John Travolta never read the Sci-Fi books from L.Ron Hubbard!

Here is an interesting quote from an interview John Travolta did with Entertainment Tonight:

"Mark Steines: The book was written in1980. Was it his last?
John Travolta: I'm not sure... there were more after. It was his favorite. He really wanted this to become a big movie." For the entire Interview go here.

Well, John Travolta is not sure, if there were more Science-Fiction books from L.Ron Hubbard published after 'Battlefield Earth'. There were exactly 10 books published: The 'Mission Earth' decalogy. Book critics refer to these books usually as 'doorstoppers'.

The New York Times about "Mission Earth": "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 possiblity of communication through language."

And here the L.A. Times: "Parts of "The Invaders Plan" [The first volume] read as if poorly translated from the Japanese. "The blastgun barrel was into my stomach with violence!" goes one entire paragraph, characteristically substituting typographical stridence for the crisp prose and well-visualized action so conspicuously absent from the book."

Anyway, it's obviously that John Travolta never read any of these Hubbard books!
Why not Johnny? The books are not good enough?


Here is the New York Times Book Review about "The Invaders Plan" (Vol. 1 of the 'Mission Earth' series):

The New York Times
12.1.1986

By Gerald Jonas

(...)

Many decades after he had interrupted a successful career as a science fiction writer to found the Church of Scientology - described by its leaders as a religion and by its critics as a highly profitable business with cultlike overtones - L. Ron Hubbard started writing science fiction again. His new books became best sellers, even though the plots were hackneyed in the extreme, the characters were thoroughly obnoxious (although not in any interesting way) and the sentences sounded as if they had been created on a non-English-speaking word-processor. Sample: ''Like a dying person's life flashing past their eyes, such news always brings a review of one's crimes.'' THE INVADERS PLAN (Bridge Publications, $18.95) is the first volume in a ''dekalogy'' with the overall title ''Mission Earth.'' Dekalogy is a neologism that we are told means ''a group of ten volumes.'' In his introduction, Mr. Hubbard assures us that what follows is satire, a form of literature whose origins he carefully explains in what I take to be a satire on ponderous, self-serving pseudoscholarship. What actually follows is 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.


© 2000 Copyright by Don Flubbard