GREAT EPIC TALE

You say you have been wondering what to give a special friend for Christmas? Is your friend a reader? If so, you won’t do better that to give him or her a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s huge, panoramic science-fiction novel: Battlefield Earth.

I know $24 sounds like a lot of money for a novel, but this time it's not a ripoff. Battlefield Earth is in every way a major novel, a true publishing event, a fine example of responsible book publishing. You can pay almost as much for an ordinary, standard-length novel today, and Battlefield Earth is not ordinary: It’s grand, exciting, suspenseful – and it’s some 800 pages long. It will make a rewarding companion for long winter days indoors, and is a novel to keep and savor in other years.

The publisher had the good sense to let Hubbard write his own novel and to publish it as it was written. This is one of the old masters we are talking about here – Hubbard has been at the writing trade for some 50 years and has published more then 100 novels, 138 short stories and his works have sold some 22 million copies around the world. He has put a lifetime of experience and dreaming into Battlefield Earth, and the novel has it all, plenty of war and destruction, love and hate, plotting and counter plotting, intergalactic diplomacy and financing and tears and smiles. It’s an epic novel one that will be celebrated by SF fans but it also should receive wide attention from all kinds of readers, because it is simply a corking good adventure-love-war story that sweeps the reader along in its classic themes and roaring pace.

The sub-title of Battlefield Earth is: A Saga of the Year 3000. The story puts us into a time when most human beings who survived the poison gas that killed millions, a few who endured in the Psychlo world of greed and cruelty. One of them is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who is the last remaining human being who knows that the human race was once a great and as strong as the Psychlos. So a traditional familiar conflict is set up: Tyler, with a few other human beings, decides to try to overthrow the Psychlos and re-establish humanity on Earth.

Hubbard is still a storyteller, a supreme yarn spinner. Though his characters are not always fully developed and some of the plot may seem uncomfortably familiar , Battlefield Earth is still an absorbing novel, a great adventure, full of excitement and suspense. Its rapid pace and its attractive central character go a long way toward ensuring reader interest and attention.

Every library worth the name will have to have one or more copies of this great epic tale, but many SF fans will want their own copy to keep. So spend the $24 and make a reader happy this Christmas. It will be an investment in intelligent dreaming, in good fun, and in provocative imagining about the future of the universe.

L. Ron Hubbard stopped writing fiction about 30 years ago. His return to writing is a grand, multi-colored fireworks display of talent that sparks in style, plot and action. Battlefield Earth is the culminating of a writing lifetime, its author’s masterpiece and is superb entertainment.