GOP Hopeful Mitt Romney Loves Battlefield Earth (But That's Okay)...

Recently, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney sent eyebrows shooting into the stratosphere by claiming that L. Ron Hubbard's novel Battlefield Earth was his favorite book. He later qualified this comment by saying Battlefield Earth was merely his favorite science-fiction novel, but the damage was done. Only lunatics like Battlefield Earth, right?

Not according to Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe, who writes:

Unlike the symbolically loaded Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, for example, religious apologetics are nowhere in evidence in "Battlefield." Instead, the book's plot concerns Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a primitive tribesman who learns, after he's captured in the ruins of Denver by a fearsome alien named Terl (played in the 2000 movie version by a dreadlock-sporting John Travolta), that earth was conquered by Terl's race 1,000 years ago. Jonnie decides to teach himself all of humankind's forgotten science, then use the knowledge to defeat the aliens. By the end of the story, Jonnie has not only freed the earth but united the rest of the universe in the interstellar struggle against tyranny.

True, the book isn't particularly well-written. I discovered it when I was 15, and although I was an omnivorous reader, even then I recognized that Hubbard was nowhere near as talented a stylist as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Philip K. Dick, or certain other pulp authors. That said, "Battlefield" is no worse than some of the lesser works of, say, science-fiction giant Robert Heinlein (who called it "a terrific story").

It's true: liking Battlefield Earth doesn't make you a Scientology closet case. It just means you have terrible literary taste... an accusation that can be squarely leveled against every single one of the thirty four jillion people who slavishly buy Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Anne Rice, J.K. Rowling and John Grisham novels every year.

Pulp Affectation [Boston Globe] (via Boing Boing)