Battlefield Earth
by L Ron Hubbard
This book starts with a statement that humans are almost extinct. It takes place about 1000 years in the future, with the Earth taken over by Psyclos, a violent species who only wants the planet for its mining potential.
The storyline starts from this desperate situation, and against impossible odds, the heroes succeed and everything turns out OK. About ten times. That's right: it seems like the book is constantly contrived to have climax followed by lull followed by another climax for the entire 1066 pages (in my edition). There is a lot of interesting technology ideas (most of them blatantly incompatible with science, such as the idea that the Psyclos are made out of elements that don't exist in our universe, which as far as I can comoute it means that they couldn't continue to exist in our universe) and few interesting sorts of plot twists, but this book is a chore to read nevertheless. The aliens are all built on a human-ish body plan (even those descended from sharks and those descended from trees). If you know much science, this book is almost painful to read.
From what I have read online, it seems that members of the "Church" of Scientology (which L Ron Hubbard founded) played the biggest part in making this book appear to be a best-seller, without a lot of people actually reading it. If that's really what happened, you have to admit that they seem to have done an effective job.
If you just want a book to eat up quite a few hours of your life, this is an excellent choice. If you like science fiction where you learn some valid science on the side (as opposed to flatly contradicting it) then you should look elsewhere.
I give this book a 3/10
Flaws in the book: (I'm sure that there are more than I'll list. This is just the beginning.)
-
Electrolysis: Near the end of the book, a magic Psyclo machine
that takes metal from one electrode and plates it across something that
it can spray onto. The book very specifically states that the
metal travels through another metal conductor. This is just
silly. Electrolysis actually works by moving ionized metal atoms
through a liquid (usually water) to move the metal from one end to make
a layer coating the other end. Probably the author (whether
Hubbard himself or just a minion) of this section just saw how metal
could make thin coats over stuff and had heard that it was called
"electrolysis" and used the word.
-
Gas drones: The mysically undamagable gas drone is so strong that
they just can't seem to damage it, even with atomic weapons, during the
invasion of Earth. They imply as much later in the book. If
they can make one machine this strong, and it's cheap enough to just
throw it away on the end planet rather than recycle it to invade
another planet, then why don't they make any other machinery out of
that stuff? It seems obvious.
-
Gas drones: The gas drones kill off most of the people on Earth,
yet they don't seem to have killed off very many animal species.
Silly. Humans were actively avoiding the gas, so some of them
would have lived. Yes, the gas works on animals. Even the
Psyclos were scared of contacting the stuff, and they're not related to
us at all.
- Biology: Speaking of Psyclos being scared of the same kill gas that kills humans, why is that exactly? If they're about as closely related to us as a virus, how can there be a chemical that's toxic to EVERYTHING in such small amounts? It seems pretty unlikely.
- Logistics: If the home Psyclo planet has only a single teleport receiver station, then why not take over a couple of handy other planets to take some of the load off the home planet? The psychiatrists (or whatever they're called) who run the planet could as easily control several planets as one, there's no reason to be THAT paranoid. If they have effective control over one planet, they can control several.
-
Logistics: If they have over a million planets being mined by
Psyclos, and they're sending back ore at EVERY single time of day, then
how exactly do all of the other Psyclo companies move stuff
around? It's mentioned that there exist companies other than the
mining company.
- Patents: In the real world, patents are respected because they're temporary and it's more profitable to respect them than to go against the government. They aren't a rule of nature. The Psyclos could keep control by intimidation, but there is no reason that a bunch of alien species would respect millions of Psyclo patents for thousands of years, even when some of them are at war with the Psyclos. I assume the chatterboxes must've been at war when they shot down that Psyclo gas drone they brag about.
- Solar Powered Space Ships: If a space ship is "solar powered" that implies that it collects solar energy. Since most of space is light years away from any star, it is just plain silly to make an interstellar space ship solar powered.
- Chemistry: The things mentioned imply that Psyclos are made out of elements that don't normally exist in our universe. This implies that the physical constants of our universe are different than those of the universe the Psyclos come from. If this is true, then the elements stable in that universe would not be stable in our universe (It's pretty clear that the periodic table contains all elements stable under normal conditions in our universe.) so the Psyclos would disintegrate when they entered our universe, and vice versa. There would be no reason for Psyclos to covet anything from another universe.
- Mining: The Psyclos can make interstellar spacecraft and all kinds of magic machines, but they can't come up with a better way of mining metals than digging a hole in the ground of a planet and pulling stuff up out of the hole? Come on, that's silly. There are dozens of better ways.
- Uranium: The book constantly refers to breathe-gas being damaged by uranium. The symptoms described, however, are those of breathegas being exploded when it comes in contact with radiation (either beta, gamma, or neutrons. Alpha doesn't fit.). If this is true, then breathegas will have a chance of exploding anywhere in our universe, since almost anyplace imaginable has some exposure to radiation. The best workaround explanation I can make up is that breathegas has to be exposed to a certain level of sustained radioactivity to explode.
If I think of more, I'll let you know.
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