Mission Spork is Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

All Good Things Come To An End. Also, Battlefield Earth is Over

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 indeed discovers 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 and 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 Conqueror 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 home, 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.


Back to Part Thirty-Two, Chapter Seven

Forward to "The Problems With Terl, and Other Villains"