BATTLEFIELD EARTH

 

Battlefield Earth

A Saga of the year 3000

 

 

Author - L.Ron Hubbard

 

#BattlefieldEarth

 

I have never listened to an audio book before and boy what a brilliant way to tell a story.  Battlefield Earth by L.Ron Hubbard takes you on a fantastic journey telling the story of mankind's battle to survive an alien take over.

 

The story starts where most of earths population has been wiped out by poisonous gas leaving only pockets of humans struggling to survive.

An Alien race called Psychlo's occupy the planet and for the next thousand years build mines and plunder the planets resources.  This race is a greedy and mean society considering man as nothing more than animals and uses them to kill for sport.  Over time a very cunning Psychlo called Terl is appointed the Head of Security at the mine in Denver.  He hates Earth and wants to go back home to Psychlo.  Circumstances end up getting his duration extended and he turns to deception and murder.

One of his flying security drones sends through pictures of a hidden gold seam and being the selfish creature he is he decides to get it for himself and not advise the authorities.  As the Psychlo's do not breath the air on earth and have to wear breath gas masks it is difficulty for him to do the work himself so he decides to capture some humans to do the work for him.

 

Man has over the thousand years lost a lot of their knowledge and one young man called Jonnie gets restless and wants to search further afield from his village.  He believes that where their village is there is something that is making them all ill but no one will believe him.  He eventually decides to take matters into his own hands and leaves to explore much to the annoyance of the village members.
Jonnie has a girlfriend called Chrissie who is one of the few people who will miss him and she runs after him to tell him if he does not come back within a year that she will come and look for him.

Jonnie goes off on his adventure and gets captured by Terl who enslaves him for the next year and forces him to learn Psychlo and how to operate Psychlo machinery.  Once Terl has trained Jonnie he tries to force Jonnie to do his bidding.   Jonnie fights him all the way until after the year, Chrissie comes looking for him with her sister Pattie and gets captured by Terl.  The deranged Psychlo then uses Chrissie and Pattie as leverage to get Jonnie to do his bidding.

Terl takes Jonnie to a Scottish village and tells him to get 50 men to help mine his gold or he will kill everyone in the village.  Jonnie cleverly turns the tables on Terl as he does not speak English.   Jonnie talks to the Scots and persuades them to help him by learning how to use the machinery and speak the language in order to take back their world.

 

This book is full of action and twist and turns.  Just when you think you can see the end something else happens.  The Narrator Josh Clark is absolutely brilliant and guides this story perfectly.  The actors are excellent and this story from the start carries you along with the action.  It's exciting and you feel frustrated for the characters plights.  There are highs and some sad lows.  I even cried at one part but I wont give that away. 

 

At first I did think the Scottish accents of the clans were a bit dodgy but the writer has been very clever here as if you think about it there would have been no role models to copy over the years and the dialects would have changed, some even lost.

 

The actor that play Terl,  Charlie Davis has a fantastically gravely voice and plays this character beautifully.  You kind of like him but then you want to hate him for being so mean. 

At the end of the story there is another big twist that takes it in a whole different direction and this is definitely a "keep you on the edge of your seat journey".  What a ride!

I received this product free of charge and am under no obligation to write this review.