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2 The writing and authorship of Mission Earth 3 Volumes 4 Critical reactions 5 External links |
The Grand Council of the planet Voltar becomes convinced that it must send a mission to prevent Earth from destroying itself, so that the Voltar Confederacy may proceed on its timetable to conquer the planet, which they regard as an important potential base on the main route of their planned invasion of the galactic centre.
The mission is assigned to Fleet Combat Engineer Jettero Heller as a secret agent. Soon after reaching Earth, he heads to New York City. He investigates why Earth is self-destructing, unaware that he is being tracked and that factions on Voltar want his mission to fail.
Mission Earth is not a ten-volume series, but a single 1.2 million word novel cut into ten parts for publication. Robert Vaughn Young, Scientology's public relations officer, had been ghostwriting many of Hubbard's written communications and was given the job of editing the text. Young received the manuscript, suggested cutting it into ten volumes, then edited it for publication.
The authorship of the novel is contentious. The book was produced in the last few years of Hubbard's life, when he was in seclusion, and many have doubted Hubbard was up to the task of writing Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth, his first works of fiction in over 30 years.
Young stated that although he had written the introduction of each volume, and much other writing in Hubbard's name in the last few years of Hubbard's life, Hubbard had written the entire main text of the series himself. Furthermore, the writing style is consistent with Hubbard's earlier pulp magazine writing.
The individual volumes of the Mission Earth series all reached the New York Times bestseller list. However, many industry watchers believe that the Church of Scientology engaged in a massive book-buying campaign, similar to the campaign to promote Battlefield Earth, so as to deliberately inflate sales of the series in order to promote it as a best-selling literary work. In the years following its publication, enormous quantities of the Mission Earth books were delivered to second-hand and discount bookstores, often from the same distributors that distributed other Scientology-related books.
In spite of its apparent success, the Mission Earth series has been lambasted by critics and readers, receiving nearly universal negative reviews. It is frequently cited within science fiction circles as one of the worst science fiction novels of all time. More forgiving literary critics usually cite Battlefield Earth as Hubbard's best work of the later years of his life.
The New York Times review of the series describes Hubbard's writing as "... a paralyzingly slow-moving adventure enlivened by interludes of kinky sex, sendups of effeminate homosexuals and a disregard of conventional grammar so global as to suggest a satire on the possibility of communication through language."Plot
The writing and authorship of Mission Earth
Volumes
Following Hubbard's tradition of inventing new words to promote his ideas (see Scientology: Beliefs and Practices), the series' publisher, Bridge Publications (a Scientology-owned company), coined the word "dekalogy" to describe and promote the series, meaning "a series of ten books."Critical reactions