Romney was asked to name his favorite novel, and what does he say? Battlefield Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard — that monstrous lump of pulp with the absurd Mary Sue plot. Admittedly, it wasn’t as bad as the Eye of Argon, but still … maybe it’s just that someone who can swallow the goofy mythology of the Mormon church is a little more open to the goofy mythology of the Church of Scientology founder (or ghost-writer). I would have at least expected him to have slightly higher literary standards, though.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Obviously, you doth expect too much.
That is a shocker. Does he think he’s not associated with enough oddball religion yet?
Mitt the Twit is one of the great political goofballs of our time. It’s going to be extremely fun to watch him spend hundreds of millions of Mormon dollars on a losing mission. If anyone hasn’t checked out the footage of Mitt trying to justify his ludicrous claim about being a lifelong hunter, you must find it on YouTube. He actually uses the word “varmints” to describe his prey. He is a total douchebag, and I can’t wait for his political career to vaporize. I’m also glad he’s not in MA anymore so I don’t have to worry about seeing him in the stands at Fenway, where he was always seated on the third base side of home plate so as to get maximum face time on broadcasts. What a jackass.
Maybe he thought it was a book about global warming??
I’m also glad he’s not in MA anymore so I don’t have to worry about seeing him in the stands at Fenway, where he was always seated on the third base side of home plate so as to get maximum face time on broadcasts.
But if you’re down there being bombarded with foul balls, surely you want a Mitt with you?
This guy is doomed. Can’t even pick a good science fiction book ontop of picking a pisspoor religious mythology to follow.
Maybe Tom Cruise and John Travolta will vore for him.
“The goofy mythology of the Mormon church”? Don’t you realize you’re not supposed to say such things? Religious beliefs must always be respected, remember? And anyway, are Mormon beliefs really any goofier than the mainline Christian beliefs of, say, the current president?
PZ said:
Umm…have you read the Book of Mormon? Being raised on that would explain a lot when it comes to Romney’s “literary standards.”
A small irony. On some comment thread or other about Glen Beck, an adult convert to Mormonism, I recently called the LDS the 19th Century’s answer to Scientology, but I also gave Romney a partial pass because, unlike Beck, he was born into the religion. I figured that any grownup who buys into such foolishness is little better than Tom Cruise. I guess I gave Romney too much credit.
Since it was SF would at least have expected something from Mormon-nutjob Orson Scott Card. (Whose writing I admittedly like, at least the older, less insane stuff)
You know a lot of the original background and “culture” from the 1970s Battlestar: Galactica was lifted wholesale by Glenn Larson from the Mormon church — so the history of Mormonism and cheesy space opera is deeper than one might at first imagine.
I wonder if Mitt identifies with the Psychlos. They seem to embody good Republican free-market priciples by creating a worldwide mining corporation.
Ugh! Battlefield Earth! But let’s not give pulp a bad name here by associating it too closely with Scientology…
But speaking of Mitt Romney, has anyone here watched any of the new PBS doc on Mormons? I’ve watched last night’s episode and it’s pretty interesting stuff. I personally don’t see much difference between the ridiculousness of Mormonism and any other religion out there, but they did have an intriguing bit where they talk about how important it is to the Mormon faith that it rests on these revelations that are so obviously just pure fantasy (pulp if you will) that Joseph Smith literally pulled out of a hat. They have a great sequence where a head of the Mormon church says that the whole religion falls apart if Joseph Smith’s revelations aren’t true. Just like Christianity falls apart if Christ’s resurrection isn’t true (as does Mormonism). Of course archeology, DNA, and history have pretty much done the job of debunking the revelations in the book of Mormon, so that leaves them in a pretty sticky place I think. The PBS documentary doesn’t make that final logical leap, but it definitely puts 1 and 1 out there and let’s the viewer add them up to 2, which was nice since at other times it’s kind of credulous about the history of Mormonism (for instance the statement that Smith was a successful treasure hunter goes unchallenged – did he find a lot of treasure or just convince a lot of people to pay him to try and find treasure – I’d always heard the latter).
