The worse book ever written After I read this book and before I started to write this review I went and researched the book on the internet. It seems so very unlikely to me that this book would be a "best seller,"

since it is so very, very, VERY bad. Well, not just "bad," but horrible. It is as if some 16 year old sat down at a typewriter and banged out 1000 pages for a high school assignment, and then turned in the ms without any editing or even a proof read.

To say this book is "very bad" is a vast understatement.

To begin with, there are huge gaping holes in the plot. Events jump over to other events, as if an entire chapter had been removed and no attempt was made to cover the holes.

Then there are the self-contradictions. Distances in the book are reported as one figure on one page, and another figure on a preceeding page. Where is the editor?!

Then there are the one-dimentional characters. One usually calls such characters "two dimentional," i.e., cardboard cut outs that are so stereotypical as to INSULT the reader, but this book's characters are one-dimentional: no width, depth, or height. A insignificant dot on the literary space-time continuum. This is very, very poor writing. How anyone can rate this book a "good read," let alone a "best seller" is truely astonishing to me.

Then there are the other absurdities. Fort Knox is left full of gold even after 1000 years of alien occuption--- even those those aliens are on Earth looking for gold.

Fighter jet aircraft built 1000 years ago are still fully functional.

The entire military complex of Earth--- 18,000 nuclear bombs;

40,000 attack jet aircraft many with nuclear tips; surface to air missles in the tens of thousands on every point on the globe--- is defeated in just nine minutes. And yet 1000 years later FIVE CAVEMEN leap into ancient aircraft and defeat the alien occupation with no difficulty at all.

The writing in this book is horrible. Just HORRIBLE. I could not understand why people say it is a "best seller," so I asked some questions.

The the American Book Readers Association were the ones who gave an award for this book as "the best science fiction book writen in the 20th century." That was so unlikel to me (I love science fiction, and I can easily list 100 books far superior to Battlefield Earth) that I researched the American Book Readers Association. It turns out they are a Church of Scientology front group--- they awarded a prize to their own book! The "best seller" claim started to look explained.

I then researched the claim that "Battlefield Earth" was "voted number one." Once again, I discovered that the poll was sponsored by the internet on-line site for The Random House, and that Scientologists flooded the site with votes for their own book.

It is therefore explained why such a very poorly written book could be considered "best of the century."

If you are interested in how to NOT write a book, this is the book for you to study. It is a classic example of bad writing, and could be used in a college writing course as an example of all the mistakes new writers make when writing.

Do yourself a favor: buy Asimov instead.

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