A Sci-Fi Master Celebrates 50 Years in High-Flying Style

THE PULPS are back – monsters, rockets, blasters and all.

And they’re back in style, a style that spans half a century of peering into the future by one of the masters of the pulp magazine form.

For anyone familiar with the golden age of the pulps, the magazine thrillers with prose matching the lurid covers, there’s a certain response to the name of L. Ron Hubbard before he got deeply serious, he was – simply – one of the best in the science-fiction field.

And the field at that time was purely science fiction, without the mixture of fantasy and "soft" science that marks the field today. It was "hard" science fiction, with labs and scientists and answers firmly rooted in technology.

Battlefield Earth is a prime exhibit, even though it’s a project of the 1980s. Hubbard, in a prologue defining his art, describes it as "the only one I ever wrote just to amuse myself," and he wrote it as a celebration of his 50th year as a professional writer.

It is Rocky, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Flash Gordon and Battlestar Galactica all rolled into one – and then some.

It starts with a buckskin-clad frontiersman riding out of town – and ends with him riding off into the sunset and legend. Not bad, for a book that’s not a western.

It is Pure Good against Pure Evil, Mankind picking itself up off the mat to deliver a knockout blow to the rulers of the universe, damsels in distress and dog fights in the skies over Britain. You can fit a lot of this sort of thing into 819 pages and you can do it in cliffhanger-after-cliffhanger style.

Hubbard’s hero in this novel, subtitled "A Saga of the Year 3000," is one Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, resident of a mountain village near what once had been Denver. About the year 2,000 the totally merciless and rapacious Psychlos, possessors of the secret of teleportation and enslavers of all other races, had found the insignificant Earth by backtracking a space probe with an engraved map (take that, Carl Sagan) and had wiped out all but a few earthlings with a barrage of poison gas.

Tyler’s curiosity breaks the millenium of lethargy and lands him as a captive in the Psychlos’ mining complex, where the BEMs (the generic sci-fi abbreviation for bug-eyed-monsters, who may or may not be bug-eyed) are getting the planet for its minerals.

Jonnie escapes, rallies the troops, and pulls off a series of impossible raids and battles that are won through personal bravery and his lightning-quick mind. You get the picture.

Of course, Hubbard hasn’t been able to totally ignore a few ideas he probably couldn’t have flown in his pulp-magazine days; the ultimate battle, the one that comes after the combined forces of the BEMs have been turned back, is a delicious twist and an amusing satire involving bankers.

For anyone with the stamina for a novel this long, Battlefield Earth is vintage hard science fiction, done by a master storyteller.