Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Unlike "Battlefield Earth", which is one of my all-time favourite books. My only criticism of it is that it's not nearly long enough. Should have been at least double the length it is.
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Battlefield Earth was the longest book I had ever read until I got into Peter F. Hamilton's novels. Hubbard only managed 1,050 pages, Hamilton pulled off 1,174 just as book
three in his
Night's Dawn trilogy! (You should see the UK paperback version of that book, it's insane. They had to reduce the font size to make it possible to turn into a paperback.) Books one and two came in at 955 and 999 respectively. When this series was first released in the US, they split all the books into two parts, so you had six novels instead of three.
I still need to read his
Chronicle of the Fallers series. Looks like the final book will be out this year, so I'll wait.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I read Battlefield Earth. Again way too wordy and way too many places that would have been good to stop. It's like Hubbard got to the end and decided to keep going. Then he got to another end and decided to keep going and so on. I'm guessing he got paid by the word. My criticism is that it's at least 1/2 too long as is.
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I think
Battlefield Earth and the Mission Earth series shows what happens when an author is no longer beholden to an editor. Hubbard could write some entertaining stuff, but he desperately needed someone to reign him in. By the point he wrote those books he was surrounded by Scientology sycophants and no one dared to even
try to do so. I think there's a decent story in both books, buried under an avalanche of word salad.