Product Description

From Lord Invay, Royal Historian, Chairman, Board of Censors, Royal Palace, Voltar Confederacy:

"Let me state it boldly and baldly: there is no such planet as 'Earth.'

"If it ever existed at all, it certainly does not exist today or even within living memory.

"So, away with this delusion.

"On the authority of every highly placed official in the land I can assure you utterly and finally, THERE IS NO PLANET EARTH! And that is final!"

With this emphatic disclaimer, we are introduced to MISSION EARTH, an epic told entirely and uniquely by the aliens that already walk among us. Earth is to be invaded and a Royal combat engineer must cross 22 light years to secretly infiltrate the planet. He is also crossing a scheme to use the resources of Earth's most powerful figure to overthrow the confederacy.

With a convicted murderess who trains giant cat-like animals, a doctor who creates human biological freaks, a madman who controls Voltar's secret police, and clandestine Earth base in Turkey, a bizarre stage is set and narrated by an alien killer assigned to sabotage the mission and Earth - the planet that doesn't exist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118242 in Books
• Published on: 1985-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 615 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781592120222
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

Crap. Not even in capital letters, just crap.
I have read all ten books in this series. I do NOT blow my own horn you understand, but I feel I certainly have earned a medal (or it's equivalent) for slogging through this trash.

The whole mess MIGHT have been worthwhile (as a satire) if done in a SINGLE (!!!!!) book. By a third of the way into the second book I wanted the protagonist to die a horrible, slow, death. I wanted the villian to rape the heroine. Yes, I'm foolish for putting myself through such AGONY, but only twice, in more than 30 years of reading, have I NOT finished a book or series. I love books and I mourn the fact that these "things" must be permitted to be described as, and associated with, the real thing. This was simply (the kindest explanation I can think of) a gratuitous effort at making money. Obviously, if Amazon permitted "negative" stars, this rating would be sub-zero.

P.S. Is L. Ron Hubbard dead yet? If not he should attempt to diminish the magnitude of his sins through suicide. It wouldn't be enough, but it would be the best we could hope for.

A fairly painful experience
I am an avid and voracious reader, taking occasional breaks but typically devouring a book in one to two evenings. After a week of reading, and getting through the first three books in this series, I realized that I did not have to finish the series. Thus began what was a wonderful day for me: the sun was brighter, grass was greener, and my mind functioned with a clarity that has been rarer and rarer as time goes on. The characters in this book are very one-dimensional, incredibly underdeveloped and just not very likeable. The situations they get in are straight out of a sixties sitcom: "No! Don't do that! Oh jeez... He did it." Hubbard's attempts at humor are quite sad and fall very flat. Perhaps if I was still twelve and reading under the blankets I would have chuckled here and there. The gadgets and technology are only passable if you have no ounce of disbelief in you. ("Willbe-Was" drive?? Oh boy... how pathetic.)

Anyway, enough trashing the book, I just really didn't enjoy it or the bad puns or anything about it honestly. I love humor (Douglas Adams), I _love_ scifi, but I found very little redeeming about this book. Sorry for the fans out there, just write this off, but I would not recommend this book to readers that enjoy "hard" scifi or even humor.

Totally useless and a disservice to real science fiction
I am one of those people who love to read good science fiction and that is what the mess known as "Mission Earth" is not--good science fiction. While the basic plot is OK, Hubbard's use of "satire" is so poor that one begins to root for the psychologists and the psychiatrists that are being lambasted without rhyme or reason. Many of the ideas that appear in the book are on Scientology's hit list and, as in many of his writings, are attacked without being given a chance to tell their side of the story. But this is not the book's (and the series') basic flaw. Hubbard keeps repeating line and words to the point that if a reader would take out a word (say, for example, "riff raff") the book would deflate by half. (The same holds true when Soltan meets the Russian agent later on in the series--the repetition gets so loaded that the story bogs down so that it barely moves. Finally, even in bad satire (and we have one here) a hero cannot be as good as Jettero Heller--readers need heroes and villains they can believe in--both Gris and Heller are so far off the mark that I cannot belive in them. Although Bridge Publications claim that this is the largest series ever written, size does not matter--quality does--and that is what "Mission Earth" lacks--quality in the writing. In so doing, I cannot accept that these books are the best SF written. Readers looking for good, epic space opera and adventure by a true talent can find what they crave in E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" or "Skylark" series.