Alright, finally did it. I finally got through the book that many of us have known about for years, but very few people seem to have actually read. It's Battlefield Earth written by L. Ron Hubbard, who is most famous for founding the Church of Scientology. And, uh, well, I'll be honest, it's pretty bad. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So, if you're like me, you probably only knew about this book originally because of the movie, and if you're unfamiliar with the movie, it's- it's horrendous. Here's a couple of clips from it to give you an idea of what it's like. Is anyone here? I've seen one. A demon! A monster! A beast! Yeah! Basically every YouTube channel that talks about bad movies at all has a video on Battlefield Earth somewhere in their catalog. And, in fact, this copy that I have of the book proudly says on the front, soon to be a major motion picture starring John Travolta, Barry Pepper, and Forrest Whitaker. Yeah. Well, I won't lie to you, the book is better than the movie because the movie actually only covers the first half of the book. So, you can see there's actually a lot more tabs in the first half than in the second half. And that might give off the impression that the second half is better. It's really not. It's equally bad, and actually I would say it's worse, but it's bad in more of a boring way. You know, whereas the first half, there is like an actual story there, and there are some bits that I genuinely think are good, but overall it's just- it does- it does not work very well. See, the first half is kind of just cheesy old school sci-fi, like Manly Man does manly things and saves the day, you know, that sort of thing. The second half, I'll admit, I wasn't expecting so much talk about intergalactic banking and finance to come in in this over a thousand page long book.  Like, before now it was probably Ben Shapiro, but Ben Shapiro, while he is an asshole, it just- Hubbard's on a whole another level. Like, the dude founded a cult, he blackmailed people, kidnapped them, committed all sorts of fraud, indoctrinated them into his cult, tax evasion.  So, when I say that the book is somewhat better than the movie, and when I give it credit for the couple of things it does well, keep in mind, I'm not doing that because I like Hubbard or I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. I think he was an absolute monster, and I'm glad he's dead. But what's the actual story of this book? Well, the full title is Battlefield Earth, a saga of the year 3000. And basically, what it is, is in the year 2000, which this was written in the 80s, so this would have been like 20 years later, an alien race known as the Cyclos came to Earth, killed most of the humans, and took over so that they could just mine all of the metals and such that we have here. And so now, a thousand years later, humanity is reduced to these primitive little bands that are wandering around in the countryside and avoiding the Cyclos at all costs because any time they run into them, they're just immediately dead.  Okay, that sounds kind of cheesy and a little dumb, but hey, that could possibly be fun. You know, maybe not super serious or anything, but it could be fun. Let's see where it goes. So the very first line on the very first page is actually a line from the main villain of the story. Man, said Terl, is an endangered species. Now, I know it might sound strange to stop that quick, but the instant I read that when I first got through this, I thought, okay, that's pretty good. See, the villain knows about humans and he feels like he's so far above us that he can look down at us almost like animals. And he's just like, yes, there's only a couple thousand of them left. They're below us.  They're almost gone, whatever. It's not a big deal. And so I thought, okay, yeah, that sounds pretty good. But over the course of this conversation, Terl is talking to his boss about humans and he's saying, hey, you know, maybe we could get a couple of those humans and get them to mine for us. You know, because there's some areas which are dangerous for Cyclos to go to and they could mine stuff like gold for us. In fact, he specifically mentions a vein of gold somewhere in the nearby mountains, which they can't go to for reasons that they'll bring up later. And he says, hey, the humans could do it for us.  They aren't going to be able to do any of that. And immediately, okay, I know it's been a thousand years since human civilization was mostly wiped out, but they mentioned multiple times you can still go around the planet and see ruins of our cities and stuff. Like, they know we were an intelligent civilization. They know we are at least sentient. They should understand this. Like, there's no level of ignorance or arrogance that would excuse that level of stupidity. There just isn't. And so that's a problem we're going to see throughout the entire book, is that the villains are just complete dumbasses. There's also a note at the bottom of the page which says it's from a translator, and it says that time, distance, and weight have all been translated to earth systems to prevent confusion. And I think that's fine. I think having a little asterisk with that there to help the audience get a little more into the world is okay. That's a stylistic choice, certainly, that most books wouldn't make, but not a big deal. The problem is that they only do that three times in the entire book. This is one of them, and then the last two come like 30 pages near the end. So I had basically forgotten that that was a thing, and I didn't have time to get used to it. And so it took me out a little bit the first time, but then the second and third time, I was like, oh right, this is a book, this isn't real, so it just takes me out of the moment. Oh Lord, we're only on the first page. And then we also have lines like this one, Char Glowered at him.   You know, it's the villains, particularly the Cyclones, just talk weird, and it comes across as a little more silly than intimidating or threatening or anything of that nature. It just, I don't know, it's kind of dumb, and again, it kept taking me out. Though I will say for the most part, the actual writing in this is competent. You know, nothing special, but I believe that Hubbard was a professional author. Because he was before he founded the Church of Scientology. Like, I believe, okay, this guy knew more or less what he was doing. Okay, so despite all that complaining that I just did, this really is an okay opener. You know, it gives a setup for the world, like we understand, okay, the earth is pretty much destroyed, there's very few humans left, and the villains are these aliens named Cyclones who rule over us. And, okay, the name's Cyclone. One letter off from Psycho, get it? Because they're evil. You may as well just call them the bad nasties or the evil dudes.  And, yeah, okay. So after we learn about Turrell's plan to, you know, enslave humans and make them mine for him, we cut to the protagonist of the story, a guy named Johnny Good Boy Tyler. That's his real name. It's not Johnny, and then, like, in quotes, Good Boy. Like, it's a nickname or something. Like, his full name is Johnny Good Boy Tyler, so... Yep, that's the level of subtlety we're working with here. But anyways, it starts off with Johnny returning from a hunt to his village, which only has, like, 30 people left in it now. Way up in the mountains, because they're hiding from the demons, as they believe the Cyclones are. And he finds out his father has just recently died, and they're burying him. And I guess it's supposed to be sad, but, I mean, we don't know any of these characters, so, like... How are we supposed to feel much of anything? You know, like, I mean, okay, you can say this is really more of an inciting incident, because after this, Johnny says, okay, the village, we can't stay here anymore, so we're just gonna go off somewhere else. But nonetheless, if we had had even a single line from his father, even in flashback form, then that would help us care a little bit more. And the way Hubbard describes Johnny's appearance is, uh... interesting. Johnny Good Boy had stood very tall and looked at her. Among people who were average height, Johnny Good Boy stood half-ahead taller, a muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his 20 years. He had just stood there, wind-tangling his corn-yellow hair and beard, looking at her with his ice-blue eyes.  So, over the course of, like, 10 pages, we get a brief introduction of this village, who, like I said, its population has been shrinking, the people are getting sick, it's harder and harder to find food, but they're staying there because while they're there, they're safe from the demons, which they, again, believe the cyclos are, and Johnny just says, we can't stay here forever. I'm going to go off and find a new home for us. And while, right before he leaves, he says goodbye to his girlfriend named Chrissy, and she's pretty much the only named woman in this entire book. Like, you can literally count on your fingers the female characters that are in this that actually get a name. In fact, I think there's Chrissy and Patty are the only two. I don't know if Patty gets any lines, and Chrissy gets maybe three or four pages actually devoted to her in this. It's ludicrous. Like, it is a total sausage best in here. And I know that, yes, this was the 80s and it's old school sci-fi, so you should expect that. But nonetheless, it is pretty glaring nowadays. So Chrissy and Johnny say goodbye. They love each other. Why? I don't know, just because they do. Like, Chrissy has no personality. Despite being the only named female character and the only one that gets even a little bit of screen time, there's nothing about her that makes her a character at all. Is she nice? Is she kind of a jerk? Are there other things does she like and dislike? How determined is she? We don't know. The only personality trait she has is she loves Johnny, and we don't know why she loves Johnny. Because Johnny, while he is not a very well-defined character, he at least is a character who actually goes out and does stuff. So then we go back to Turl. And I'm sorry if it's a little confusing to have me jumping back and forth here, but that's kind of just how the book is structured, where a lot of the major events will be happening at the same time, and we'll just be going back and forth between different characters. I'm going to do my best to keep it in chronological order, but some parts that's just impossible, so I apologize in advance. So we go back to Turl, and we find that he is actually the head of security on Earth, because they have several different outposts of the quote, intergalactic mining company, which is just run by the Cyclos, well, as I said earlier, they mine all the ore from Earth that they can get. And Turl is chief of security, so he's in charge of fending off like pirate raids, he's in charge of making sure that the laws are followed there, all that sort of thing. But Earth is like so far out in the middle of nowhere that there's nothing nearby, and his position is kind of pointless.  Like Johnny's tribe in the mountains is still using stone and wooden tools. Like they don't even have metal. Not long after this, Johnny finds some broken glass and uses it to cut, and he realizes, whoa, this is so sharp, I've never seen this before. Like, that's how primitive they are.  