The Invaders Plan: Lame, but very long
Written: Jun 18 '00 (Updated Jun 29 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Narrative is mostly interesting enough to follow.
Cons: Same joke told 100 times loses its punch.
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| tomgray's Full Review: Hubbard, L Ron |
It was a chore to finish L. Ron Hubbard's The Invaders Plan, the first in his (shudder) 10-volume "Mission Earth" series, but I swore to myself that I would press on so that I could honestly give it a negative review here. I'm pleased--very pleased, actually--to say that I did and that now it is over.
Hubbard bills it as "satire" in an introduction, and I guess that is true--it appears to be a cheesy attempt to satirize the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as basically low-life scum--but no one at the CIA is going to lose any sleep over this ham-handed, cow-pie-in-the-face effort.
The protagonist of Invaders is one Soltan Gris, a mid-level operative in the Coordinated Information Apparatus (get it? wow, what a gas!) of the Voltar Empire. Soltan talks like you or me, and feels misunderstood and unappreciated, but is capable of skewering some innocent person and giving the knife a good hefty twist without a second thought. Most of the time, he is comic, in a whiny, repetitive way; the sudden bursts of gore and mayhem are jarring and out of place. His mission, which clearly seems impossible, is to accompany an All-Around Hero, Jettero Heller, to Earth. On the surface, their goal is to provide advanced technology to Earth governments and prevent them from wrecking the planet with pollution before it can be conquered by the Empire. But Gris's bosses in the CIA want the mission to fail for unspecified reasons (Earth is the source of several drugs that have potent effects on the Voltarian metabolism, and one suspects they wish to profit from illegal trafficking), and Gris's true aim is, therefore, to sabotage it. Why does this seem impossible? Well, because Heller is clean, thrifty, and brave, and seems to outwit Gris at every turn without even thinking or breathing hard--the main running joke of this novel.
Hubbard began writing SF for pulp magazines in the late 1930s, and it looks as though he hasn't stopped, as Invaders features the same sort of cardboard, one-dimensional characters that populate many stories and novels from that era. There is the Widow Tayl, for instance, a nymphomaniac. There are several gay characters, presented in ways that are obviously meant to disparage. And there are Heller and his sister and his true love, all strong/beautiful/intelligent/talented beyond belief. I would say Invaders is like a comic book, except that that would be an insult to the many comics I have seen that have been more thoughtfully and artistically put together.
Aside from the cutout characters, the most glaring weakness of Invaders is its tendency to repeat the same lame jokes endlessly. Most annoying: the narrative is filled with "(bleeps)," about one or two to a page, because that is how the Voltarian translation machine renders Earth profanity. It might be funny for one or two pages, but here it goes on for 615. Unbelievable.
It's up to you, gentle readers, to find out what happens in the other nine volumes of this series and their millions of words. I've done my duty.
Writing: 5
Characterization: 3
Big Issues/Ideas: 2
Recommended reading: If you like this, I'm speechless. Hehheh, just kidding. I can, however, recommend a few Earth invasion stories that I've enjoyed, including: Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters*, a tautly-written account of a battle against mind-controlling slugs from outer space; Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (and the movie!), where alien "pods" grow into replacements of people and kill them; and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, where Earth is taken over by aliens far beyond our comprehension whose job is to guide us on to our destiny.
Also, if it's 1930s-style, multi-volume SF you crave, there is actually some good material out there. E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" (Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensman, Children of the Lens) and "Skylark" (The Skylark of Space, Skylark of Valeron, Skylark Three, Skylark Duquesne) series were reprinted in the 1960s by Pyramid Books and should be available in the used-book market.
*I've also reviewed this book for Epinions.com.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
tomgray
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Member: Tom Gray
Location: Norwich, Vermont
Reviews written: 160
Trusted by: 231 members
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