Science fiction novel is real page turner

L. Ron Hubbard started writing in the 1930’s when there were hundreds of genre and sub-genre Pulp magazines and before he found what he calls his "more serious work," he was prolific. He published 101 novels, 32 novelettes, and 138 short stories.

To mark his golden anniversary as a writer and pay homage to the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" he wrote this big book. In fact, Hubbard says it may be the biggest science fiction novel ever in terms of length.

A lot of the pulp literature, where a number of great writers got their start was slam-banged adventure stuff, and in this book Hubbard proves his boast that he was a master at it.

There is a story about a pulp writer who was writing a continuing series for a magazine of the day. Naturally, each segment ended in a cliffhanger. Finally he had his hero at the bottom of a glass-walled and unclimbable pit filled with angry and very poisonous vipers. The pit was surrounded by a jungle tribe shooting poison arrows and darts at him. End of chapter.

The problem was the writer has a deadline to meet for next month’s installment and couldn’t figure how to get his hero out of predicament . Finally, in desperation, he something like: "With a mighty bound, Barf the barbarian leaped out of the pit, knocked the tribesmen down, and ran away into the jungle."

Hubbard would never have had that problem. He gets his hero out of endless fixes and with a lot more trying than the above example. Battlefield Earth is written in 32 parts, with about six or seven chapters in each part and every chapter ends in a cliff hanger. If you like this kind of fast unrelenting Raiders of the Lost Ark action, then this is the book for you. It’s a real page turner.

Hubbard claims this novel contains practically every type of story there is –"detective, spy, adventure, western, love, air, war, jungle, you name it" – and it does.

It is set in the year 3000. Earth has been controlled for a thousand years by vicious aliens and man has been reduced to a few scattered tribes in remote mountain corners where survival is marginal.

The hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, lives with some 30 or so people in the Rocky Mountains until he decides to venture alone down into the plains in spite of the legends of "monsters."

He meets and is captured by a monster, one of the aliens, in a place ancient man had called Denver, which an alien text describes as "not as aesthetically advanced as those (cities) in the middle and eastern part of the continent….. Utility rather than artistry seems to have been the overall architectural purpose."

These aliens are tough cookies. In fact, are feared not only in this universe, but in 15 other universes. Numbers like billions and trillions are small change in this this book. But the worst mistake they ever made was messing with Tyler and the 30,000 or so other humans who have survived.

So what if the aliens, and there are dozens of different kinds, have populations that number in the trillions, space ships, dreadnought war machines that can destroy whole planets before breakfast, and hundreds of thousands of years of practice. The Earth people have a real hero. Aliens don’t stand a chance. You got to give the aliens credit for holding out for 800 pages.

There are lots of delightful pulp traditions here. One is to give the villains names with lots of sibilants so just in reading them you hiss the villain. Like "Sitineter Pliss." You know Pliss is a bad guy,

One of my favorite characters is an alien newspaper reporter, Roof Arsbogger, whose paper, Midnight Fang, "was envied as the very epitome of inaccuracy, corruption and biased news." Arseboger’s face is patched with the sores of disease. His fangs which are poisonous, are black and one is broken. He dresses in clothes that look like they were discarded from a slum. You can almost smell his unwashed condition, until you see this specimen in action. (It tells you what Hubbard thinks of press. Hey, Hubbard, I like your book.)

There are alien bankers. They have coarse gray skin. Their noses turn up on the end. They have gill slits where humans have ears. They come from a planet that is nine-tenths water. They have enormous appetites and double rows of teeth in their mouths…. my gosh. They’re sharks!

Hubbard excels at thumbnail character sketches. For example, he mentions that one of these bankers is the kind of person who will even use spacecraft "to go to the corner store for a bottle of schnapps."

In an introduction, Hubbard states in no uncertain terms that he is writing science fiction, and there is plenty of speculative science here. In fact, there is enough in this one book to have provided less imaginative writers with material for an entire writing career.

Also in the introduction, Hubbard boasts that in the "hard-driven" times between 1930 and 1950 as a writer he was a "top liner." With this book, in spite of the pell-mell first draft flavor, he makes his case and he’s right. As pure adventure, it’s top line stuff.