That's the main thing. Like, he wants to be rich, but he also wants people to look at him and think, wow, Turl, you're so cool, and we got basically that during his introduction, and that's it. Like, we never really learn much anything else about his motivations or what sort of person he was at all. It's just, he wants money, he wants power. Not even power, he wants money, he wants fame, really. And I'm not saying those are bad motivations for a villain to have, it's just that you need to, if you're just going to give it to us right away in his narration, then there has to be something else, or we have to build up to it, or something. We need to do something to change it up a little. So Turl goes to another cyclone whose name is ZZT, that's how it's spelled.  But yeah, he's in charge of all the machinery and vehicles and everything.  And he tells ZZT about the humans, how they are intelligent and everything, and ZZT is surprised. He's like, what? I thought they were basically just animals. And again, the ruins of civilization are all around us. We were definitely technologically inferior to you guys because you have a whole space empire, but like, they're around.  Jesus Christ. Turl eventually gets him to agree by saying, hey, maybe some pirates will be out here, and ZZT doesn't really believe him, but he's like, okay, fine.  A breaking the dough life of a security chief on a planet without insecurities, a planet that wasn't likely to produce many opportunities for an ambitious security chief to get promotion and advancement. That's it. That's his whole character right there. That's all you need to know. So we also cut to Johnny who has gone on his whole journey. You know, he comes out of the mountains and he actually finds ruins of an old city, which we don't get that much detail for, but he finds like an old library which was actually sealed up. We find out later by some aliens after they came. It wasn't the Cyclones. It was another race that the Cyclones brought with them called the Chinkos, which, okay, that's one letter off from being extremely racist.  But, you know, anyways, Johnny finds a library with some books and he can't read but he can look at pictures and stuff and he's like, wow, this is incredible. And he finds a big highway as well and walks down. He's like, wow, old humans lived in these gigantic villages. There must have been so many of them. This is really impressive. The demons really must be powerful if they could do this. And at one point he kills a boar with his bare hands because he's just that cool. And actually, I put in my notes here that he worries about Chrissy and I put that he, Chrissy is only a motivation and not a character in her own right, which, yeah, pretty much, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. And while we're with Turl, we learn that the city that Johnny is exploring, which is nearby the Cyclone Mind Site, is actually the city of Denver. And I was actually a little excited when I read that because apparently in the movie it is brought up that the Cyclone Mind Site is near Denver. I just never picked up on it while watching for some reason. But I was kind of excited because a large chunk of the story from this point forward does take place in Colorado and that's where I live. And it's, you know, I don't see that very often. So it's just nice to say, hey, yes, my home state is being represented. But here's the thing. When someone is writing about a real-world place, you can kind of tell when they've actually been there and they actually have a feel for what it's like and they write about different locations and such. You can tell, like, okay, yeah, they have an idea for what this place is like, what the people are like. And you can tell when they just looked up a list of landmarks and started throwing them in there as if they're checking off boxes. Hubbard is definitely, definitely in the second category. Like, the identity of Colorado here is completely stripped away. It's just a series of buzzwords. Like, this could take place pretty much anywhere on Earth and it wouldn't change much about the story. Like, so far we know about Johnny's tribe lives up in the Rocky Mountains. What do we know about them? They are mountains. That's it. He explored the ruins of Denver. What do we know about the ruins of Denver? It's a ruined city. We don't get much description of what it looks like or anything. And briefly, the cyclos mentioned how it was less developed than some other cities throughout the world, but that's about it. And I mean, that's true. Denver is a young city by a lot of standards, but still, that's not given us much. And it also goes over some other landmarks in Colorado. Like, later we'll come across the Air Force Academy and NORAD and some other stuff like that. And there's just, there's no identity to any of it. So even if I wasn't from Colorado, I don't think this would have... Or if I wasn't from Colorado, I don't think this would have disappointed me the way it did, but it also just doesn't draw me in. You know, the setting has no identity, it has no flavor, it has nothing there. It could take place just in a generic city anywhere on Earth and it would be pretty much the same. It's also around this time that we learn that uranium blows up the cyclo-atmosphere. Cyclos can't breathe Earth's atmosphere, so when they go outside of their domes, they have to have these masks on.  We'll just move past it. The issue is that uranium, or more specifically radiation, whenever it hits their breathe gas, it explodes. And not small explosions, either. Big ones.  Okay, okay, here's the thing. As I said, we later realized that it's not just uranium, it's radiation at all that causes their stuff to explode.  There's radiation in space all over the place. Solar radiation, that's a thing, and it comes in and it can make it blow up. And before you come in mentioning that, hey, solar radiation is different from uranium radiation, yes, I am aware that that's a different thing, but later on in the book, they explicitly mention that solar radiation also makes it blow up. And, okay, even if your planet has an extremely powerful magnetosphere that would keep most of it out, it's not going to keep all of it out.  This makes no sense, and from the moment it happened, I immediately knew, okay, that's foreshadowing, that's how they're going to defeat the bad guys somehow, or they're going to use it at some point, because you can't put in a piece of world-building that is, one, that specific, and two, that's stupid, and expect the readers to not go, oh, yeah, I know where they're going with this immediately. So, I already immediately knew the basics of the hero's plans throughout, not just the first half, but the second half of the book. Alright, so around this time, Terrell and Johnny run into each other, and Johnny's like, holy shit, it's a demon, and Terrell's like, oh, sweet of human, and he manages to capture him, and he brings him back to the cyclobase, where he chains him up in a cage, and Johnny actually manages to escape a couple of times, but Terrell catches him each time and throws him back in, and why Johnny didn't just wait until nighttime to run off at one point when he knows he's being watched, I don't know, but that's, that is what he did, and Terrell is looking through some of the records to try and find out what humans eat, because, you know, he wants to keep Johnny around for a while, he's going to need to know what he eats, and they don't have any records of it, so he's like, well, shit, huh, how am I going to figure this out? And while he's planning, he leaves Johnny in the cage without food or water for like two or three days, the time is not made super clear. At first I thought it was just a couple of hours, but then it's mentioning that Johnny is feeling his strength fading, and so I'm thinking, okay, it must be at least a day or two, I don't know, but anyways, he can't figure it out, and for some reason he doesn't want to talk to Johnny, even though they have, like, translators and such, they have, you know, books that are full of English words, so he could just say, what do you want to eat? And even if he's supposed to be this arrogant guy who doesn't want to reduce himself to speaking like backwards savages, his whole plan depends on finding a human and keeping him alive for a while, and teaching him about cyclo ways so that he can get him to work for him.  But no, instead of doing that, he again lets Johnny escape and Johnny runs off and, like I said, he hasn't had food for several days or water, so he jumps into a stream and just drinks a whole bunch of water and then he sees a couple of rats going around an abandoned shack so he manages to grab one of them and starts eating it, and then Turl pops out, captures him again and brings him back to the cage and he just thinks, rats, that's it. I'll feed the humans rats. Yes, that's what they like. It's also worth noting at this point that even without technology, Turl can easily overpower Johnny because cyclos are huge. Most of them are between eight and nine feet tall and they weigh around a thousand pounds. That's explicitly stated in here. Later on we'll meet a cyclone named Kerr who's seven feet tall and he's thought of as almost being a midget among cyclos. That's... yeah, they're really big. So basically in every way humans are the underdog here so while they're trying to build up tension, yeah, yeah, that works, but it does feel a little bullshitty when they finally come back and you'll see what I mean later, but when they come back it feels almost like the villains are no longer as strong as they used to be. So after Turl gives Johnny some water and a bunch of raw rats for him to eat, which is unpleasant to think about, but I think that's by design. But he also gives him this machine and kind of shows Johnny how to work it out which is... it takes a little bit of time but once he does he realizes, oh okay, this is a teaching machine and when he pulls a lever it shoots this laser beam at his head which instantly imparts him with knowledge. Like it instantly imparts him with knowledge of the cyclolanguage, it imparts him with knowledge of human history, of mathematics, how to read and write, all sorts of stuff like that. He just instantly learns.   