Battle for Earth is lengthy but well-paced

By RICK WILBER

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 12, 2000

Battlefield Earth By L. Ron Hubbard Bridge Publications, $7.99 for paperback Battlefield of dreams L. Ron Hubbard said he didn't want his science-fiction work to be a press release for the church he founded. Nevertheless, the connections between Battlefield Earth and Scientology are worth noting. On screen Space aliens without a clue They're big and they're ugly, but the unkempt race that has devastated Earth in Battlefield Earth is also clueless about the workings of science fiction and the demands of plot.

It's long. It's very, very long.

That's the thought I had when I bought Battlefield Earth, L. Ron Hubbard's 1,050-page science-fiction saga on which John Travolta's summer movie is based. I wondered, hefting the two-inch-thick paperback home, how anyone could possibly squeeze all this into a few hours of film.

Hubbard, who first published the book in 1982, wanted it long. In the introduction he says, "I decided not to cut everything out and to just roll her as she rolled, so long as the pace kept up."

With a few exceptions, the pace is just fine.

The novel follows young Jonnie Goodboy Tyler as he leaves his girlfriend and the rest of the sickly villagers in his humble Rocky Mountain village to go in search of adventure, despite the myths of terrible monsters that roam the land outside his small valley.

Adventure, and monsters, he soon finds. He discovers that for the past millennium Earth has been a conquered planet with only a scattered few thousand humans left in inaccessible corners, from African jungles to Scottish mountain retreats.

The evil Intergalactic Mining Company, run by an ill-tempered race of large beings called Psychlos, wiped out all but a few humans in an attack 1,000 years ago and have been mining Earth ever since, using a teleportation system to ship the minerals instantly home.

The security chief of the Psychlo mining operation, named Terl, is a viciously ambitious fellow who, not unlike Jonnie Tyler, wants to better himself. His convoluted plan involves smuggling gold home to Psychlo so he can be the rich and powerful being he knows he should be.

Inevitably, Tyler and Terl's ambitions clash and the future of the universe -- of all 16 universes, in fact -- rests on the outcome of their struggle.

One secret to writing successful science fiction is getting the reader to suspend disbelief and join the writer on an unlikely storytelling journey. Too many raised eyebrows and the reader -- even the most devout of science-fiction readers -- literally won't buy the story.

Any clear-headed reader will find flaws in Hubbard's logic. The Psychlos, for all of their advanced technology, are curiously -- and for plot purposes, crucially -- vulnerable to uranium. One wonders why this incredibly advanced race hasn't dealt successfully with its danger.

But Hubbard's writing is often brisk enough to get us past these problems -- and past the dismaying length of the book. That's a mark of good genre writing, though Hubbard sometimes unleashes sentences like this one -- "Jonnie pounded them into rolling balls of dead flesh with the assault rifle." Whew.

Still, Battlefield Earth does what Hubbard promised it would do, delivering a huge, sweeping saga in the tradition of science-fiction's Golden Age of the 1930s through 1950s, when men were men and if you got them mad they'd conquer the universe for you.

The only question I had, at the end, was how in the name of a teleportation transshipment console they're going to fit all this into one movie. Turns out they're not. I've since learned the movie covers only the first half of the book and a sequel is expected.

-- Rick Wilber teaches journalism at the University of South Florida. His novel Bone Cold is forthcoming from Tor Books.

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