphere cable to neutralize the force field around the platform, and finally drop an armored dome from a crane over the teleportation console.

...Where did they get an armored dome? When did they hang it from a crane? Why hasn't anyone noticed?

Dwight's nervous about the number of the crossbow-toting Brigantes, but luckily Dr. Allen (I thought he was the historian?) has come up with an antidote to the toxin the savages use on their bolts, which "caused the nervous system to speed up faster and faster until it killed."

Hubbard, honey? The nervous system doesn't move. It transmits signals at over a hundred meters per second. "Speeding up" this process to kill someone is pretty nonsensical. Now, slowing the signals or disrupting them altogether is another story, and how our friendly neighborhood nerve agents got on the banned weapon lists.

It's Dwight's job to yell into a radio "First alert!" when Terl gets on the platform, and "Second alert!" when Terl walks to the console, and "Third alert!" when Terl pushes the button. He completes these objectives admirably, though he grows worried when Dwight sees the bundled-up hostage Terl has with him.

With the final signal, "Action!," the other Scots attack, using weapons that won't interfere with the teleporter - flamethrowers salvaged from Russia (don't question it) and good ol' Claymores. Warcries of "For Allison!" and "For Bittie!" fill the air, and Dwight hits a button on a loudspeaker to play a recording of trumpeting elephants, which will surely terrify the Brigantes, who have lived all their lives in Africa and hunt the beasts for food.

The Brigante soldiers charge, and hey, the noncombatants hanging around run for the plains! They might survive after all! And of course it isn't a battle so much as a barbecue. One Scot goes down when his flamethrower sputters out and he gets mobbed in close combat, but otherwise it's another one-sided L. Ron fight scene.

"The operator," presumably Jonnie, though since he isn't referred to as such leaves the chance Hubbard is being tricksy, manages to get the dome moving - they buried it overnight to hide it?! But something's wrong and the force field isn't down yet, so the dome can't drop. Nevertheless, Dwight obeys his orders to withdraw before the backblast from the firing can hurt anyone, and gets back in his "coffin foxhole" along with the other Scots. The whole exchange took less than a minute and a half.

That dangerous Brigante toxin? A pointless detail, since the morons don't even bother to shoot their bows. No, when faced with flamethrowers, they try a bayonet charge.

There is just so much stupid in this book...

Part 24, Chapter 2 - Is it him? No. Or is it? Maybe it is.

2010-09-21T19:03:00.002-05:00

This is a short chapter, which is good, but from Brown Limper's perspective, which is not. It starts with Terl confiscating his and Lars' firearms, but Staffor completely misses Terl's warning that gunfire around the teleporter platform will kill them all. He is, of course, still obsessing about Jonnie.

Terl had somebody else there in the bundle. Tyler? No, it couldn't be Tyler or Terl would have called out. Maybe it was Tyler. Maybe Terl was double-crossing him! No, it couldn't be Tyler. Who was it? But yes, it might be Tyler. They put an air mask on whoever it was. They meant to take somebody to Psychlo!

No, it couldn't be Tyler.

But maybe it was.

Riveting stuff. Also, if you're this worried about the identity of someone, stop speculating and take a good look at them. Or hell, ask who the prisoner is. But no, Brown Limper's too craaaazy to do something like verifying whether or not someone is the object of his obsession. I guess in Hubbard's mind a person dying of thirst would be too bonkers to see if there's any water in a canteen.

Instead, Brown Limper is waiting for a good moment to rush back to his car and grab the Tommy Gun he has stashed there, and then hose down that bundle of humanity that may or may not be his nemesis. But then someone in a radiation suit rushes up to him, grabs Terl's "gift," and tells Staffor to run. Brown Limper recognizes Jonnie's blond beard and orders Lars to open fire!

The neo-Nazi instead bolts for Denver. Whah...whah... whaaaaah.

Only then, belatedly, does Staffor realize that despite the blond beard, the guy in the radiation suit sounded Swedish, which indicates that visual data reaches his brain faster than aural information. But then he does hear Jonnie's voice shouting over the platform. So Brown Limper "tore" his way to his car and "raced" to get his other gun and finish his hated foe once and for all.

Remember how Brown Limper is a club-footed cripple? 'cause L. Ron don't.

Part 24, Chapter 1 - Here We Go Again

2010-09-20T19:31:00.003-05:00

It's Day 92, and Terl is "jubilant." He's already thought up a story of heroism in the face of mutiny for his superiors once he goes home, and of course he'll have all those gold- and credit-stuffed coffins to retire on. And then there's that bomb that'll detonate once he's teleported off this rock, erasing all the incriminating evidence and some personal enemies in one fell swoop. Life is good.

You'd think after how horribly, horribly wrong things went for him last year, there might be just a smidgen of uncertainty in the vast expanses of Terl's skull. But nope.