Because they wind up using some cyclo machinery and stuff to mine the gold, yes, but you could mine most of it with old style like pickaxes and stuff like that and also that stuff would be a lot less useful if you've ever tried to fight back or flee or anything. It takes a lot less time to learn how to use. Dude, why would you teach them all this? This is the villain just giving them the rope with which they're going to use to hang him. It's the stupidest thing ever. But anyways, while Johnny learns about all this he realizes, wow, the world is so much bigger than I initially thought. Humanity used to be this grand civilization and now the cyclos are gone for his village anymore so that they can be safe. He wants revenge on the cyclos and he wants to take the earth back for humanity. And I mean, as far as an as an introductory section of the book goes this is fine, but this whole segment where he gets captured up to the point where he starts learning the machine and wants vengeance is more than 30 pages. So like, you could have made it go a little faster, guys. So we go back to Terrell talking with his boss and his boss mentions that everyone that works on the planet is getting their pay cut in half and they're losing their bonuses because apparently the mining operation on earth just isn't very profitable and so they're like, well, we're going to have to cut some fat somewhere and it's not because the earth is running out of metals or anything, they still have plenty of that. It's just for whatever reason they can't make much money off of it and Terrell tells his boss, well, we could cut costs easily by using humans as a workforce and his boss is like, no, I'm not doing that and Terrell just thinks, man, I need leverage on him to get him to do what I want. Leverage, leverage, leverage and like every other paragraph he says leverage I need leverage, leverage, leverage and it's really hard to get across just how often he uses this over the course of the next couple hundred pages. I need leverage on this guy. Leverage, leverage, leverage I understand using repetition in order to get across how a character thinks or in order to put emphasis on something because using it over and over again you think, yeah, it's important but it gets really obnoxious and annoying after a little while and frankly, it's just stupid.  So Terrell takes Johnny out with a truck so that he can teach him how to drive it. Okay, I'm sure that'll be great for when he needs to know how to mine but whatever, whatever and he has to go to ZIT again in order to get it and he asks ZIT for the truck and ZIT just says, no, we're not doing that and then they have a fight where Terrell slaps him around a bit and ZIT finally agrees, fine, fine, you can go and see, this is, there's a weird dichotomy here because at this point and at a couple other points we see that the Cyclos will, you know, steal, cheat, lie and murder each other in order to get ahead and they certainly will steal, cheat, lie and murder other races but at the same time they seem to be this bureaucratic war machine with volumes upon volumes of rules and regulations that they have to follow and if anyone breaks them even once then they're dead and in fact other races also seem to go by that bureaucratic model and so it is just odd to see these two exist side by side and if you wanted to go with a oh, well they pretend to be bureaucratic but really it's just an excuse for them to go out and conquer and do whatever they want then maybe you could do something with that but they don't really focus on it enough for it to send any sort of message it just feels odd so Terrell shows Johnny how to drive the truck a little bit and he tries to have him give a demonstration for the other Cyclos but then something goes wrong and the truck blows up, Johnny almost dies and it turns out that Zit sabotaged it so Terrell decides, okay I need leverage on him leverage, leverage, leverage, leverage, leverage over and over and over again and the short version of this is that Terrell steals some stuff and plants it on Zit so it looks like he's the one that did it and then he catches him with other witnesses and stuff he's like, hi, you stole it and this is the penalty for this is death so he gets Zit to sign off on all the requisitions he wants for forever and he knows that if Zit doesn't do it he can just say the word and he'll be killed so this moment is actually fine or not even a moment it's like a whole couple of scenes which are taken up by this but I think it's alright it does make Terrell seem smart it makes him seem like yeah, he knows how to manipulate people he knows how to plan he knows how to play to his own strengths yeah, okay, I can see how this would work so a little while later Terrell and Johnny are driving around and they come across the ruins of the United States Air Force Academy and Terrell apparently believes that it was the primary defense base for the entire planet because during the initial Cyclonevasion that was the last place to stop giving any sort of organized resistance like a single cyclotank came upon it and some of the cadets that were there were able to fight it off for about three hours before they were finally killed and then Terrell is like muahaha, see, you even your primary defense base couldn't stop us muahaha, I'm evil and like I said before it's just checking a landmark off the box to try and make you feel like oh yes, this is definitely in Colorado but we don't get any real description of the landscape or anything like that and basically Johnny thinks about it for a little bit and he's thinking, yes, those guys even though their position was hopeless they still decided to go out fighting rather than just let themselves be killed and I think that's what humans should do so I guess it does solidify his motivation if nothing else and then while they're driving Terrell also gives Johnny a bunch of exposition and trains him on weapons and tells him about how radiation blows up the cyclo breath gas because again, just give the hero everything you need everything he needs to kill you because like I was just praising Terrell a second ago because it had a scene where he seemed intelligent and stuff but now he just seems like an absolute dumbass because he's giving them away all the information that they need so because all the cyclo workers have had their pay cut there's rumors of a mutiny and so in order to prevent that Terrell confiscates all weapons and puts them under lock and key because again, he's the security chief he can do that and again just foreshadowing big sign that says foreshadowing you may as well put it out there and he's still not allowed to use humans though because his boss doesn't think it's a good idea he thinks they'll get in trouble and then we bring in Kerr that midget cycle I mentioned not long ago who trains him who trains Johnny on some of the machinery and Johnny just asks him hey, is this the only location mining location that you have and he's like no, there's plenty all over the world see and he like shows him a map just again, all of these villains are just way too friendly considering that they're supposed to be villains like way too friendly and helpful so Johnny attempts to escape and while he does that he runs into Chrissy and some of the others who came out to look for him and then Terrell captures all of them and he holds Chrissy hostage as a way to say hey don't you act up boy I'll kill her, don't think I won't and then okay fine and then Terrell discovers what might be the dumbest part of this whole book so he discovers that his boss named Noof is he's skimming money off the top from the company like that whole half payroll cut that he mentioned the head office did not order that really it's just Noof and his nephew who works back on Cyclo are telling the workers that they're only getting paid half but then they're taking the rest and keeping it for themselves now in addition to Terrell just discovering this it doesn't take him long to do it he just sort of comes across it oh now I have my blackmail in addition to that a company could not function if it could not keep track of its money like that because it's mentioned that it's over 100 million credits a year and the average worker gets paid like 50,000 credits and even the head boss only makes like 75,000 credits every year so 100 million credits is a lot a lot of money and anyone who's ever worked in any sort of accounting or finance will tell you that every cent has to be accounted for in order to prevent shit like this and the people who tried things like this are usually not stupid enough to steal so much money that it would immediately get noticed like that because that much money would get noticed and they apparently did such a bad job of covering their tracks that Terrell could find it just by looking at the books for a couple of minutes like he's not even an accountant or anything he's just able to look at it and go oh all this money is missing turns out he's stealing it and just no company that was that bad at keeping track of its money would be able to function for any length of time and it's mentioned that the intergalactic mining company has been around for many thousands of years so that just, that would not happen they could not do that even if it was a relatively small amount of money which this is not they would notice and they would kill whoever did it and it's mentioned that this went on for like 20 years before Terrell got wind of it it's just like look normally this wouldn't bother me that much but when you consider that the second half of this book talks a lot about banking and finance you, I would have expected Hubbard to know much better than this so Terrell after apparently not even being smart he just gets lucky a couple of times he blackmails his boss and tells him hey whenever I bring you something up here to sign you're gonna sign off on it and he's like okay fine he's just agreeing okay fine you can let the humans do some mining up in the mountains where we can't so then Terrell takes Johnny to Scotland and where there's still some humans up there because it's mentioned that North America got hit the hardest and so there's very few humans here like they mentioned there's 30 something in Johnny's tribe and then there's a couple people in British Columbia and that's pretty much it throughout the whole the whole book but over in Scotland there's still hundreds if not thousands of people running around so Johnny goes up to them and he basically gives them the whole story up to this point he's like yo a demon demon known as a cyclo has kidnapped me I have a plan to take back the earth if you guys want to work with me then we're just gonna have to pretend to be slaves and we're gonna go do it what do you say and apparently he's just he's just that cool because we don't actually see most of the conversations that he has with people in order to recruit them it just says Johnny gave a speech and then they go with him they're like yes we will follow you because Johnny is just that cool and just that awesome his merry soonness bends the whole universe around him but you know it's actually no no I'm not gonna say like whatever or cool or anything like that because this bit is just dumb and it takes away what could have been a decent character moment but you know Johnny takes back a couple dozen Scotsman with him and Turrell believes that they're all slaves and they start to learn cyclo and how to work machines and all that other stuff that Johnny learned but Turrell still doesn't speak English so he's at kind of a disadvantage in terms of communication there okay and as I said there is a lot of stuff that happens all at once here I do my best to condense it basically the Scots and Johnny set up a mine in the Rocky Mountains and they start mining the gold and Turrell is keeping an eye on them but when I say keeping an eye on them what it really means is two or three times a day a recon drone will fly overhead and take a still photo so surely there's nothing they could get up to in that time and Turrell also let them have like transport planes and stuff so they can fly around on their own without his supervision again dumbass and they manage to take NORAD which again just checking off boxes but you know this bit I actually kind of like because they go into NORAD