But given the literary tastes needed to find the book of mormon compelling fiction, it’s no surprise Mitt finds Battlefield Earth appealing as well.
Ah, yes, the great Glenn Larceny.
I’ve actually read Battlefield Earth (yeah, I know) and I don’t think it’s as Scientological as people are making it out to be. It’s still crappy SF, but that’s beside the point.
I have to give props to L. Ron Hubbard, though. Very few science fiction writers can come up with ideas that, when published, people think are real. That kind of puts him in the same class as H. G. Wells.
I’ve actually read Battlefield Earth (yeah, I know) and I don’t think it’s as Scientological as people are making it out to be. It’s still crappy SF, but that’s beside the point.
Seconded. I read Battlefield Earth when I was perhaps 15 years old, having devoured L.Ron’s Mission Earth 10-book-series (he made up a name for a 10-book-series, but it’s dumb). BE was fun… but pretty crappy all the same. Naming it as one’s favourite SF strongly identifies a person as someone who has read very little SF.
“Glenn Larceny”? Excellent! I’ll have to remember that!
Another Glenn Larceny story – I’m a long time anime fan, having been addicted to the stuff since Star Blazers. A good buddy of mine worked for a time for Claude Hill, the man responsible for bring Uchuu Senkan Yamato to these shores as Star Blazers. He told me years ago that when the original Galactic got big Larson was sued by Lucasfilm claiming that he’d ripped off Star Wars. Larson called up the producer of Yamato, Yoshinobu Nishizaki, to testify that in fact Larson had ripped him off instead. He cited the Galactic episode “Gun on Ice Planet Zero” as having ripped off almost the entire plot about the Gamilon “Reflex Gun” on planet Pluto from Star Blazers (gigantic laser cannon buried under ice planet surface, posing mortal threat to heroes space battleship which must get past, heroes send strike team to plant bombs to blow up the gun, etc…)
Never mind that Nish had sorta stolen the idea from “The Guns of Navarone” in the first place…
Now if only Mitt would state that his favorite Supreme Court justice is Whizzer White…
I read Battlefield Earth in junior high because it was astonishingly bad enough to be entertaining. I suppose it’s the best book his handlers could choose for trying to craft an image that appeals to the anti-intellectual crowd.
I’m a member of this club, too. I read Battlefield Earth and when I was maybe 12, and because it was such a hoot, I followed with Mission: Earth, which I thought was pretty funny. I didn’t finish the series, though. After five or six books, it got old. Or maybe I just got a little older. I dunno. (The same thing happened with the Xanth series…)
My Media Studies teacher saw me carrying a “Mission: Earth” volume and tried to organize an intervention for me.
I was always afraid of l ron as my usual style is to go to the library and pick whatever in the fiction side. I did pick up one of those lahane crap and almost got through the first chapter.
The Eye of Argon at least has humor value. Especially if you get the MT3K version. Granted, I did laugh most of the way through the Battlefield Earth movie the first time, but a subsequent viewing only made me want to wretch… even though I was watching it after it had been throttled by Rifftrax. I can still giggle at The Eye of Argon. :)
I can’t believe he gave that answer. Don’t his handlers know that “favorite book” is a staple during campaign season? Just say “Huckleberry Finn” and move on. He then said his favorite is the Bible. What about the Book of Mormon?
The “my favorite book” question is an example of all that is silly during campaign season: there can never be an honest answer–someone who reads will have more than one favorite book, someone who doesn’t read will have no favorite book. Nonetheless I find Romney’s answer inexplicable.
Its as if someone asked him what his favorite flavor of ice cream was and he said ‘peach-licorice’. Certainly there is nothing wrong with such a wierd choice… but why wouldn’t he have said chocolate or vanilla?
