My copy of Death Quest still hasn't arrived yet - in retrospect ordering it so close to the holiday shipping season was probably a bad decision - so I guess now's a good time to try and wrap our heads around what we just went through.
Fortune of Fear. Where to start? What can we say without using words that 54 Charlee Nine would (bleep) out?
The title sucks. It refers to Gris' fortune, which is won without any effort, involves no character development, lasts for less than a third of the book, and is utterly, achingly wasted. There's certainly nothing fearsome about it, and the only effect it had on the plot was making Gris flee to America and do his bloody job once he'd wasted the money (after said fortune let him to waste a month neglecting his job). But why'd he end up leaving? Because he was facing punishment for the crimes he committed with the fortune. What about the other crimes he'd done? Why couldn't Gris have been forced to flee Turkey because of child abuse or his outstanding credit card debt? Or why couldn't that Bloody Dagger assassin guy bully Gris into returning to America?
In other words, why did the eponymous pile of gold even need to be in the story?
I guess to titillate, because none of those other ways of getting Gris out of Turkey involved him spending a month in the backseat of a limo with random peasant women. Though this theory is problematic because the author quickly undoes that bit of "fanservice" by revealing that the women were both coerced into spreading their legs for Gris and raped beforehand by his henchmen. Why'd Hubbard do that? Did he want to get the reader all flustered by reading a not-too-explicit-but-more-explicit-than-it-should-be sex scene, then make them feel guilty by revealing it had been rape all along? If so, why? Was it to ensure that the reader wasn't enjoying the adventures of Gris? Then why include the sex, or make Gris the protagonist to begin with?
Come to think of it, sex played a bigger part of the story than what was in the title. Gris' wasted his fortune on Turkish not-hookers, and the consequences of that forced him back onto the job. Then he went to America and raped a pair of lesbians into becoming his benefactors. And then Krak mind-raped the frigidity out of Miss Simmons and turned her into a gang-rape fetishist who gave Heller a pass on her class. They should've called this thing Record of Rape or something.
This in turn leads me to realize that there is exactly one healthy sexual relationship in Mission Earth, Heller and Krak's... well, assuming you consider a relationship built around exclusion, deception, and insane jealousy to be "healthy." All the other sex has been rape, prostitution, nymphomania, statutory rape, outright pedophilia, or homosexuality caused by Psychiatric Birth Control. Is Hubbard making a statement about contemporary culture or just sex in general? Or is there no statement to be made, and this is just what he wanted to write about?
Useless gold, unhealthy sex... did anything else happen in the book? There was that section in Atlantic City early on, but that turned out to be a big waste of time. Maybe Miss Boomp will use her new casino to save Heller later or something, but I'm skeptical. And then there was... well, those pirates back at the Apparatus base are presumably waiting for Gris to finish planning that heist of Switzerland, right? Or did he manage to talk them out of it? I hope not, because that would mean that the whole "line-jumper" subplot was only there to facilitate the "Gris' fortune" subplot, which I've already established was basically pointless. Compound pointlessness. Fractal subplots that lead into each other without affecting the main plot.
I can think of four meaningful events in this book. First, the Countess Krak arrived to team up with Heller at the start of the story. Then around the middle we established that Heller is cheating the stock market to build up the fortune needed to create the Eco-friendly technology that will save the world. Shortly afterward Dr. Crobe designed a magical pollution-eating microbe to assist in the same. And at the end Heller passed his Nature Appreciation class, apparently all that was holding him back from earning the degree that would force the world to take him seriously.
So what about these four events required them to be bracketed with rape and mind-control and poorly-invested gold ingots? Or in other words, why did 90% of Fortune of Fear need to happen?
'cause Hubbard wrote it, that's why. There was nobody around him to say "do you think having a character cure someone's homosexuality by raping her might be a bit controversial?" Or "are there a few scenes we could cut to keep the plot moving on at a brisk pace?" Nope, this was a man convinced of his intellectual greatness and status as a master storyteller, a man about to change the world through his satirical sci-fi-romance-spy-humor epic, a man venerated as a prophet by the people around him.
Or maybe Hubbard was more level-headed than that, and knew full well that Battlefield Earth's sales figures had been inflated by his followers, which meant that it didn't matter what he wrote. So he just strung together a bunch of rants and rape and rambling subplots and called it a bestseller.
All this criticism aside, I can think of a few positives about Fortune of Fear - it really fleshes out Heller and Krak's relationship, or more specifically how horribly dysfunctional it is. Theirs is a romance built around withholding information from each other, duplicity, and outright lying. After the oh-so-perfect "love story" involving Jonnie and Chrissie in Battlefield Earth, such a disturbing affair is almost refreshing, even if the author probably didn't intend it to be as such.
Similarly, I was worried that the Countess Krak was going to be another Chrissie, a vapid collection of attractive body parts whose only characterization was her slavish devotion to the male lead. Boy was I wrong! Krak is manipulative, vengeful, and delusional. Gris and the book's jacket spent a lot of energy hyping how dangerous she was, and while part of this is due to her being a rare Mission Earth character capable of forming and then executing a basic plan, Krak really is kind of a scary psycho lady.
The downside of these revelations is that we no longer have any reason to root for our heroes. They aren't sympathetic, and now it's hard to say they're even good people. And since the closest alternative protagonist around is Gris, we're left with nobody to cheer on, nobody to care about. Combined with the excruciatingly meandering, plodding story, there's no incentive to pick up the volume in the series.
Well, no positive reason anyway. Maybe you're using Hubbard's opus as a way of examining his neuroses and warped worldview. Maybe you're fascinated by how horrible the series is, and are perversely interested in just how much worse it will get. Or maybe you decided to start a blog about Mission Earth.
The point is, five books in and we're just getting started.
Back to Part Forty-Two, Chapters Ten and Eleven
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