which if you're unfamiliar that's also in Colorado it's like 40 minutes away from where I live it's an entire military installation that was built on the inside of a mountain it's supposed to be like the government goes after in the event of a nuclear war so it's it's actually pretty cool and they go there and they find the record of the invasion which apparently what happened was the Cyclos teleported a big drone to the earth which then started pumping out poison gas at population centers and the humans tried taking it out with missiles and stuff it didn't work and then when the drone was done the Cyclos sent in tanks and planes and infantry and stuff to moth up the survivors and I did like this bit because it feels like you can sort of feel the desperation and the hopelessness that the humans did at that time and Johnny basically says hey well we get it you guys fought and you lost but because you fought we were able to finish it things off now again it kind of cheesy but I did like that bit it does really feel like yeah this is humanity's last hurrah and if they fuck up then we're all dead and around this time it becomes clear that Johnny's plan is to teleport some sort of bomb back to Cyclo and because again he knows that the brief gas will go off if there's any sort of radiation so they start searching for uranium or any sort of other things that will give off radiation that they can teleport back there because the mining company actually has a semi-annual firing is what they call it where they just take all the workers and stuff who are going on leave and all the materials and everything put it on a big platform and fire it back to Cyclo and also some other stuff will come from Cyclo to there and basically every colony does that and so their plan is in addition to killing all the Cyclos on Earth to just do that in order to prevent a counterattack again smart enough plan however in their search for uranium they have difficulty because they don't have any Geiger counters and they can't find any after a little while of searching Johnny has an epiphany that hey maybe we can just use breathe gas you know it's not great but if we could just get little small amounts and throw it near somewhere we go oh radiation and then they know it's uranium and it wouldn't be perfect but it would work and I'm like sure that's fine but the problem is that they don't have any breathe gas then they have to go out and do that and at this point it's just a yes but story and what I mean by that actually a lot of thrillers have this problem is like okay the heroes come up against an obstacle they come up with a solution does the solution work? yes but they have to get something else to get the solution it's like the 2018 God of War game had a problem with this it's like okay you come upon an obstacle and in order to get through that obstacle you have to get this item but in order to get that item you have to go through this whole long journey and then once you get that item you bring it up to the obstacle, you go through the obstacle oh shit there's another obstacle so you have to go and do something else and that's basically how this whole book is structured from this point forward and it does get extremely repetitive especially considering the length like if this book was half the length I would not have nearly as much issue with it as I do but at a thousand pages you gotta keep my attention so Johnny leads a small raid on a cyclo outpost and kills some breathe gas that they can use as makeshift Geiger counters and while he's there he takes out some cyclos with melee attacks like he literally takes a rifle but and hits them and takes them out like that and I'm just thinking guys cyclos weigh like five times more than you like these are massive beasts I don't think you could take them out that easy just by hitting them like shooting them I'd understand but it's just inconsistent and this book has several issues with that but it's just trying to show off how cool the main character is by having him essentially punch a horse to death that's essentially what happens there but you know during the raid he sees Chrissy in her cage and she seems like she's starving and everything so later he manages to get a message to Turrell and while he's talking to him he says hey I need you to give Chrissy food and stuff but because he doesn't want Turrell to know that he was at the raid at the outpost he tells him that humans have mind powers so he's able to communicate with her that way and Turrell just believes him like he just goes with it he doesn't do any follow up research or anything he's just like yeah ok humans have mind powers I'll treat your girlfriend nicer Turrell is seriously the dumbest fucking villain of all time so Turrell knows that if he minds the gold on the company planet then the gold belongs to the company but he wants to keep it all for himself so what he's going to do is he's going to have the humans deliver it to him he's going to smuggle it on to Cyclo in coffins actually and then he'll just dig it up and sell it bit by bit and he'll be himself or he'll be rich and have all his fame and everyone will love him yada yada but in order to prevent any witnesses from telling anybody about it he so he finds the old gastron that Cyclo's used during their initial conquest and sets it so that the day after he gets all the gold delivered it'll just fly around and kill off all the remaining humans and um ok sure I got no issue with this but it's just taking more and more time to do stuff in a story that's already extremely long so Johnny goes back to his old village and he tells them all about the shenanigans he's been getting up to in the past like a year and a half at this point at this point it's been like a year and a half since he left so this whole story takes place over the course of like three years which is kind of odd because I never really felt like that much time was passing but that's a nitpick it's really not that big a deal but basically he goes to his village and he tries to get them to leave because it turns out radiation is in the area that's what's making everybody sick and you might be wondering well how did Johnny avoid it if he's also living there listen up a sudden chill came over Johnny and not from the morning cold that flash was right alongside the path where the villagers went two and three times a day for water and more as a little boy he had been a mutineer on a subject of what work he would do he was a man he had said illogically since he had begun this soon after he could walk and he would hunt but he would not sweep floors or bring water and he had never fucked fetched water from that spring so Johnny avoided the radiation because he basically said he didn't want to do any work makes him seem like kind of a dick rather than a hero doesn't it so while this is going on Terrell finds out that there's a federal investigator somewhere in the mine and he thinks oh shit this guy's coming after me and so we have this whole long rigmarole where he's like really paranoid and he goes after this guy and then eventually he just kills him and then he realizes well I'm probably screwed so I'm just going to have to take all the gold and stuff I can get and get the hell off the planet and go into hiding somewhere as soon as I can but then he realizes after he killed him oh ok he actually wasn't after me cool I'm in the clear so that whole the whole story arc is just a cul-de-sac which is why I'm basically skipping over it now it's just the villain getting lucky and then it seems like he's actually really smart so the humans deliver their gold to Terrell and he hides it in the coffins like I mentioned before but they actually sneak in at one point and replace all the gold inside the coffins with bombs that they got from NORAD and from other places and as I said before their plan is to teleport the bombs onto Cyclo and then as soon as the radiation hits the atmosphere it'll go boom and they're hoping it'll destroy the teleportation platform or possibly even an entire city and that would prevent an immediate counter-attack so it would give them some time to build the earth back up and properly protect itself really not a bad plan and in fact this is the climax of the first half so right after this happens the humans gather up all their weapons and they launch an attack on the Cyclos and because the Cyclo weapons are all under lock and key they aren't able to fight back all that effectively and meanwhile humans send out battle planes and destroy most of the other installations the only one that they capture wholesale is the Denver one and we even get a decent bit of action where Johnny and Turl are in a fight in the air in battle planes and Turl gets shot down and yeah this is actually an okay climax the issue comes when Turl does his evil maniacal villain laugh and tells Johnny haha I sent the gastrone off already there's no way you'll be able to stop it before it kills everybody haha and then Johnny has to go off and stop the gastrone now that sounds fine on paper the problem or maybe it doesn't because this is paper there's kind of a weird saying when you think about it but whatever you know it's the same as like the villain saying haha the bomb's gonna go off soon and the heroes have to go off and try and defuse it it's the same principle but the thing is like you could just as easily have done that with oh the drone is about to launch we have to stop it before it launches because from the moment Johnny finds out about the drone to the moment he takes it off or takes it out is more than 70 pages long like first he has to get himself into a plane then he has to fly the plane over there and then he has to talk to the cyclo who's flying the other plane to stop flying it and then he has to land inside the drone and go in there but it turns out Zit is in there so he has to fight him and then he has to plant all the charges and oh my god it just goes on and on and on but after all of this they manage to teleport the bombs back and they go off they don't know exactly what happened over there all they know is like it destroyed the platform and they killed off most of the cyclo like you that are left they keep prisoner including Turl because Turl is the one who gave all the humans all this technology and everything that they needed to rebel and so he Johnny thinks that he can keep Turl as a bargaining chip in case other cyclo's come back and maybe it'll work maybe it won't so that's the end of the first half and that's also where the movie ends so in the second half Johnny goes from being this perfect manly man character who is the savior of mankind to this perfect godly character who becomes ruler of the universe and the second half it's actually a little bit more than half I'd say it's closer to 60% but the point is this bit is a lot less dense with information so I should be able to get through it faster but it's just at first it was a cheesy story about a manly man doing manly things but after this point it's very clearly just a self insert Gary stew and I cannot stand it so during the explosion after he took out the gas drone Johnny got some brain damage and at first I was actually pretty surprised by that I was like wow the hero actually got hurt and he's actually going through physical therapy and stuff and he's trying to regain the