Science Fiction Review

No one could say Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth is lacking in incident: it’s in continuous uproar. But I came to scoff and stayed to praise. The theme is basic post-catastrophe, though this time the gallant band of men who climb out of barbarism have been sent there, in AD 3000, not by the bomb but by a race of thuggish aliens, employees of the giant Inter-Galactic Mining Corporation. But as a swift-moving adventure story it is first class, and the technical details are conveyed without tiresome pedagogy. The humans are rather cardboard, but the alien "Psychlos" are astonishingly convincing – especially the nefarious security chief, Terl, whose maneuvers to outwit the bureaucracy of Inter-Galactic Mining and his home government are worthy of Gogol. He emerges as a great comic villain.