He hauls everything out to the platform and starts wiring the console up. He sets up a three minute firing, then sets his Happy Fun Box to go off six minutes after he's gone. Terl still has an hour to kill, so he goes back to his office and tosses all his paperwork into the recycler machine. I find it vaguely amusing that the sadistic and thoroughly evil Psychlos are eco-friendly. Then Terl puts on his dress uniform and a parade cap before returning to the platform.

There's five hundred Brigantes forming a perimeter outside the "atmosphere cable" force-field thingy that Terl probably wishes he'd used last year. The subhuman soldiers are ordered to use only poisoned bows and knives due to the danger of shooting around an active teleporter. The tribe's off-duty soldiers and women are hanging around the morgue to see the boys off, and I have the sinking feeling that Hubbard is about to wipe them all out in a huge explosion. I hope I'm wrong.

Brown Limper drops by but is, as always, only interested in whether Jonnie's going to show up. Terl assures them that he will, but notices and confiscates the guns Staffor and Lars are carrying. To make up for it, he gives Brown Limper a present: the bomb.

"It's a nice gift," said Terl. "Open it when I'm gone and you'll find the answer to your most golden dreams. Something to remember me by."

At least he showed a bit more restraint with his False Reassurance. Not enough to not be immediately suspicious, mind you, but he's getting better.

Terl checks on one last bit of baggage, a human hostage all tied up with an air mask for passage to Psychlo. Given that last chapter we were told Robert the Fox went missing, I'm not sure what the point is of keeping the prisoner's identify a secret. Then the big stupid alien hits the platforms firing button, and follows up by activating the time bomb... the bomb he gave to Brown Limper? Does he have a remote control, or are there two bombs?

The chapter ends with Terl noticing a figure in a radiation suit leap out of hiding, and even in an all-encompassing environmental suit Terl recognizes Jonnie. He just mentally laughs that "Brown Limper had gotten his Tyler after all" and goes back to thinking about how wonderful it'll be once he's back on Psychlo in three minutes.

Random fact: Terl mentally swears "by the crap nebula" in this chapter. I'm growing increasingly convinced that not only is the crap nebula real, but it's a Psychlo holy site.

Part 23, Chapter 9 - The End of the Middle But Not Quite the Beginning of the End Yet

2010-09-17T19:10:00.003-05:00

It's Day 87, less than a week before Terl's scheduled firing. Now that he has his next objective, Jonnie gets ready for his mission. He makes notes of his discoveries and explains things to Angus, who of course doesn't want Jonnie to go but concedes when Jonnie points out that he'll have thirty Scot extras in the background while he saves the day.

He orders a decoy teleportation platform built in Singapore, since Jonnie's operating on the assumption that the "visitors" above are waiting for the next firing to act. It'll take the brunt of any alien attack since overheard chatter indicates that the xenos think the one in Africa is a temple of some sort, thanks to clever use of camouflage netting.

Dr. Allen collects some pyrethrum from plants near Nairobi to act as bug spray and help combat those damned tsetse flies. I'm not sure where this fits in with the whole struggle against the alien invaders, but Hubbard thought it worth mentioning so I'll pass it along.

Stormalong is being left behind to take command of Earth's defenses if Jonnie dies. He doesn't want Jonnie to go either. It's not mentioned that Stormalong is still brooding over the death of Unnamed Swiss Guy, which is a bit of an oversight due to what will happen later.

Ker's over in Africa now, and he actually high-fives Jonnie ("they swatted 'paws'"). He jokes about the worthless currency he was getting paid with, then gives Jonnie the layout of the firing platform. And he doesn't want Jonnie to go either, since he's sure Terl is up to something. He also relates that Sir Robert has disappeared, which worries Jonnie.

Jonnie writes a letter to Chrissie "that he knew the parson would read for her," in case something happens to him. We're not treated to the letter's contents, but we can be certain it was a tear-jerking, majestic proclamation of his undying love for the woman he remembers once every other Part or so. He also writes a will, and I guess there's some humor when he keeps remembering possessions like horses or that chrome AK-47 and has to go back and add to it repeatedly. And once he's finished he checks his gear and packs before settling down for a good night's sleep.

He had done everything he could. Now it was in the hands of the gods. Or a devil like Terl.

I'm confused why everyone is so reluctant to see Jonnie go into danger, when all the evidence suggests that he's a nigh-unstoppable killing machine. He should be the first person you want to have on a raid.

Anyway, tune in next Part when Jonnie and his team of Scots swoop into the American minesite to interfere with Terl's teleportation and stop his attempt to wipe out mankind.

Again.

Back to Part Twenty-Three, Chapter Eight

Forward to Part Twenty-Four, Chapter One

Part 23, Chapter 8 - I Wonder What the xkcd Guy Would Make of This One

2010-09-16T18:21:00.003-05:00

Fortunately, Unnamed Swiss Guy's heroic act of self-sacrifice was not in vain, as the latest discs of surveillance footage show Terl in the act of building a teleportation console. Jonnie thinks that this is the first time "in all of Psychlo's long and sadistic history" that non-Psychlos are watching the process. Apparently none of the other alien races can figure out how to plant a bug as well as Jonnie.

