After a black-and-white repeat of the cover art there's another page of blurbs, this one featuring Orson Scott Card's assurance that the book is "Ironic, exciting, romantic and hilarious," which is sad coming from the guy who wrote Ender's Game. Then we get a two-page spread of a "Voltar Governmental Cities Map." It's mostly shaded areas denoting city districts between a coastline, mountains, and the desert beyond. The names are pretty unimaginative - Government City, Green Mountains, The Great Desert, Western Ocean, Port City, Commercial City, Joy City - with the exception of the slums of Ardaucus and the Pausch Hills, which at least show a modicum of effort.
Next comes a list of "Among the Many Classic Works by L. Ron Hubbard," then a title page, then a list of all the books in the Mission Earth series, then another title page. After the copyright and printing info we get a note from L. Ron dedicating the book
To YOU, the millions of science fiction fans and general public who welcomed me back to the world of fiction so warmly, and to the critics and media who so pleasantly applauded the novel "Battlefield Earth." It's great working for you!
Now I wonder if Mission Earth was avoidable, like if Battlefield Earth hadn't made the bestseller lists or somehow found critics willing to praise it, Hubbard could have decided to retire from writing for good.
After that is the Author's Introduction, which according to Mission Earth's editor was ghostwritten by him on Hubbard's behalf, so I won't spend much time on it. There's a lot of names dropped from both early sci-fi as well as Greek and Roman playwrights, but what stands out to me is a bit at the beginning: "[Battlefield Earth] was fun to write and if the best-seller lists were any indication, people found it fun to read."
As I mentioned earlier and in my other blog, Battlefield Earth's bestseller status was the result of some shady practices by Scientologists, who bought copies in bulk and repeatedly to ensure that the book was a commercial success in an effort to promote Dianetics through the awesome power of corporate synergy. The perennial question, of course, is how large a role if any did Hubbard play in this. From what little research I've done it sounds like he spent his later years balancing leading his followers from hiding with maintaining plausible deniability for their actions, so I can't really speculate. Either he was aware of the book-buying scheme and this comment about his last book selling well is a smug boast, or else he was a man separated from the world not only by his paranoid delusions, but also by the lies of his sycophantic followers.
After a third page bearing the book's title, there's the Voltarian Censor's Foreword. Lord Invay, Royal Historian and chairman of the Board of Censors, assures us that there is no such planet as Blito-P3 aka "Earth" on any of the charts of the 110-planet-strong Voltar Confederacy. The censor admits that while some Voltarian historical figures appear in the upcoming story, the planet Earth and everyone on it are entirely fictional. Special mention is made of a fellow named Rockecenter who allegedly controlled all of the imaginary planet's fuel and finance, with the remark that "no planet would be stupid enough to let itself be run by such a person." Satire!
The standard Hubbard obsession returns once more when the censor goes on to explain that the subjects of psychology and psychiatry are the author's invention, and "to assert that these had a whole planet in its grip is of course beyond even the license of fiction." Satire!
We're also reminded that there is no such thing as "drugs" and that "no population would ever permit itself to be enclosed in the grip of such an obvious effort to enslave them." Sati... hang on, that's a little more problematic. Not the whole "controlling citizens through mind-altering vices" theory, but the notion that these Voltarians, the galactic overlords of over a hundred worlds, have never encountered a substance that got them high, drunk, or even caffeinated. Or, if we go with "drugs" in a pharmaceutical sense, these Voltarians are millennia behind us in the field of medicine.
The censor wraps up with an explanation that this book is intended to show how silly some Voltarians' beliefs in UFOs are, and hopes that it will help put a stop to "the Earthmen are coming" clubs (complete with buttons). The passage concludes with "On the authority of every highly placed official in the land I can assure you utterly and finally, THERE IS NO PLANET EARTH! And that is final!"
After that fit of redundancy, we get the Voltarian Translator's Preface by "54 Charlee Nine, the Robotbrain in the Translatophone" who... you know, I just realized that I can't tell you if Mission Earth is as bad, better or worse than Battlefield Earth in terms of made-up compound words. After reading about breathe-gas for a thousand pages, I'm not sure that sort of thing even registers anymore. That's kind of scary.
Anyway, Charlee the Robotbrain talks about the difficulty of translating Voltarian terms such as glagged (blood leaving the brain due to spaceship acceleration) and the difficulty of confusing English sayings like "get ripped off" with "going on a tear." Supposedly our puny Earth language (presumably English) only has 1/1000th of Voltar's common-use words and a fifth of the vowels and consonants. Since this will have no noticeable impact on the narrative, I can only assume that a lot of these alien words or sounds are redundant.
Measurements are discussed, and will all be presented in familiar Earth units, of course - or rather English units, not metric, because "the computer says this system was invented in a country called France and that that country stinks." The issue of time is raised and a Universal Absolute standard is mentioned, which is kind of mind-blowing - how the hell would you pull that off? What would be basis for your units of measurements, and how could you express them in a way that was valid anywhere in existence?
Then we get to censorship. The "vocoscriber" used to write this book was part of the Machine Purity League, which preserves robotbrain's circuits by bleeping out curse words. There's gonna be a lot of "(bleep)" in this book, and I can't understand why. Hubbard sort of censored himself in Battlefield Earth, alternating between "-------" and Psychlo euphemisms such as "crunching," but given that the book contained genocide, death by mutilation, war, implied offscreen child rape, the destruction of entire planets, cannibalism, and other such quality entertainment, I cannot for the life of me comprehend why Hubbard thought rude language would be considered the offensive part. It's like bleeping out the cursewords in Saving Private Ryan but letting the rest of the movie air unedited on basic cable.
Ugh, just had a horrible thought - Robert Vaughn Young, the book's uncredited editor, mentioned that Hubbard wanted the author's note "to be 'scholarly' - with a bibliography - with the idea that it would be used and cited in schools." Did he intend for children to read this book? Christ on a moped.
And with the translator's preface done with, the book proper begins. Next chapter we see the framing device intended to tie together the ten volumes of this ill-fated "dekalogy.
Back to the cover
"But I can see now why there is no Earth. With due respect to that great Saturnian, you'd have to be NUTS to live there!" Saturnian? "Saturn" is an Earth word for a planet in the "Blito" system. In order for this joke to make sense, it would mean someone named Nuts, living in the area of "Blito P6", or maybe someone stationed at a Voltarian base somewhere in the orbit of Saturn, or on one of its moons, became famous enough to be considered great. But if that were the case, then the Voltarian censors would have [BLEEP]ed him out of existence by removing everything ever written by this person. Maybe the censors did their job of castrating this story by completely removing its Nuts. There, that puts it in context. You're welcome, L. Ron.
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