Audiobook edition (abridged)

A towering masterwork of science fiction adventure and one of the bestselling fiction novels of all time, L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth opens with breathtaking scope on an Earth dominated for a thousand years by an alien invader—and man is an endangered species. From the handful of surviving humans, a courageous leader emerges—Jonnie Goodboy Tyler—who challenges the invincible might of the alien Psychlo empire in a battle of epic scale, danger and intrigue, with the fate of Earth and of the universe in the tenuous balance.

Read by Roddy McDowall

“Tight plotting, furious action and have at ’em entertainment —Kirkus Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“Recently there came a period when I had little to do. This was novel in a life so crammed with busy years, and I decided to amuse myself by writing a novel that was pure science fiction.”
—L. Ron Hubbard

These whimsically unassuming opening words of L. Ron Hubbard’s introduction to 1982’s Battlefield Earth are deceptively revealing. The novel is pure science fiction, but of monumental breadth and creative vision.

Written with a phenomenal burst of creative energy in a sustained eight-month period in 1980 this epic novel is nothing short of massive: “428,750 words long plus intro,” as Ron finally calculated from the running tally with which he marked his daily progress.

Battlefield Earth, of course, signaled L. Ron Hubbard’s return—after an absence of three decades of extensive research, writing, and lecturing about the human mind and the spiritual nature of man—to popular literature generally and, specifically, to speculative fiction, whose modern form and dimensions he was instrumental in defining.

First published in October 1982, Battlefield Earth became a breakaway New York Times and international bestseller and has been translated into scores of languages.