Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard
I have read one of Hubbard’s sci-fi’s in the past and jumped at the chance to read this book. Found it at the Costgo store in Burlington. Two whole bucks. What a deal.
I saw the movie when it came out a long time ago. It was a strange story that ended with the destruction of the invaders home planet. Pretty good feat when you consider this happened after a thousand years of occupation and the human race at that point in the story were almost on the point of extinction.
I thought therefore I knew the story. When I opened the book and saw the print was quite small (about four hundred plus words to a page) and that there were 1050 pages… boy, that was going to take a bit of time for this slow reader to get through it. But how could it be that big… the movie showed a pretty fast clip of a story?
So I started reading the story and to my surprise the movie took quite a bit of liberty to change the story development to make it as fast as it was. It almost got to the point that they could have been telling a different story. Then I read about the destruction of the invaders home planet by us simple humans… and that at around page 250. Huh????
Seems the story didn’t end there. There was a human antagonist who was maneuvering the rest of the people to overthrow the hero. Oh, and the fight with several other alien species who rose to power in the vacuum created by the defeat of the other alien race. Then there defeat. Hmmm… still hundreds of pages to go.
What I found funny is the last enemy to raise their heads. A race of small, grey, humanoids who in essence ruled sixteen universes. You know who they were? Bankers! They printed the money, made loans and watched over the finances of hundreds of empires in all those universes. Guess what? We humans took over the bank.
Oh, this was a much bigger story than the movie. It was quite enjoyable. I am glad that I had the opportunity to read such a long tale… for two bucks.
If you like sci-fi then this story is a good read. You should know however that the book was published in 1980. Sci-fi has come a long way since then. Some of the terms are outdated but the story? Never!