About the epic story
A towering masterwork of science fiction adventure and one of the bestselling science fiction novels of all time, L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth takes place in the year A.D. 3000.
Earth is a dystopian wasteland, dominated for a thousand years by an alien invader, the 9-foot-tall Psychlos. Man has become an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans a courageous leader emerges: Jonnie Goodboy Tyler.
Spreading the seeds of revolt, Jonnie and a small band of human survivors quest for freedom from their powerful oppressors—challenging the invincible might of the Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger, and intrigue—with the fate of Earth and of the universe hanging in the tenuous balance.
About the book
First published in October 1982, Battlefield Earth became an instant bestseller. The book subsequently earned a host of international awards and has been translated into scores of languages.
With more than 4 million copies sold, Battlefield Earth has been an international bestseller for over 4 decades. The Random House Modern Library Readers Poll voted the book among the top three English language novels of the twentieth century.
Hubbard’s great novel has won worldwide critical acclaim, including the US Golden Scroll and Saturn Awards, Italy’s prestigious Tetradramma d’Oro Award for the story’s inherent message of peace, and France’s Gutenberg Award for the novel’s exceptional contribution to the genre.
Reviewers praise Battlefield Earth
“Battlefield Earth is a terrific story! The carefully underplayed comedy I found delicious. A masterpiece.” —Robert A. Heinlein
“Pulse-pounding mile-a-minute sci-fi action adventure that does not stop. It is a masterpiece of popular adventure science fiction.” —Brandon Sanderson
“More than pure science fiction, it’s pure gold.” —Barnes & Noble’s Explorations
“Space opera that hits the right notes. It’s provocative, exhilarating and genuinely enjoyable!” —SCIFI.com
“The pace starts fast and never lets up.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
About the author
With over 350 million works in circulation, including international sales of some 50 million works of fiction, L. Ron Hubbard stands out as one of the world’s most enduring and widely read authors.
Of Battlefield Earth, Hubbard wrote in the book’s introduction, “Recently there came a period when I had little to do. This was novel in a life so crammed with busy years, and I decided to amuse myself by writing a novel that was pure science fiction.”
These whimsically unassuming opening words of L. Ron Hubbard’s intro to 1982’s Battlefield Earth are deceptively revealing. The novel is pure science fiction, but of monumental breadth and creative vision.
Written with a phenomenal burst of creative energy in a sustained eight-month period in 1980, this epic novel is nothing short of massive: “428,750 words long plus intro,” as Hubbard finally calculated from the running tally with which he marked his daily progress.
Battlefield Earth signaled L. Ron Hubbard’s return—after an absence of three decades of extensive research, writing, and lecturing about the human mind and the spiritual nature of man—to popular literature generally and, specifically, to speculative fiction, whose modern form and dimensions he was instrumental in defining.