use of his hands and feet and I'm just thinking wow it's not often that fiction of any sort whether it's movies or books or anything really acknowledges how getting injured can have lasting effects that never fully heal but of course Johnny does eventually get back his get back the use of his whole body and that might sound fine if he had to go through physical therapy and such for it but that's not how it happens really really he just is better one day and Johnny got better because he thought really hard about it. Mackendrick said it was another part of his brain taking over the lost functions under stress he had assumed those lost functions and nerves healed because of a battle but Johnny didn't believe that Johnny's theory was that he manipulated the nerves and it was working he had begun by simply willing his arm and leg to do what he wanted each day he had gotten a bit better and now he could trot no cane and he could throw so I guess Johnny just has super psychic healing powers now alright so a big part of the second half of this book is the humans trying to set up a sort of world federation so they go around and find all the other tribes that are scattered around you know they find some uh Germans hanging around they find some people in South America some people in Africa some Chinese people um and for the most part that's fine the government structure is also a little weird but again that's fine the only tribe that I thought was kind of odd was they find one that was apparently descended from a red army unit that was in Afghanistan and I got that and I had to stop and think for a moment I was like well the Soviet Union and therefore the red army weren't around anymore by the year 2000 and they certainly weren't in Afghanistan anymore how how would they still be around and then it clicked for me oh okay Hubbard wrote this in 1980 the Soviet Union was still around and he probably didn't imagine that it would have collapsed in the 90s the way it did in real life so he just wrote it that way and then once I realized that I was like okay so it's not really Hubbard's fault that this bit of world building doesn't make sense but nonetheless it it did take me out of it as for the government that they set up it's like fine in some ways like I said it's kind of weird but okay when you consider that it's a bunch of tribal people who really want to maintain their own autonomy and don't feel that much camaraderie with other members of their human race that are scattered all throughout the world that's that's fine the issue is that democracy really only works if it's properly respected and these people at this point basically worshiped Johnny almost as a god and I feel like they should just do anything he says but at the same time we have quote unscrupulous types who just sort of push him away from the levers of power and try to take control for themselves but at the same time I just don't know how that would work when the average people look at Johnny like this the size of the throng was growing the bulk of the trainees at the academy when they heard Johnny had appeared at the compound demanded a few hours off instantly and the schoolmaster understanding but unable to do anything about it anyway had let them off and here they were in a swarm more people were in from New Denver all work had stopped and machines were now deserted in the underground shops at the compound several council members appeared on the outskirts of the crowd like even the important people think Johnny is just the coolest thing ever so it does it does feel odd to me but okay sure what whatever we will stick with it especially because as I said democracy only works when people really respect it and like and that's goes for any type of democracy whether you're talking pure direct democracy like old school or ancient Athens excuse me or more modern representative democracies where you vote for your representatives and they vote for you like that really only works if people respect that yeah okay I lost this vote but it was a fair election and that's fine like if people stop doing that then the whole system falls apart and you can look throughout the 20th century for countries that fell to fascism and such you can see it's basically the same thing that happens over and over again and we do kind of see that in this like there's a person from Johnny's village named Brown Limper who really hates Johnny and wants to take power and we see him kind of try to manipulate the system he's just not very good at it and it just I don't know it feels like a different story all of a sudden so Johnny knowing that the earth is mostly defenseless at this point wants to master psychomathematics because the machines that he had teaching them just didn't have that in them and so he starts talking to some of the cyclos about it but they all try to kill him as soon as he asks and then they kill themselves they just will not give over this information and he's like huh okay we need some more live cyclos then that we can dissect them and look at their brains and see if there's anything that's causing this and so they go to Africa which is where the last little outpost of cyclos is that they didn't manage to destroy and there's a group of humans that wanders that area called the Brigants and they're led by a guy named General Snith okay so they go there they attack the cyclos they kill 100 of them in open battle without taking a single scratch despite being at a disadvantage in terms of weaponry and training and all that but okay sure we'll just go with that and then they bring them back and they start examining both the live and dead cyclos to see if there's something wrong with their brains now while all of this is going on Terrell is still held prisoner and Brown Limper and another guy named Thor start talking to him because they brown limper thinks okay maybe this guy can help me take over the planet and Terrell feeds them the most obvious lies about how evil Johnny is and how nice the cyclos are and they just believe him oh indeed the cyclos were very peace loving people honest kind good to their friends trustworthy he himself made it a rule of his life never to betray a trust what oh yes it was too bad this animal Tyler didn't have the principles and morals of a cyclone yes he agreed someone should have taught him to be honest and upright when he was young like dudes my guys this this guy he has destroyed your planet this race have destroyed your planet they've destroyed your civilization they've killed a bunch of your friends you've seen them in person now how do you believe this and why all of the villains in this are just so dumb and and that doesn't make the hero seem cooler in fact it makes the hero seem more lame like heroes are much cooler if they can defeat villains that are smart I don't I don't get it why why did you do this to me Hubbard why did you make me see the stupidity over and over and over again so while Turrell and Brown Limper and the others are talking Turrell says that he just wants to build another teleporter so that he can go home because he just wants off of the earth and in his mind he's thinking haha I'm gonna go there and then I'm gonna bring back an entire army and kill all of you and Brown Limper agrees to it but he wants something in return so Turrell tells him okay the earth is property of the intergalactic mining company so I'll just sign over the entire planet to you if you bring me the materials I need and then he does it you know he doesn't expect anything to come of it because he doesn't think he has the actual authority to do that but he signs over the the planet and it's all notarized and it's it's a perfectly legal contract and then he gets to work building the teleporter so Johnny spends some time to set up the earth bank again a lot of talk about finance for really no reason and then they finally managed to cut open the Cyclos head and they find this little implant in there and it takes like 20 pages for them to really get to the point of it but basically the implant is set there so that anyone who asks about cyclo-mathematics the cyclo is filled with an overwhelming urge to kill them and if they can't do that then they kill themselves and that's how they prevent their the secrets of their teleportation technology from getting out that's um that's kind of dumb to begin with but then it also turns out that the implants are what cause Cyclos to be so murder-happy and to enjoy inflicting pain on others I really don't know what to make of that uh yep yep we're just going to move on from that but it is an important plot point you know Johnny finds out oh okay yeah I can't just convince them I have to find another way I have to figure it out on my own so again to make things short the brigands and brown limper stage a sort of soft coup where they take over the Denver area and most of the other people who are loyal to Johnny Flea and Terl is able to build a teleporter uh but then Johnny and some of his other loyalists uh come back and they manage to kill brown limper and the brigands uh just as Terl is firing off the teleporter and he basically says Mwah-ha-ha I will defeat you forever Tyler and then he pushes the button and is teleported away and he's gone and I just want to point out that there are more than 300 pages left in the book at this point and we never see Terl again never never we'll come back to him don't worry but that's the last time we see the main villain of the series around this time we also meet a new character who when they first introduce him he's giving no name and no description he's just a small grey man but later on we learn that his name is Voraz and given that the second movie was never made you know they planned to make a second one but they the first one sucked ass and never made any money but had they made a second one I think that they would have wanted even more Scientology star power in it because they already had John Travolta so I figure in my mind Voraz is played by Tom Cruise hahaha hahaha anyways Voraz is in a ship orbiting around the earth along with a bunch of other aliens and they're basically saying hey we think the Cyclones are gone we want to take over the earth but we can't attack yet it might not be safe at infinitum like there's just a bunch of chapters that follow them okay and it's mentioned that most of the aliens that are here are part of a race called Tullnaps and the Tullnaps were mentioned a couple of times it's mentioned that they actually have been at war with the Cyclones a lot and the last war between the Tullnaps and the Cyclones was actually inconclusive so you see that and you're supposed to go oh these guys really are they mean business but then they attack the earth and a bunch of them are killed and some of them are captured because despite being about as dense as iron and basically bullet proof these guys have to wear these special visors in order to see and if you take it off of them then they'll go blind and you can take them out easy okay you know giving your villain a kryptonite really only works if that kryptonite isn't super obvious and easy to get a hold of so the Tullnaps start bombing human cities most of which are completely empty but they don't know that because I don't know I feel like even back in the 80s they would have thought that aliens who can orbit a planet and