One of the biggest genres of books out there is science fiction, and although it’s not my favorite, I come across it everyone once in a while. This week, or should I say, for the past 2 months, I have been slowly trudging my way through Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard. This 1000 page behemoth of a book is daunting. I consider myself a proficient reader, but this book went toe-to-toe with my attention span and patience.

In the year AD 3000, Earth has been ruled by an alien race, the Psychlos, for a millennium. The Psychlos were inadvertently led to Earth by one of NASA’s deep space satellites. Upon their arrival, the Psychlos gassed the entire planet with a single gas drone, killing about 98% of the populace. The remaining humans fought back when the Psychlos launched a ground invasion, but the resistance lasted less than a day. After one thousand years, humanity has been reduced to a few scattered tribes in isolated parts of the world while the Psychlos strip the planet of its mineral wealth.

Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a young warrior member of one such tribe, lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Depressed over the death and disease affecting his tribe, due to radiation from nuclear bombs detonated when the Psychlos invaded, he leaves his village to explore the lowlands and to disprove the superstitions long held by his people involving ancient gods and monsters. However, he is captured in the ruins of Denver by Terl, the Psychlo chief of security.

After a few year of learning the Psycholo’s language and secrets, Tyler and an enslaved tribe called The Scots, rebel against the Psychlo leader. Challenging the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intelligence, the fate of the Earth and of the universe hangs in the balance.

I’m going to be honest, this book at times is extremely fun to read, but at other (the majority) is very dry and boring. I felt as if the author was filling in details that didn’t need to be. There was a reason that it took me a bit more than two months to read this book, it didn’t grip me and hold me to it. If someone asked me about Battlefield Earth, I would tell them to put it down immediately or don’t even pick it up. It’s too massive and didn’t sell itself to me, I constantly found myself putting it down and picking other books up.