Cast Iron Chaos: Mission Earth

Here is my confession: in 1986 I bought a paperback copy of L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth simply for the challenge of reading a 1000-page book. (This was before I'd learned about Scientology.) The first half of the book bogged down terribly and it took me a long time to get through it, but the last third of the book picked up considerably, and I actually enjoyed it as a rollicking science fiction adventure. It was good enough for me to go through the Science Fiction Book Club and order all 10 volumes of Hubbard's so-called magnum opus: the Mission Earth series. Since I'd bought them all before reading them, I felt it necessary to work my way through all ten books of that sludge pile…and I did. I actually managed to survive it all with my sanity intact. Shortly after I finished that series, Time magazine published its famous expose of Scientology and Hubbard in May of 1991 [1]…and the article shocked me so much that I took all ten of the Mission Earth books and threw them into the trash. After deciding that I should find out for myself what Scientology was all about, I found a copy of L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah Or Madman? at the library and began my journey down the road to what has been nearly two decades of opposition to Scientology.

But that story is for another time. As for the Mission Earth books themselves, my confession above shows that I read those books before I knew about Hubbard's mindset, and the details that went into the writing and publication of that science fiction monster. As I made my way through the books, I realized a few things:

The books were very, very slow-moving, punctuated at times with enough action to keep me going forward to the next book. It averaged about one exciting action sequence for every 200 to 300 pages of tedium…and with the books being about 300 to 400 pages each, that meant there was a lot of waiting between each action scene.
In between the action, however, Hubbard also gave a guided tour of just about every sick, disgusting, perverted sexual kink imaginable. Described in a weird, "symbolic" manner so that he wouldn't have to actually use naughty words like "penis," "vagina," "pussy," or "cock," Hubbard parades such fun acts as BDSM (torture with tobasco sauce and mustard), rapes and multiple rapes, lesbianism (shown in such a way that no one could possibly be aroused by it), rape as a "cure" for lesbianism, rape as a "cure" for frigidity, underage nymphomaniac teenagers, necrophilia, incest (well, strongly suggested incest; even Hubbard couldn't actually write a blow-by-blow description of something like that), homosexual orgies (with underage kids being turned into evil homosexuals, or "catamites"), transvestites, rape of an unconscious woman (well, almost)…and other things that I've thankfully put out of my head. If you really want to know where the smut is in the Mission Earth books, then I'll tell you that book 4 (An Alien Affair) has the man-hating lesbians and food torture porn; book 5 (Fortune of Fear); has the same lesbians being cured of their lesbianism by being raped; book 6 has the underage nympho girl; and book 9 has the same nympho girl turning alien teenage boys into "catamites." But if you really want to read some science fiction porn, there are lots of other books out there that tell their stories in a far more erotic manner. Even the centaur-bestiality scenes of John Varley's Titan books are more stimulating than this crap.
As I later learned when researching Scientology, Hubbard considered psychiatry and psychology to be the greatest evil in the entire universe. He lets his hatred of psychiatry run rampant through the Mission Earth books, by letting these two fields of mental therapy (he always described them side by side as "psychiatry and psychology," apparently unwilling to admit there's a difference between the two) be the secret weapon used by the evil "Rockecenter" corporation to keep Earth under its dictatorial control.

Just to be sure that we don't miss a beat, the first book beats us over the head with the message THIS IS SATIRE by giving us a lengthy, boring definition of "satire." In other words, it's actually supposed to be non-realistic, cartoony, and over-the-top as it attacks its perceived enemies. The most interesting thing about the Mission Earth series is the way it gives us an insight into Hubbard's mind, both by showing us the type of selfless, heroic person Hubbard wanted to be (Jettero Heller), and by revealing the psyche of the greedy, cowardly, criminally insane person he really was (Soltan Gris). The fact that he could spend eight whole books telling the story from the point of view of a sadistic, self-centered criminal shows us who Hubbard really identified with. (I'll actually recommend the series as the best portrayal I've ever seen of a person who can truly be classified under the Dungeons & Dragons alignment of "chaotic evil." After reading these books, you'll never want to play a chaotic evil assassin yourself – I guarantee it.)

After I became involved in the online Scientology wars of the mid-1990s, I vented some of my frustrations by writing several reviews of the Mission Earth books on Amazon.com. These reviews may seem especially negative and downright hostile, so be sure to take my own bias against Scientology into consideration. However, looking back at these books in hindsight (at a time now when I'm more prone to laugh at Scientology rather than attack it), I'm still hard-pressed to find anything good to say about them.

The Mission Earth books are one of the main reasons I haven't tried getting into the Left Behind series. It took long enough to get through ten volumes of Scientology propaganda. I don't have the time or the stamina to put up with twelve volumes of fundamentalist Christian End Times propaganda. (Actually, it's now thirteen volumes as of 2007…plus a three-volume prologue!)

(At this time I am working my way through Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novels, however…)

Additional commentary on the individual books of the series can be found here:

The "Mission Earth" Books

See also: So you'd like to...learn about the written works of L. Ron Hubbard. This is my own commentary on L. Ron Hubbard's literary career, written for Amazon.com. I tried to be as honest and neutral as possible, acknowledging the fact that Hubbard wasn't a bad writer…at first.