L. Ron Hubbard decided to celebrate his golden anniversary as a science fiction writer with a novel harkening back to the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He succeeded.

Battlefield Earth is a magnificent, sprawling, 820-page, Star Wars–type novel, lavishly written with wit and adventure and the occasional unexpected curlicue in plot.

You can tell its roots are from the Golden Age of the 1930s and ‘40s because Battlefield Earth features a dauntless, bronze-skinned, golden-haired hero and a courageous golden-haired woman who adores him. They’re breathtakingly beautiful. (You can tell this because whenever someone sees them for the first time, their breath is taken away.).

The hero’s name is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler and he prevails against tremendous odds to overcome the most horrible villains in the universe; he is hailed and worshiped as a great liberator by the rest of mankind (mostly dark-haired and not as talented) and he is tremendously embarrassed about it all.

This is a novel that Hubbard, in a brief forward, chose to label "pure science fiction" as opposed to what he sneeringly referred to as the "mongrel mixtures" of science fiction and fantasy now in vogue.

This also is a novel featuring the most deliciously despicable villain of all times, the insidious Terl, member of a master race, genius, eccentric and certifiable psychotic. (You can tell when Terl is up to something nasty by his chuckle.) Terl is introduced to the reader with the near-prophetic words, "Man is an endangered species."

I doubt I am ruining the suspense by revealing that Terl’s prediction does not come true despite his best efforts. This is clearly not that type of novel. It is one that unabashedly harkens back to an age when heroes were handsome and invincible and villains were odious and malformed and always got theirs in the end.

Recent fantasy adventures usually have starred the downtrodden, everyday man who is placed in a heroic position only by circumstance and yet finds within himself the penchant for greatness. The villains too, are villains more by circumstance than by nature. The best stories have been the ones in which there were dimensions of strength and weakness in both the good guys and the bad.

No such subtlety for Hubbard. In "Battlefield," Jonnie Goodboy Tyler is blond in a village of dark-haired people. He is muscular and healthy in a village crippled by radiation poisoning. Even as a youth, he is admired by the good-hearted and feared and resented by the small-minded. His human foils are a potbellied drunk of a mayor and a sneering man with a limp, appropriately named Brown Limper.

The story is set in the year 3000. Our civilization had been wiped out centuries earlier by a malevolent race of conquerors known as the Psychlos, who establish a mining colony on the planet. The handful of humans remaining are considered little better than the animals. A few of the Psychlo miners hunt them for sport, but basically they are ignored.

The piece of technology that make the Psychlos invincible, and which qualifies this novel as "pure science fiction" in Hubbard’s view, is the secret of instantaneous matter transfer. It is a secret jealously guarded by the Psychlos. Thousands of races in dozens of universes have tried for untold centuries to learn it. Enter our hero.

Jonnie (as he is affectionately known) falls into the clutches of Terl, the security officer of the Intergalactic Mining Co. assigned to Earth. Terl has discovered an exposed lode of gold, (which is also the Psychlo monetary standard), and has devised a scheme to mine it secretly using the handful of humans left on Earth. Terl has this dream of returning to the home planet a billionaire, of buying a stableful of wives, of having other Psychlos tremble and whisper whenever he passes by.

The first step in this scheme is to teach Jonnie (whom Terl calls "ratbrain") some of the secrets of Psychlo technology so that he and other humans can mine the gold for him.

Jonnie, of course, takes the snippets given him and parlays it into enough knowledge to outwit the sneering, gloating Terl and overthrow the vast Psychlo empire. He not only liberates mankind on Earth but sentient races everywhere.

Battlefield Earth is the first and almost certainly not the last of a trend that started more in the movies than in literature. Think of the Star Wars sagas, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, mix in the triumph of Rocky I Rocky II and Rocky III and you have captured the exuberance, style and glory of Battlefield Earth.

For the discerning reader, Battlefield Earth is as improbable as each of those movies, even accepting the science fiction maxim that in an infinite universe, anything is possible. But more important, the novel is as fun to read as those movies were fun to watch.