Battlefield Earth: Turning nay sayers into fans

It was with some reluctance that I agreed to review a book on the cover of which a muscular young man was depicted as busily zapping alien beings with a blast gun.

Sci-fi has never been my favourite genre, particularly the kind involving intergalactic warfare, monsters with green blood and transportation by a form of telepathy.

So you can understand my feelings when L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (Quadrant Books) landed on my desk, particularly when it ran to 800 plus pages.

But how wrong I was? It is an absolutely cracking story, which has been a best seller in the United States for some eight months – and no wonder. Few books can be described as truly entertaining. But this is one of them.

It is glorious knockabout stuff, which contains all the elements of every good story you have ever read. And I predict that Battlefield Earth will do for the bookstores what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for the cinemas.