I’ll be honest. I had completely forgotten who L. Ron Hubbard was when I picked up this doorstop of a sci/fi novel by him. I can’t say scientology is normally top of mind for me, so it wasn’t until I posted about this book on social media and my friends started asking me why I was reading a book by a cult leader that I remembered why his name sounded familiar, but by that point in was too late. I had already been completely sucked in by this book.
That’s not to say that the book is well written because it is not. There is a lot of headhopping. There are enough rhetorical questions to fill a whole book on their own. And So! Many! Exclamation Marks! I actually asked Google how many exclamation marks are in the book, but Google didn’t know and there are way too many to for me to count.
Also, the main character looks like some sort of Aryan god and is named Johnny Goodboy Tyler. How the hell am I supposed to take him seriously with a name and description like that!
Nevertheless, I found this book hard to put down, even when the writing was so bad it made it hard to keep reading. It’s suspenseful, action packed, and the stakes are as high as they can go (arguably higher because this book is just that ridiculous).
The concept is that an alien race, called Psychlos, came to Earth around the time the book was written (It was published in 1982) and almost entirely wiped out the human race so they could mine the planet for various metals.
Fast forward about a millenium and Psychlos are still mining the planet and the few surviving humans are living in small tribes isolated from each other and the Psychlos until Johnnie decides to leave home to see what’s beyond his tiny hometown and ends up getting kidnapped by a Psychlo named Terl.
Terl uses machines to teach Johnnie the Psychlo language, how to read and write, mathematics, engineering, and electronics so he can put Johnnie to work in the mines with the goal of getting Johnnie to teach other humans. All that would allow Terl to expand his operations outside the confines of his company, which sounds like your usual bloated corporation, complete with corporate politics and embezzlement.
Johnnie figures out pretty quickly that Terl will only keep Johnnie alive as long as he’s useful, so he knows he needs a way to banish the Pychlos from Earth before completing his work for Terl. Not only are the Psychlos much more advanced than the humans, but they’re physically huge (about 10 feet tall), with operations spread across galaxies. And they basically run the universe because they control all teleportation. So, to say it’s a David-vs-Goliath situation is putting it mildly, but of course Johnnie finds a way because he’s perfect.
The book should have ended there and been left at a reasonable 500 pages, but apparently Hubbard wanted to make Johnnie rich (although he has no need for riches because he never had money before, so why would he need it now?) So there’s a whole thing with various other alien species attacking Earth, but of course they best the literally astonimcal odds to emerge victorious from that scrape.
But wait! There’s more!
Then there’s a whole plot where Earth has defaulted on its loans and they have 1 week to pay trillions of Galactic Credits they obviously don’t have, so they become a master of Galactic financial law in just 7 days so they can negotiate their way out of that scrape and live happily ever after.
I’m amazed at how Hubbard’s imagination could be so expansive and so limited at the same time. He can imagine several alien races, all sorts of different technology and societies, and even a new system of mathematics, but he can’t imagine a society in which women are autonomous from men, much less hold positions of power. The Psychlo women are all administrative assistants, and the Psychlo men literally buy wives. In all the races who attack Earth, every single one is male. Every general, captain, pilot, soldier, and banker is male. When Johnnie calls a meeting of representatives of every alien race, every one is male.
Also Johnnie relies on his Chinese chamberlain to teach him how to act and speak to command respect and Johnnie becomes convinced the strategies are universal. Apparently Hubbard doesn’t know the difficulties of diplomacy when what is respected in one culture is insult in another. All you have to do is look at the differing body language between cats and dogs to know there’s no such thing as universal body language.
At first I thought this book was completely whitewashed because the only mentions of surviving human tribes were in North America and Europe, but then Johnnie and his friends start exploring and finding tribes in Africa and Asia. The representation of Asians wasn’t great, but it was nowhere near as bad as the Africans, who were depicted as cannibals who sold humans to the Psychlos to be slaughtered. Also they literally have no concept of bathing. When Johnnie gets all the other human tribes to work together to defeat the Psychlos, the Africans elect to work with the Psychlos instead. To the extent that there are human villains, it’s the Africans, along with one man from Johnnie’s hometown and a Nazi.
This book was a lot of fun, but I won’t be reading anything else by Hubbard.