go across galaxies and such would have strong enough telescopes to just look down and see hey there's nobody there or X-ray vision or something but then we also get this weird rant on religion which I'm pretty sure was just Elron Hubbard complaining about the FBI investigating Scientology he explained that it must be the pagoda the reason was that he hated all religions religious people were zealots and upset governments and always had to be crushed Hubbard my dude you committed a lot of crime that's what happens other than that though this bit is pretty good in fact I have a stretch of like over 20 pages where I didn't take any notes like the Tullnaps are attacking the humans the humans plant a bunch of mines around the city of Edinburgh in Scotland and managed to take a bunch of them by surprise they kill a bunch of them they capture a bunch more like they okay they managed to bring things to a stalemate and then they bring it into peace talks and the peace talks look I'm open to the idea that the real battle would be after the fighting has stopped and it's really just a mind game at that point like how can you utilize the leverage that you have how can you get more leverage without killing people because neither side really wants to do that anymore like I think that's an interesting idea if nothing else for a climax because it's different than what we usually see but my god this goes on forever like we have more than a hundred pages essentially of preparing for peace talks and then doing the peace talks and then finalizing the peace talks and it's just it's just there to make Johnny seem super smart and diplomatic as well as being a badass warrior so I'm gonna try and do this as quick as I can first Johnny determines that the Tullnaps were not actually acting on orders of the Tullnap government therefore they're basically just pirates and he actually goes through like a dictionary and looks at the definition of pirate to make sure they're all on the same page and they all agree to it and it yada yada yada okay second the Tullnap leader Schleim something like that plans to kill everybody there like he actually has hidden weapons with him and he's like I'm just gonna kill everybody here my men are gonna kill everybody and then we're gonna take over the planet because every villain in this is just evil for the sake of being evil third we have Johnny show off because he still has the teleporter that Terrell built so we have Johnny show off by teleporting a special Cyclobomb to the Tullnap moon where most of their spaceship fleet is and then setting it off and destroying the hangar and destroying a bunch of their ships probably killing a bunch of their people which feels like an act of war to me which maybe you shouldn't do that while you're in the middle of peace talks while you're trying to prevent people from attacking you anymore because you're very vulnerable but okay sure and then and then this happens Schleim screamed then he acted he popped his earplugs shut then leapt up he wrenched at the bottom ring of the scepter and as though it were a machine gun swept it in an arc from left to right to freeze them all paralyze screamed Schleim stand dead damn you stand dead so not only did he attempt to fight all of them the way that he said he wouldn't when he you know agreed to peace talks but he just admits to it right in the middle of everything he's like why isn't my evil plan working like why would you say that out loud I don't I don't understand like maybe you could talk your way out of it if you just stood up and pointed at them but just every villain every villain is so irredeemably dumb and so because all this happened and because you know the tone-ups don't have rightful ownership of the earth and because uh the general Schleim tried to attack everybody the tone-ups are fined one trillion credits which is going to get divided amongst everybody and then hostilities end and that's not the end of the book but that is the end of that segment so then we get to what might be the dumbest part of this entire book basically Johnny teleports a camera a spot several many light years away from Cyclo so that he can see what happened the day he sent the bombs back and what happened was again he was just planning on destroying the teleportation platform and maybe the city around it but what happened was that Cyclo has been so thoroughly mined out that the entire crust is full of tunnels and stuff and so when the bombs went there it destroyed the crust and then sent more bombs to the core of the planet and when they went off it started a fusion nuclear fusion reaction which then turned the entire planet into a star one that's not how stars work like you need a lot more mass than a single planet like even if Cyclo is a lot bigger than earth which is mentioned you you'd need a lot more than that but in addition to that all the Cyclo's on all the colonies because their teleportation to and from the home planet is scheduled so exactly they all just teleported themselves into the middle of this new sun which wasn't supposed to be there so all of the Cyclo's are now dead except for the couple that are on earth including Turl by the way the main villain of the entire book just fucking yeeted himself into a star then who's fault is it? mine so Johnny being some dumbass who just saved the day by accident like you can have accidents happen in the heroes plan but the accidents have to get them in more trouble not less like that's just extremely unsatisfying so in addition to that we have Turl's final dumb stupid pathetic act as a villain which just makes him genuinely the worst villain I've read in a long long long time which is a shame because at first he started off as kind of intimidating you know he really knew that this guy was somewhat intelligent and he had all of this power that he could bring to bear against the humans and all of that just got pissed away almost immediately before it finally concludes with this shit I I cannot describe how hard I face palmed when I read that but and even setting that aside Johnny did kind of commit a genocide and he doesn't ever really even think about that he doesn't feel guilt, he doesn't feel satisfaction he just goes oh they're all dead so Johnny has a really long conversation with Voraz you know the Tom Cruise small grey man and his friend named Drize who I guess if we want more Scientology star power he'd be played by Jason Lee I know Jason Lee isn't a Scientologist anymore but he was back then so you know we'll leave that alone but anyways basically these guys are members of the board of the Galactic Bank or the Intergalactic Bank and they are there to because all the Cyclones are dead now they defaulted on their debts and all of their properties up for grabs so the Intergalactic Mining Company which was owned by the Cyclones that is the company that officially owned Earth but because that's not around anymore the bankers are going to Johnny and saying hey you guys owe us money it's 60 trillion credits by the way and if you don't give it to us then we're going to have to repossess your property which means they're going to take the whole planet and sell it off at auction and whoever owns it will then be able to do whatever they want with the humans there now that's obviously way too much money for the humans to pay like even with all the gold and stuff that they mined they only have a couple of billion credits and they know this so they're like hey Johnny why don't we just offer you and some of your friends a job because you know how to use the teleporter and maybe you can eventually build some more because only the Cyclones had them other races don't have them and having access to one would be super useful but Johnny just says no because you know he's not the kind of person that would abandon his friends like that and then he decides that he wants to end war all together like he just says war is evil and I'm going to end it once and for all uh sure that's kind of coming out of nowhere you know up until this point Johnny has been really focused on just protecting the earth and making sure humans have control of it again but alright sure we'll go with he wants to end war now and then we finally reach the real climax of the story so basically this guy named Baron Von Ruth comes out of nowhere to save the day and Baron Von Ruth is you know a tribesman from Germany or Switzerland and his family before the Cyclones came had worked in finance for generations and so he apparently still learned all of that now I'm calling bullshit because even if he could read old history books and everything some of that knowledge would just be lost because not everything gets written down okay sure we'll say he knows all of this and basically we get this long-winded financial explanation which is not too difficult to follow but at the same time I have a degree in finance so that might be why so basically I'm trying to simplify it as much as possible here so basically when Turrell signed over the earth to brown limper he was the highest ranking member of the intergalactic mining company that was left because all the others threw themselves into a sun and when he signed that over and then he died the brown limper also inherited all of the intergalactic mining company's assets which means all the planets that they own all of the ores and metals that they've mined all of the equipment that they used that was all brown limpers but then brown limper died and so legally it would go to whoever the leader of earth was and now that's Johnny which means that Johnny owns the entire intergalactic mining company or what's left of it anyways and he's just super wealthy like this is all perfectly legal now in addition to all of this when Cyclo collapsed the economy went with it because they were no longer mining so all of the metals that they mined suddenly shot up in price and they defaulted on all of their debts so the intergalactic bank was hemorrhaging money and it's about to go under essentially and so that's why Voraz and Drys came over here in the first place is that they could take earth and then hopefully sell it for enough capital to keep themselves afloat for a little while and that's the gist of it it goes on a lot longer but that is all of the important details hopefully that's not too difficult to follow now because Johnny has all of these assets he tells the bank okay I am willing to bail you out he will give us a two-thirds share in your bank and they're like what's that's a controlling share and he's like yeah but well you can take it or leave it and so they eventually agree like okay fine master of the universe you're the most powerful guy ever we will let you take control of our bank and we'll let you have your planet now here's here's the thing Johnny taking control of all this through some elaborate complex strategy that sounds pretty cool on its own the issue is that this just comes out of nowhere this is all information that the audience was not privy to up until this point and the heroes didn't actually have to do anything except point out that information in order to get the villains to just do what they wanted like the only bit about this that I kind of like is how it turns out that Terrell signing over the planet was actually legal because you know when that first happens you think Terrell's just messing