To be blunt, Mission Earth is shit.
It's a story of sorts, with characters and some semblance of a plot, but they're all soaked in bile and acid, bleached of any positive qualities until there's nothing left but bare bones and foulness. The book is an offensive, noisome mess that should be disposed of far from polite company, rather than put on a bookshelf for others to see. The idea that someone could be proud of producing it is worrisome, the notion that any audience would eagerly consume it is horrifying.
But sometimes, shit has its uses. If you're willing to hold your nose and gingerly pick through it, you might learn some things from it, about the world it came from, and what went through the person who excreted it. If nothing else, you might be able to spread it in a garden, turning reeking refuse into something productive.
So that's the next phase of Mission Spork. I'll be making irregular posts looking back on the series, examining went wrong in the story as a whole rather than in particular chapters, or what's wrong with the characters in it. If nothing else we might learn more about what was in the head of the man who wrote it, and maybe through this amateur literary criticism we can learn what not to do if we wanted to write a non-shit story, so that even Mission Earth's many failures can be put to good use.
As for what comes after that, we'll see when we get there.
Back to the last chapter
Indeed. Mission Earth is obviously a thinly veiled manifesto of Hubbard's and not-so-cleverly disguised as a sci-fi story. The most valuable thing you'll get out of it is an insight into his very disturbed mind.
ReplyDeletePersonally I suspect that the whole "satire"-angle was something some very frightened publisher had to stick onto the books before they were released. As some kind of censoring - to make Hubbard seem like a satirical writer rather than a full-blown madman.
"He doesn't really believe psychologists are bad. He doesn't lust for little girls. He doesn't have any homophobic and bigoted views - it is all just satire! See?!"
Mercy.