Don’t fret. It’s not actually his favorite book of all time. That would still be ‘The Bible’
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/romney-favors-hubbard-novel/
Personally, I liked one of God’s later works better,
‘Quantum Mechanics’, by A. Messiah
http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Physics-Albert-Messiah/dp/0486409244
I wonder if any candidate would have the courage to list Dahlgren by Samuel Delany as their favorite book. THAT could score some points in intellectual circles- high literary quality, great SF, and of course the author was gay. Nah, the plot is too subtle for a political hack.
Yes, I also admit to having read Battlefield Earth. Not Psychlos, but the ‘Selachee’ bankers might be more his ilk, and perhaps he’s on the directors board under Wolfowitz– now there’s a hybrid animal.
Seconded. I read Battlefield Earth when I was perhaps 15 years old, having devoured L.Ron’s Mission Earth 10-book-series (he made up a name for a 10-book-series, but it’s dumb). BE was fun… but pretty crappy all the same. Naming it as one’s favourite SF strongly identifies a person as someone who has read very little SF.
I can shamefully admit that in my younger years I read Mission Earth. The whole run. All ten crappy volumes. And I can say with all honesty that after that, I knew how fucked up Hubbard was. In a way, I doubt it’s even science fiction and more of a lightly fictionized victim complex with Hubbard as the Mary Sue lead character (well, for most of the series) as he was sitting in a garage during the last years of his life. And the sad thing is that it was so pathetically written and scripted that it’s not even good as a trashy read. It’s more the fading paranoia and growing delusion of an old schizo drug addict that didn’t have enough guts to end his own life.
And Battlefield Earth was just boring and stupid. Even AE Van Vogt couldn’t get through it, and I don’t blame him. All of Hubbard’s output was garbage designed for pennies per word (try to read any of the Ole Doc stories; a five year old could write better) and at the end he still thought he had genius because he hung out in good company with Campbell and Heinlein. All and all? Hubbard was a leech on the underbelly of classic science fiction. There is nothing special about his works. In fact, his delusional adventures in the Navy in ‘Bare-Faced Messiah’ made better reading than anything he intentionally sold or wrote.
My point? I want Mitt Romney to make a mistake and start saying Mission Earth is his favorite book. Especially the fourth volume, with the underaged prostitute, the S&M lesbian hitmen, and the Turkish belly dancer that eventually is revealed to be a man.
THAT will go over well with Republicans. And will be the funniest thing ever.
with the absurd Mary Sue plot
erm, what is a Mary Sue plot?
Hubbard’s credibility went right out the window when he killed of Harold Shea. ;-)
I loved Battlefield Earth, it was fun to read. Read the Mission Earth series as well, but I don’t think L Ron wrote anything but the first book, the tone of the book changes after the first one.
I do read a lot of Science Fiction and L Ron is a pioneer in the genre. But take the stories for what they are, just fun reads.
Isn’t this a good time to expose Mormonism for what it truly is? A massive con. Like J Smith, L Ron realized the way to true power and wealth was to create your own religion.
But that’s the key to the delusion: they would be utterly devastated if the rationale for the religion were removed. Since acknowledging that the revelations aren’t true would devastate them, and their conception of absolute truths is weak at best, they simply declare that the revelations are true. It doesn’t scan, but their emotions don’t care – it gets them where they need to go.
Which reminds me: need strategies to help spread atheism? Work to make people’s lives as pain- and horror-less as possible. When people don’t have so much to lose, psychologically speaking, when they give up gods, they tend to give them up quite easily.
suse (28): Mary Sue.
“Mission: Earth” is a hoot if you read it with the right attitude. It’s got one good gimmick…it’s a James Bond-type adventure story, as told from the point of view of the Evil Mastermind’s Bumbling Henchman.
Other than that, it’s just Hubbard taking clumsy potshots at Scientology’s designated enemies…psychiatrists and atheists get the worst of it, but he also takes on newspapers, ad agencies, and the Rockefellers. All of the minor characters are constructed from various racist/sexist/homophobic stereotypes…they wouldn’t have been unusual in the 1950’s, but they were kind of jarring in the 1990’s when the series actually came out.