with Brown Limper but then it comes back in a way and you're like oh that's a bit of a twist I wasn't expecting that so I liked that bit but other than that this is just an extreme Deus Ex Machina and that's also this is the climax of the book like this is just the heroes getting out of trouble through the power of coincidences and not having to do anything like this might be a little bit worse than the climax of Fallen which I'm not going to go into that right now but if you've seen my review you know that essentially literally God himself just comes down and saves the day and it's the dumbest shit ever and this might be a little bit worse because saving the saving the human race and saving the earth has been the main goal of the characters throughout this entire story god damn it I'm not used to having hair this long it's been the main goal of the characters the entire story and it just it's saved now you don't have to do anything else like my god so Johnny brings together representatives from a bunch of other races and he sets up some firing platforms with teleporters because remember he's the only one that has the teleporters at this point and he sets them up with bombs and he tells all of them hey if any of you try anything we are going to teleport these bombs to your home planets and just fucking destroy all of them and then one of them says this is a declaration of war Johnny stood there gradually his presence brought silence it is not a declaration of war he said it is a declaration of peace no no that's uh that sounds like a declaration of war but you know okay whatever and eventually he just hides all the teleportation platforms and says hey if any of you try anything all of these are going to go out and kill everybody so just don't try anything it's like mutually assured destruction I guess because you know they have fleets and stuff that could come in and destroy the earth without much trouble so that that that's it that's how he keeps the earth safe he tells them hey rather than your economy is being used for war you're gonna use them for to make consumer goods and stuff which is a little weird that these economies could be that advanced and not know about consumer goods or not do anything with them but alright sure we'll just go with that this is the end of the book I kind of wanted to get done with it now so Johnny finds a really old cyclo named Soth and manages to take out his implant and talks to him for a little bit and Soth agrees to teach him mathematics and it turns out that their rulers the cyclo like put in implants in order to specifically make them evil but they had to put it on they had to put it in every cyclo to prevent it from ever being found out in fact Kerr is one of the only cyclo that doesn't have one because he was just an extra pup that was born in his litter and he was literally like thrown out into the garbage but he managed to survive somehow and they are so strict about this that cyclo are only allowed to be born on the home planet of cyclo like any females that go off world they have to be sterilized so the few remaining females that are on earth are all sterile like they'll never be able to make any more cyclos they're just they're going to go extinct so in addition to Johnny accidentally committing genocide we now finally finally have that little bit of Scientology dog must living in psychiatry is evil you see guys those doctors who prescribe you medicine for your schizophrenia and your depression or who go through therapy for you they aren't trying to help you they're actually part of the government that are trying to turn you into evil drones listen to Al run hover listen to him in his cult Jesus Christ that was stupid that was I went this whole book being slightly impressed that he wasn't using it to push his beliefs you know I went through this whole thing thinking you know it feels like Hubbard while he was a piece of shit he was using this because he really just wanted to write a good story and he might not have succeeded at that I didn't think but you know up until this point I was thinking yeah he's not trying to push Scientology on us but there it is psychiatry is evil guys wake up sheeple and then it's just the epilogue it's years later everything is great Johnny and Chrissy have kids because like oh yeah Chrissy is in this story and Johnny sort of goes away from society to be a hunter because despite having a net worth in many quadrillions of credits he might have all this wealth but he's too manly to actually use it he only relies on himself because he's just that cool you know the wealth is just a status symbol he doesn't want to actually use it to get soft or anything because manly man must do manly things and everything is peaceful because we wiped out that one race of people who were causing all the trouble does anybody else see a problem with that? so overall Battlefield Earth is pretty bad like it's not as bad as the movie admittedly but the movie is bad in a funny way the book is just bad it's not even entertaining I thought it would be stupid action for the most part and while there is some of that a lot of it is just planning and preparation now don't get me wrong having planning and preparation before you go into battle and actually do the action scenes is a good thing like it makes them have a little more weight and the anticipation builds for it but it just gets too repetitive when it's just characters searching for items and searching for information and then finding it oh but we need something else it gets really really repetitive the characters in this book are not even really characters at all Johnny is just a perfect savior who never messes up and when he does mess up it winds up working out in his favor in the end anyways and then at the end he just sort of stumbles into being the most powerful person in the universe I don't even understand how that would happen Turl is the one who causes all the trouble and he's the one that is the end of all the villains and the end of his entire race like if Turl had not done anything then the Cyclo Empire would have just kept on trucking for however many thousands of years until it eventually collapsed like I'm certain it would have happened one way or another because that's just the nature of things but Turl brought it to an end within like a year and all he wanted was just to mine some gold so okay yeah and all the other villains are kind of the same way they're just dumb in order to make the hero seem smarter they have all this power but they're idiots so they never come across as intimidating or like they might actually kill people or anything like that all the other good guys have maybe one trade a piece and they all worship Johnny like that's the thing is Johnny's the only good guy character who has any personality at all and even then that's not very much there are a bunch of others who are just kind of yeah we're we're good guys we work with him we do everything he says and occasionally we'll mess up but then Johnny will come in and fix things and so I genuinely have trouble even remembering the names of most of them there are many small dumb world building moments like how for example these Cyclones have not developed any new technology in over 100,000 years it's mentioned at one point it's mentioned that there are 16 universes I don't know how that works exactly like they mention hundreds of galaxies in 16 different universes that's something that you need to go into a little more detail about if you're gonna bring it up the bad accounting which I mentioned earlier and the fact that these supposedly brilliant bankers had to repossess earth specifically like they had all those planets that the intergalactic mining company took over but they went to this one specifically that already had a race of people on it that were defending it why not just go to one of the other ones way out in the middle of nowhere and auction that off like wouldn't that make a little more sense it's less trouble but okay and it's mentioned that the Tomeps are able to fight the Cyclones to a sand field despite only controlling one planet which is weird because the Cyclones control literally hundreds of thousands of them so they should have way more resources and way way way more people than the Tomeps could ever bring up and just there's a lot of little moments like that which just took me out of the world and took me out of the setting and as I said at the beginning despite a huge chunk of this taking place in Colorado there's no real identity to it it could be anywhere else on earth it could be any generic mountains it could be any generic cities just there's not much here now the first half of the story is kind of okay you know it does have some tension it has a clear goal and it's really not too long there are segments of it that go on longer than it needs to but it's like 480 pages before we get to the climax where like yep we caught Turl and destroyed Cyclo and all that but the second half as I said it has way too much math and finance in there I really mean it I tried to skip over as much of it as I could but there's a lot of talk of Johnny just I want to find out about Cyclo mathematics but I can't and there's a lot of talk about setting up the earth bank and inflation and just like I said I have a degree in this and it's still bored me to tears and then we get to well there's sort of two more climaxes there's like one with the peace talks and one with them just sort of having everything handed to them and Johnny is suddenly the owner of the galactic bank and it's very unsatisfying but all in all this could be so much worse it is mediocre cheesy sci-fi that it's not really my cup of tea but there's other people that might enjoy it really I think this book would have faded away into obscurity if it weren't for the movie and the movie would never have been made if it weren't for the fact that it was written by the guy who founded the church of Scientology like it's been reprinted a bunch of times just because they keep wanting to push it on people like it's been reprinted 1982 1984 1995 and 1999 is this copy I'm pretty sure they've done it more since then but overall it's I can't say it's the worst thing I've ever read like if I had to assign it a place in the order of the worst books I've ever read in this really long, in-depth format I would say it's slightly worse than Fallen maybe it's about the same level as the Fifth Wave maybe slightly worse than the Fifth Wave but overall it's just not that noteworthy and I think that about wraps it up I don't have that many more thoughts on a book that's way too long for its own good and next up I'm probably going to go with the second place poll winner but I might dip into that pile of angel young adult romances that I bought a while ago because that seems like it might be fun to do but I'm not totally sure yet we'll see see you later you guys are the best let me tell you and without you I would not have been able to make this entire really long review of Battlefield Earth I hope you enjoyed it I mean if you watch this far I assume you enjoyed it at least anyways thanks for watching this far please like the video comment on it I hope you enjoyed it I hope you enjoyed it please like the video comment on it and subscribe if you haven't already and check out my channel for more of these bye


