Echoing golden era of science fiction

Back in the fray after 30 years of absence is L. Ron Hubbard, one of the great formula and pulp writers of the golden age of science fiction. Battlefield Earth is the huge, rollicking saga of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. A youth from the hills where remnants of mankind hide from a high-technology race of aliens who have occupied Earth for a thousand years, Jonnie is captured by the aliens and ends up turning their own technology against them.

The pace starts fast and never lets up. This is a shoot-’em-up adventure of the kind that has the hero fight an air battle in the morning, whip a gang of aliens in hand-to-paw combat in the afternoon, crack an unbreakable code in the evening and find time at odd moments to settle a couple of tribal disputes and run a lab experiment or two.

Hubbard is hard put to make his Disney animals cruel enough. They torture people for sport, but really seem no worse than humans have been under Stalin or Hitler. Ironically, it is Jonnie and his friends, rather than the aliens, who destroy an entire planet, extinguish an entire race of sentient beings and casually shoot any living thing that happens to occupy a cave they want to sleep in.

The whole thing is fun, in a twisted sort of way. Terl, the thousand-pound security chief for a mining operation, gets it into his headbones that locals might be trainable to operate mining machinery and do off jobs. He captures a human but doesn’t know how to care for it, so before it dies he lets it go temporarily free so he can observe it in the wild.

It flops face-down into the first puddle it sees. Seeing no other game, it kills a rat. Having no fire, it eats the rat raw. Problem solved! Now Terl knows to flood its cage with water and bring raw rats.

In the introduction Hubbard tells how in 1938 he was a top-line professional writer of adventure stories. The publisher of Astounding Science Fiction magazine "was unhappy because its magazine was mostly publishing stories about machines and machinery."

Hubbard was brought in, over the editor’s initial objections, to write science fiction stories about people. The editor was John W. Campbell and "his idea of getting a story was to have some professor or scientist write it and then doctor it up and publish it."

From 1938 to 1950 Hubbard wrote about 270 novels, novelettes and short stories, including mysteries, adventure stories, westerns, detective stories and fantasy as well as science fiction. He turned to other pursuits and stopped writing fiction completely.

With Battlefield Earth Hubbard comes across as a powerful science writer comparable to Robert Heinlein.