Now, I'm not an electrician. I'm not particularly mechanically-inclined. I'm a political science major with an interest in writing and a love of reading. So maybe I'm not the best person to critique the paragraphs that follow, in which an enthralled Jonnie watches Terl put together some insulating board and resistors and circuitry. It's really boring to me, but maybe an engineer would find it fascinating.

The short version is that Terl's being tricksy with the console circuits. First he builds one that's rigged to blow out, traces an entirely new one on the backside, then uses his alien annealing knife to space-weld this second circuit. In effect, if you "sew" up insulative materials with that tool, you can run a current through the altered material.

I'm not a chemistry major either, so even though this sounds fishy, I guess it could work. You know, if you were using an alien cutter/welder device on some otherworldly material.

So the big revelation is that all the captured Psychlo circuits the alien scientists have been studying and failing to make sense out of are all fakes, and don't make sense with Psychlo mathematics for good reason. And no tests that any of the alien scientists have done in thousands of years have been able to detect this "invisible" second circuit.

Terl then adds a switch that if flipped the wrong way will wipe out the true circuit, but Jonnie can't tell which position it's set to be in for the first firing. And after that he puts in a "magnet fuse" that detects if the console is opened with a magnetic field, which blows out the second circuit as well.

An invisible circuit, two booby traps to wipe it out, a completely false circuit to distract.

And that was the secret of the Psychlos.

Underwhelming, isn't it? And the sad thing is that it's worked for hundreds of thousands of years, with countless alien races working feverishly to crack it. And all Jonnie had to do was install hidden cameras in the right places.

Jonnie makes copies of the footage and diagrams, but he's still got a problem - that one switch that has to be in a certain position in order for the console to not self-destruct. So he'll have to go over and check in person. I guess it's supposed to be dangerous, but this is a guy who can bludgeon bears to death and cut down twenty-eight Brigantes in an afternoon, so I'm sure he'll be fine.

Back to Chapter Seven

Forward to Chapter Nine

Part 23, Chapter 7 - Not So Much a Dogfight as a Joust

2010-09-15T19:12:00.005-05:00

Suddenly, Jonnie is aboard his trusty old Mk32 battle plane, racing along with Stormalong and two other pilots to rescue Glencannon, who fell under attack while en route to deliver the latest Terl footage. It's Day 78, and there's now eighteen alien ships orbiting Earth, and one of them's apparently a Tolnep "plane carrier" that launched the fighters that are harassing Glencannon.

Six more "needle-like craft" are launched by an orbital carrier while Jonnie watches his scopes, but then he spots Glencannon, alone and harried by four bogeys. Stormalong and the two other pilots rip through these pursuers, leaving one alive. So Jonnie changes course to meet the six newcomers head-on in a suicidal maneuver that only works because he's the main character. His spray of firepower kills the leader and he's able to down another enemy when the formation rushes past. He's actually hit on the wing ("touched") by a piece of Tolnep debris, but if you think that'd have some sort of an effect on a high-speed aircraft, you'd be wrong.

Jonnie goes head-to-head again and somehow his "shots stuffed the Tolnep's own fire up his cannon barrels," destroying the ship. I guess it's like those old Looney Tunes where you stick your finger in a shotgun barrel and it blows up in it's wielder's face. Only, you know, with blasters. After taking a hit that darkens half his windshield, Jonnie blows away two more Tolneps without further incident, and then blasts apart the last one as it tries to flee.

Glencannon, meanwhile, is almost at the minesite landing zone, with that one last stubborn Tolnep on his tail. He makes it through before the minesite guards turn the "atmosphere-armor curtain" back on. The Tolnep doesn't.

When Jonnie's on the ground checking on Glencannon, he finds him crying in his cockpit because he was ordered to leave his escort, a Swiss pilot and friend of his, behind. When Unnamed Swiss Guy was shot up and ejected, the aliens blasted him in midair. Jonnie and the others manage to talk Glencannon out of a suicidal attack on the orbiting enemy warships, and Jonnie takes the shipment of Terl discs, hoping that they're worth it.

So yeah, action this chapter. Tedious, suspense-free, meaningless action.

I've read the X-Wing books, which contain plenty of dogfights and ship-to-ship combat, and they're nothing like this. In those stories there's substance to the starfighter battles. You've got the initial terrifying rush as the two sides close on each other and exchange fire, the expanding furball as the combatants chase each other, trying to get behind for a kill-shot (or a missile lock). You've got the hero pilots trying to outsmart their enemy, anticipate which way their target will break, and struggling to slip away from a foe that gets behind them. You've got suspense even when you're following characters that canonically survive the book, because you get to see them looking out for other pilots, their squadmates, and try to keep them alive.

Jonnie on the other hand is just as boringly invincible in the air as he is on the ground. There's no sense of danger, no suspense, or even a sense of accomplishment at the end. We're just being told how many aliens Jonnie blew up that day. It's only exciting in comparison to the chapters we've had to sit through recently.

Back to Chapter Six

Forward to Chapter Eight