So, I'm not too sure how familiar my young audience is with an individual like James Carville. No, he's not a naked mole rat. He's actually a Democratic Party strategist who worked for Bill Clinton previously. And an issue with him is that he hasn't updated his strategy since 1992. Now, a lot of us, you know, we learned about him over the last summer or fall, actually, when he was on a panel with Kyle Kalinsky, and he just basically browbeated Kyle Kalinsky and talked about how horrible the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is. And you're going to get a sense of just how out of touch he is in this clip that I'm about to show you where he concerned trolls about Bernie Sanders and tells us what he thinks the Democrats need to do in order to defeat Donald Trump this year. Now, he's going to give you the same advice that Hillary Clinton accepted. Nonetheless, he thinks he's right and we're wrong. So, let's hear him out. A lot of people compare him to Jeremy Corbyn. I say he might be closer to Lopez Obrador in Mexico. Somebody who manages to get into power because the existing parties have so disappointed everybody. People are disgusted with Democrats. They don't trust Republicans. They go for Bernie. Do you think that is a path to victory if he makes that argument? Why do I think people are disgusted with Democrats? We had the highest turnout in 2018 since women were going to write the vote. We had the biggest margin. We ran a smart campaign and it worked. All right? It matters who the candidate is. It matters what a party chooses to talk about.  Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death. That's why. And we got to get, let's get relevant here, people for sure. Okay. That's why I don't vote. There's overdone. Jeremy, they were all the Sanders people were taking pictures wishing Jeremy Corbyn the best. And they were mistaken. They were very mistaken. Yes. Yeah. I don't want to go down that path. Okay. All I've got for you, James. It's Claire. I just love you. I love you too. And your analysis, if you look at the press corps with AOC crazy, and the Iowa caucuses of liberal, it's too, whatever, to combine the left side of the party. And I don't consider myself a liberal, by the way. I'm not a modern. But they look, you know, over in the center of the culture and, you know, Buddha judge got a lot of votes. And we've got to decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult, or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party? I know where you stand on that center because you had to run in a red state. Right. So again, you and I noted 18% of country elects 52 senators. And the urban core is not going to get it done. What we need is power.  That's what this is about. Without power, you have nothing. You just have talking points. You know, in the Marine Corps, they say, you know, wish in one hand and do something in the other, which hand is going to fill up the fastest? We better get serious here. And, you know, a lot of Democrats around the country are concerned. I know these donors are now going to give a popsicle to the DNC right now. I can promise you that. No joke, listening to him speak is like nails on a chalkboard. Possibly worst. Because this is the most inseparable, miserable prick I've had the displeasure of listening to in quite some time, even for MSNBC standards. I mean, that was just, that was horrible. So, I mean, the first thing that you see is them compare Bernie Sanders to, you know, Jeremy Corbyn or talk about the affinity that we have for Jeremy Corbyn. And while ideologically, you know, they may be similar, the problem with that equivalence is that Jeremy Corbyn over performed the polls in the first election and he lost because he didn't actually have a firm strategy when it came to Brexit. And James Carville says, look, I just don't want to go down that path. Okay, well, how about this? We'll promise you, James, that in the event Bernie's the nominee and, you know, the United States votes to leave the EU, we'll have a real exit strategy. How about that? I mean, we have no Brexit equivalent in the United States. Jeremy Corbyn lost because he didn't take a firm stance. There ideologically speaking, I mean, people agreed with his policies, but they just seem to care more about Brexit. These are two different countries. So while we can draw equivalences between Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn on the policy, I mean, to say that that's exactly what's going to happen is laughable. They always bring up these instances where a politician lost, like James McGovern from like 50 years ago. But as Namiki Kantz put it, Hillary Clinton was James McGovern. She ran the exact strategy that individuals like James Carville said that, you know, the Democratic nominee should and she lost. So why are we taking these people seriously? Why are we bringing them on MSNBC to pontificate about something that they're clearly wrong about? On top of that, he says, look, I'm 75 years old. Why am I here doing this? Because I'm scared to death. That's why. Okay, we're all scared of Donald Trump. But why do you think the same exact moderate strategy is going to pay off this time? Trump now has the economy that he can boost about. It's not necessarily true, but he's going to do it nonetheless. Trump is now a president. He has that incumbency advantage. So if that moderate strategy, that neoliberal centrist approach, didn't work the first time, then why on earth would you think it work this time when Trump is more powerful, more formidable? It just, these people, they have worms in their brains. To quote someone who was interviewed on info awards once. They have worms in their brains. I don't know how else to put it. I mean, how can you be this dense? Like nobody is a sure bet against Donald Trump.  Like why are we listening to these people? They're losers. Democrats lost more than a thousand seats. And this was all under neoliberal rule. Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi. Why are we listening to them? Why isn't MSNBC bringing on people with different ideological perspectives and strategic views? I don't get it. Oh, it's because they probably want to lose to Donald Trump. Now Claire decided to insert herself in this conversation just to tell James Carville how much she loves him. And then he goes on to give Claire McCaskill credit because she knows what type of campaign you have to win because she ran in a red state. Except what happened in her race, James, remind us what happened when Claire McCaskill ran to the right in a red state. She lost. She lost. She literally embraced Trump's racist immigration policies saying that, you know, we need to stop them at the border. And now she's working for MSNBC. Maybe she's not the best person to take electoral advice and strategy advice from. Just a thought. Now, on top of that, James Carville says, we've got to decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult and have a majoritarian instinct to be, you know, a majority party? It's funny because he calls it, you know, having standards in ideological cult because we are very principled and disciplined. But to say, no, we have to be a majoritarian party. He disregards the fact that progressive policies are incredibly popular. Medicare for all, legalizing marijuana, ending the wars, a federal jobs guarantee, a green new deal, getting money out of politics. Every single one of these policies have majority support, not just within the Democratic Party, but among the general electorate. So if you truly want to be a majoritarian party, in other words, populist, then you should come to the progressive wing and talk about the policies that we're espousing, you know, the things we're talking about, because that's what's popular.  I swear to God. Now, finally, he says, what we need is power. And we don't have that because we followed your strategy. We followed your exact strategy, the ticket to get power, and Donald Trump is the president of the United States, a reality television show star. He went up against the most electable, centrist Democrat that the exact strategy that you wanted and Trump is the president.  I mean, it seems like the more wrong you are, the more merit you achieve in DC as a Democratic Party strategist. Look, whenever I see the labeled Democratic strategist, when anyone is talking on TV, I just automatically assume that this is one of the dumbest people in the country because it doesn't matter how wrong they are. The mainstream media still takes them seriously. They still treat them with the respect that they don't deserve.  The 1992 third-way strategy is no longer electorally viable, hence why Hillary lost. So it just makes no sense that this individual would be brought on MSNBC, the liberal network supposedly left leaning, but no, they really are just neoliberal pro-corporate. And they just, they say, give us your advice. And he says, let's do what Hillary Clinton did, essentially. I don't know what to say. DC people, the pundit class, the Democratic Party, they watch MSNBC. So they really take what individuals like Jason Johnson and Claire McCaskill now, apparently, and James Carville, say, and they respect the advice that they give. That's why you see them using the same failed centrist strategy. But on top of that, it's also really convenient to utilize the centrist strategy because if you're a centrist, then you can easily appease your corporate donors and say that you are a pro-woman and pro-LGBTQ while not really doing anything to help them, not changing the economy in a fundamental way, not combating corruption.   It's things like this that make young people feel disinclined to vote. This is why people stay home.


What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today. I bring you this top 5 Destiny 2 Lucky's Plays of the Week but before we get into it people, do you want to win some juice salute? If so simply drop a like on this video, leave a comment down below and join my discord server linked within that video description. Ok so let's get straight into the top 5. In at number 5 we have a clip sent in by Vincent Victory1 who starts off his top 5 with Sweet Random Nova. In at number 4 we have a clip sent in by Ruzem and FIFA. Complains about the game world then What? Where did you come from? I looked, killed, oh wait he's dead. And then I thought guys, don't you love supremacy?  Yeah, stupidest game ever. Why? Why did they decide to implement this in the game? As I said, Street 2.   I'm recording that. In at number 3 we have a clip sent in by Saxelax10. Actually never really hear people talking about how OP these grenades are. Well they are and this clip demonstrates why. In at number 2 we have a clip sent in by kind of Falcon. First time I've seen a random across map Dawnblade. Great, great clip. In at number 1 we have a clip sent in by Craniumdex. The reaction says it all really. But guys that is the end of this top 5 luckiest players of the week. If you enjoyed the video leave a like really does help me out. If you're new around here and enjoy daily destiny videos be sure to subscribe. If you have any amazing clip to send in send it into the email address linked within the top of that video description. But thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully people I will see you on that next one.