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In an even more professorial voice, already deep and roaring enough, Terl repeated his thought. "Man is an endangered species."
Char glowered at him. "What in the name of diseased crap are you reading?"
- Battlefield Earth, Part 1, Chapter 1
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 is a 1980 science fiction novel written by L. Ron Hubbard about Jonny Goodboy Tyler, one of the last humans left on earth after an Alien Invasion by the sadistic, corporate Psychlos. Jonny is captured by a devious yet stupid alien named Terl, is taught the Psychlos' language, masters their technology, and eventually leads a crack squad of National Stereotypes to retake the planet somehow. The other two-thirds of the book is a long denouement concerning other alien races with an interest in Earth... and Jonny's attempts to figure out Psychlo mathematics. If you read it with the right mindset, it's one of the most unintentionally hilarious novels ever. Otherwise, it may give you cancer.
The book made it to the top of numerous bestseller lists (partly because Scientologists would buy it in bulk, return the copies to allied booksellers for a rebate, and buy them again in a successful effort to boost sales of L. Ron's other book, Dianetics), but critical reaction was... less than enthusiastic.
A film of the book was released in the year 2000, starring John Travolta (who personally bankrolled the project), Forest Whitaker, and Barry Pepper. You can read more about its tropes here.
The novel contains examples of:
- A Boy And His X: Jonny and Windsplitter, his faithful horse.
- After The End: Mankind's cities are in ruins, and there are only scattered bands of humanity left.
- AFGNCAAP: Jonny becomes something close - after he's liberated Earth, annihilated the Psychlos, and shown the other aliens the path to righteousness by abandoning wartime economies for blissful consumerism, he becomes the greatest hero in existence. When other alien races depict him in their art, his features are changed to resemble their own, so that eventually no one is able to agree on what this god among mortals actually looked like. Since Jonny is of course modest enough to want a simple frontier life, he is fine with this.
- Alien Invasion: Once by the Psychlos, then another after the Psychlos are defeated and a bunch of other alien races move in on Earth.
- Always Chaotic Evil: The Psychlo race, with a few exceptions.
- Anvilicious: Hubbard's idea of subtlety is to have his superhuman Author Avatar tell readers that taxation is like governments stealing from their citizens, or to slightly jumble the letters of his most reviled group's name before inserting them into his story as villains. Twice.
- Author Appeal: You get the sense this was L. Ron's attempt to write an Animal Farm exposing the imminent dangers of psychology. Also, he made money off of it.
- Author Avatar: Earlier pre-movie tie-ins of the novel (the ones with the pale blue-violet covers) portrayed Marty Stu Jonny Goodboy Tyler as having a close physical resemblance to none other than L. Ron Hubbard himself. In fairness, later editions portray Goodboy as more closely resembling Barry Bostwick in the film Megaforce, with just a hint of Chuck Norris.
- Author Tract: Compare the name "Psychlo" with L. Ron's least favorite group of professionals. A character in the book even mentions how a depraved cult called "psychologists" used surgical mind control on humanity before the aliens showed up.
- Blackmail Is Such An Ugly Word: Terl and his obsession with "leverage."
- Braids Beads And Buckskins: The everyday clothing of Jonny and his tribe, though it's especially prevalent in the movie version.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Terl in particular and the Psychlos in general. It's a wonder their society functions at all.
- City In A Bottle: Jonny's miserable home village.
- Concept Album: L. Ron Hubbard composed a companion music album called Space Jazz: The Soundtrack of the book Battlefield Earth in 1982, billed as "the only original sound track ever produced for a book before it becomes a movie."
- Covers Always Lie: "A terrific story." - Robert A Heinlein (Oh, Robert, how could you let us down so badly?)
"The pace starts fast and never lets up." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Tight plotting, furious action and have at 'em entertainment." - Kirkus Review
ter*rif*ic
adjective
2 archaic inspiring terror
ORIGIN from Latin terrificus, from terrere ‘frighten.’
New Oxford American Dictionary
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Averted in the sharklike bankers who try to repossess the Earth. Their hat is banking with absolute honesty. It's nothing personal, "banking is banking. And business is business."
- Played straight with Terl, of course, and to a degree the other Psychlo mining executives.
- Custom Uniform: For his meeting with representatives from other planets, Jonny's Chinese chamberlain outfits him with a black and silver outfit complete with a shiny dragon helmet, which combined with his new Sir Francis Drake haircut and some cheesy theatrics helps him awe the alien diplomats into taking him seriously...somehow.
- Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: The humans lace their ammunition with radioactive material, since the "breathe-gas" Psychlos use for air explodes when combined with even trace amounts of elements such as uranium.
- Depopulation Bomb: The Psychlos use a gas attack to almost wipe out humanity.
- Did Not Do The Research: Science-fiction with an emphasis on fiction. Even then, the fiction makes it hard to suspend disbelief.
- Aliens that can conquer multiple universes? Right....
- Disposable Woman: Jonny's girlfriend, Chrissie. What dialogue she has is often simply narrated, she doesn't do much besides get captured and held hostage, and once she's rescued she simply fades away into non-importance. If you were to look up Shallow Love Interest, you'd see her picture right there, staring blankly into the camera.
- Doorstopper: 1083 pages of pain, whether someone throws it at you or you try to read it.
- Earth Shattering Kaboom: In a VERY real (if nonterrestrial) sense. Humanity wins the war by teleporting nuclear "planet buster" bombs to the Psychlo homeworld. Since the greedy Psychlo have mined their home planet to the extent that its riddled with abandoned shafts and tunnels, this causes a chain reaction in the planet's core that turns the planet into a new sun. Then when all the other Psychlo worlds attempt to teleport to the homeworld, they get blown up by the same exploding "breathe-gas", causing another chain reaction that destroys nearly every last Psychlo in the universe(s).
- Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion
- Embarrassing Middle Name: Not necessarily embarrassing to the hero, but would you
nickname yourself Jonny Goodboy Tyler? His tribe's naming conventions also give us antagonist Brown Limper.
- Ending Fatigue: The book's climax is around page 320. There's over 700 pages afterward.
- Evil Tastes Good: Why the Psychlos are Always Chaotic Evil: the evil "Catrists" that secretly control them (another "subtle" dig at a certain profession) have implanted devices into their brains that stimulate pleasure centers when they do evil deeds.
- The true purpose of the implants is to protect the secrets of Psychlo technology. Turning them Always Chaotic Evil just happens to be a side effect.
- Government Drug Enforcement: See Evil Tastes Good above.
- The Greys: The Selachees.
- Happily Ever After: Complete with castle. At least, for a while.
- Heroic Sacrifice: One of the Scottish pilots makes a kamikaze run on an alien carrier, but in a subversion, actually causes as much trouble as he ends after the doomed ship crashes near the humans' teleporter site, nearly destroying the generators for it.
- Humans Are Special: Going from stone-age refugees starving in caves to essentially rulers of the universe in a couple of years counts as special, right?
- Im A Humanitarian: The Brigantes, a mongrel tribe of former mercenaries sent to Africa Just Before The End, have an... innovative approach to food shortages, paychecks, and burials.
- Instant Expert: An alien teaching machine 'beams' knowledge directly into the brain.
- In Working Order: Mostly averted. Jonny and his followers master Psychlo technology and equipment only with intensive training, but do figure out how to use some Lost Technology and concepts from Just Before The End.
- Love It Or Hate It: You'll either think the book is dumb but readable, or painful to sit through. Some do reckon it to be decent if you're just there for the fun of it, but general consensus puts it as So Bad Its Good or So Bad Its Horrible.
- Marty Stu: Jonny Goodboy Tyler. Besides becoming the heroic savior of humanity, judging by the cover art for early book editions, he's even enough of a Bad Ass to fire two laser pistols in opposite directions without actually aiming either of them.
- Moral Dissonance: Jonny heroically wipes out an entire race of aliens...who are only evil because a shadowy cabal
of psychiatrists rewired their brains that way. He even locates the Evil Surgical Implants later in the book and figures out how to remove them safely, rehabilitating the handful of (sterile) Psychlos that survived his genocide. Sadly, nobody calls him out on this.
- Narm: Truly more than the sum of its parts.
- National Stereotypes: The Scots are all claymore-wielding kilt-wearing Bravehearts, Russians drink vodka and still hang onto old Soviet traditions, Swiss-Germans are all master craftsmen or bankers (in a post-apocalyptic world where most tribes have not yet rediscovered metal!), the French are useless in combat and faint at the sight of even a dead Psychlo, Chinese are experts on protocol and courtly manners, and You Do NOT Want To Know about the tribe of mercenaries from Africa.
