[Manabi]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I managed to crawl through four or five volumes before I had to give up, and that's back when I had a scarcity of reading material and little sense of quality.

I read part of it in high school, but didn't finish it then because I couldn't find the rest cheaply. I guess even then I knew it wasn't worth paying much for. A few years back, when I had copious amounts of free time, but no money and no e-reader, I discovered my library had the full set. As they don't have a very large scifi selection, and I always wanted to know how it ended, I started checking it out one book at a time along with other stuff.

It's not great, but it's not absolutely horrible. (Although parts are great and parts are absolutely horrible, it kind of averages out to "meh".) A lot of the "satire" is heavy-handed, and after reading a few volumes you'll know all of Hubbard's bugaboos, since he lays it on thick about the things he had an axe to grind. It can be quite funny when he's not going over-the-top, and reads quickly even though it desperately needed to be edited—with a freaking axe. If it had been edited properly, and Hubbard had been forced to whittle it down to a trilogy's worth of content, it would have been much, much better. But of course he was next to god in Scientology and absolutely no one was going to suggest anything beyond minor edits, and even then they had to be careful about how they suggested them. The story of the editing process is quite interesting, and explains a lot.

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Having read Fear and more than enough of Mission: Earth/The Invaders Plan, I just don't see myself reading Battlefield Earth. The film adaptation probably doesn't help.

Don't hold the movie against it, everyone agrees the movie was an abomination. Wikipedia sums it up well:

Battlefield Earth is often considered to be one of the worst films ever made. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a "rotten" score of 3% based on 148 reviews with an average rating of 2.3/10. The critical consensus states: "Ugly, campy and poorly acted, Battlefield Earth is a stunningly misguided, aggressively bad sci-fi folly." On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 9 out of 100, based on 33 critics indicating "Overwhelming dislike." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of D+ on an A to F scale.

I read it back in high school, and liked it a lot.