I don’t get Romney’s “Battlefield Earth” answer at all. That one’s got a couple of clumsy potshots at psychiatrists and international bankers, but other than that it’s a pretty generic 1950’s-style pulp adventure story. It’s way too long, but it’s not completely awful if you compare it to other books from the genre. But I can’t see it being anybody’s favorite novel, unless it’s the only novel they’ve ever read.
Battlefield Earth is at least eighteen times as bad as The Eye of Argon. Why? Because it’s at least that much LONGER.
I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say the Mormons are, more or less, what the Scientologists will be in a century. Their origins are about a century apart, and Mormonism was considered about as wacky-fringe when it was thirty years old as Scientology is today… so it may not be surprising that Mitt identifies with L.Ron.
Gawd, I thought I was the only one outside a nuthatch to actually read Battlefield Earth. I have to admit that the book didn’t really start to stink until the first sentence of Hubbard’s introduction. After that, it went downhill rapidly.
I saw the movie too. It was pretty interesting to have an entire movie theater to myself.
But what really shook me up was when I got to the halfway point of the book, and found that the Battlefield Earth Movie ended there. The movie was only the first half of the book! They actually intended to make a sequel!
For a good book on L. Ron Hubbard, read “A Piece of Blue Sky – Scientology, Dianetics & L. Ron Hubbard Exposed” by Jon Atack at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/atack/contents.htm
I wonder if any candidate would have the courage to list Dahlgren by Samuel Delany as their favorite book. THAT could score some points in intellectual circles- high literary quality, great SF, and of course the author was gay. Nah, the plot is too subtle for a political hack.
Subtle politics, too–citing that book wouldn’t be enough to get me to vote for Romney (now, maybe if he rolled out the more-or-less antecedent more-or-less memoir Heavenly Breakfast, I might reconsider…), but it would definitely get me thinking there was something there worth looking at.
But as long as he’s interested in reading science fiction novels with loopy religious connections, why not go straight to our American Kafka (as I’ve heard him called), Phil Dick, and sell us on the merits of VALIS?
–pr
For a fascinating look at Mormonism in its formative stages, I highly recommend Mark Twain’s Roughing It. At one point, Twain describes visiting Salt Lake City not long after its founding, when Brigham Young was still running the joint. While superficially respectful, one gets the distinct impression that Twain really did think it was either a loopy cult or some sort of scam, like many people think Scientology is today (he also describes The Book of Mormon as “chloroform in print”, a phrase that still cracks me up to this day).
Anybody wanna take a bet that his favourite movie is Red Dawn?
To further extend the Mormon-Scientology connection, I’ve heard an uncofirmed rumor that the Book of Mormon was originally intended as the early 19th Century equivalent of a science fiction book, but somehow got transmuted into a religious manual. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s quite interesting in light of the scammer histories of both Joseph Smith (among many other things, he had a convenient revelation about ‘garments,’ i.e. the magic underwear, when he was running a textile mill) and L. Ron Hubbard (reputed to have stated that the quickest and best way to get rich was to start your own religion).
Some might have expected him to plug the home-religion boy, Orson Scott Card.
If I had to answer that question, I suppose I’d say Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. But maybe that’s just disguised as sci-fi. No squids, for example. Vonnegut does a fair amount of preaching in it — is that what it takes to make sci-fi?
I wasn’t planning to vote for Romney in any case. Nor was I planning to read any L. Ron Hubbard. Where is hubbard on the issue of universal health care? What’s his view on protecting wilderness and funding national parks? What about funding for the NSF? There are so many good questions that should be asked, that aren’t.
Mainline? Bush claims to be Episcopalian or Methodist, depending on which way he thinks the audience leans — but both of those faiths officially favor teaching evolution, and neither has any doctrine favoring creationism (same as the Mormons, BTW).
Is there any real evidence that Bush is a mainline Christian?
Wait, people have watched to the end of that book? I found that harder than reading to the end of that John Travolta film. You know, the one where he has dreads and sneers a lot.
What happens at the end? Do we find out that Ender is revealed as the true seventh son of the seventh son?