- Never Found The Body: Terl is basically killed off-screen in a teleporter accident. He presumably was sent to the Psychlo homeworld while Jonny was in the process of annihilating it, so there really shouldn't be any body. Thankfully, he doesn't make a miraculous reappearance and stays good and dead for the rest of the book.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Psychlos are constantly screwing each other over with obscure rules, to the point where one wonders how they managed to get off their home planet to begin with, much less conquer entire universes.
- Parody Retcon: L. Ron's publishers responded to criticism with claims that the work was intended to be satirical.
- Peace Through Superior Firepower: Jonny forces peace upon the universes by threatening to use Psychlo teleportation technology as well as their "ultimate bomb" to annihilate any aggressors. The alien ambassadors seem okay with this, after a token complaint. One.
- Planet Looters: The Psychlos are stripping the Earth of all its valuable minerals.
- Planet Of Hats: Every alien species has a specialty, to an even greater degree than the National Stereotypes.
- Ragnarok Proofing: City ruins are recognizable despite the fact that they should have disintegrated after several centuries, especially some buildings such as libraries, that were preserved by the aliens, records work, hydroelectric power plants function after being rebuilt with alien technology, and the humble Thompson submachine gun, already an antique by the time of the book's publishing, is still barely usable in the year 3000, along with a few other specially preserved military items.
- Riding Into The Sunset: In the end, after committing genocide, being hailed as the hero of multiple universes, and becoming obscenely rich, Jonny, longing for the simple life he had before he was captured, runs off into the frontier with his family.
- Rival Turned Evil: Brown Limper, Jonny's bitterly jealous neighbor, effectively usurps control of the new Earth government, even allying himself with Terl, a Swedish Neo-Neo-Nazi, and the Brigantes. He even gets a Hitler mustache, in case the previous acts were too subtle for the reader.
- Rubber Forehead Aliens: All aliens described are humanoid, with a few animal-like characteristics.
- Schizo Tech: Psychlos have teleportation, long distance space probes, and a multiverse spanning empire that holds all of reality by the balls. They use tanks and bomber aircraft, and computers are mentioned in passing only, despite the presence of drone aircraft.
- So Bad Its Horrible: "...an unsubtle saga, atrociously written, windy and out of control" - The Economist
- "[Hubbard has an] excellent understanding of evil impulses, particularly deviousness, which helps with the plot, and [he] is well-enough aware of his weaknesses not to dwell upon frailties like love, generosity, compassion." - Punch
- "From this, Battlefield may sound almost worth looking at for its sheer laughable badness. No. It's dreadful and tedious beyond endurance" - David Langford
- Space Jews: Besides the Selachee, a race of shark-descended bankers who try to repossess the planet, we're also introduced to the Chinkos, a race of effeminate, intelligent, subservient aliens enslaved, and subsequently exterminated by the Psychlos. Jonny even uses the phrase "tired of being Chinko polite," which combined with the author's real-life views leads to some Unfortunate Implications.
- The film changed the name to clinkos, which is a) idiotic since they still behave like stereotypical Asians, and b) against Scientology rules in that they altered Hubbard's work.
- Squick: Chrissie's little sister, Pattie, gets married to Jonny's "squire," Bittie MacLeod. When she's sixteen. After receiving a locket with "to my future wife" on it from him years earlier. The pièce de résistance? Bittie was killed just after the Psychlo war, and is dead and buried at the time of the wedding.
- What's squicky about getting married at 16? It's legal (if not actually normal) in most of the world.
- Strawman Political: The Catrists, a "medical scientist cult" that secretly controls the Psychlo race through brain surgery. Supposedly the word Psychlo means "mind". Have you gotten the point yet?
- The Dung Ages: The tech-level humanity has been bombed back to, in most places. Which makes their mastery of alien technology all the more miraculous.
- Training The Peaceful Villagers: Somewhat subverted, in that the Scots recruited by Jonny weren't all that peaceful to begin with.
- TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life: Because it means you get to spend a lot of time contemplating Battlefield Earth in order to make a nice beefy entry for it.
- Wallbanger: See every entry on this list. Here's a fun game: flip the book open to a random page. Read it. Commence cranium-wall interfacing.
- We Will Use Manual Labor In The Future: The Psychlos can teleport across entire universes, but never thought to create mining robots to extract minerals from hazardous areas. We Could Have Avoided All This...
- We Will Use Wiki Words In The Future: Gems such as "man-animal," "breathe-gas," "picto-camera," "compo-gradients," and "crap-brain" will hurt the same the first and five hundredth time you read them.
- You Fail Physics Forever: Honestly, the entire book makes absolutely no sense. Even Disney has some dignity concerning the laws of nature.
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