...i could probably take that description and make it work make the brain implants include obedience/loyalty to the conquering species in the traits added then have conscription for the males of the conquered species so they're like conquered, and then the males are used as a soldier caste, with some amount of the Evil being a combination of side effects the conquerors didn't care enough about to remove plus maybe some frustration/anger being subconsciously redirected from their treatment/cultural expectations brain implant forced toxic masculinity plus conscription
kinda like many DoWaS gryphons actually...although those were created not conquered and it was shock collars not brain implants and also all gryphons not just the males but whatever maybe they're like eusocial and like reverse bees, with most of them being male where most bees are female???? maybe there's other forms of sexual dimorphism in play?? who knows
Someone abandoned a hardcover copy of Battlefield Earth (movie art dust jacket and all) in our theater once. It had a brief but memorable stint as The Best Book of All Time in a couple of rehearsals before being summarily dismissed from the position because a) it was outrageously heavy, b) the characters were supposed to be clueless elitists but not that clueless, and c) nobody could keep a straight face.
I'll admit that I only ever started reading it because I was trying to find the novel version of a "humans in space fighting aliens" movie I'd liked and I thought maybe that was the right title. (I finished it because it was awful and I didn't want it to get stuck in my head from wondering how it ended.)
I’m glad someone read it honestly, because I want the gory details but I have enough trouble even getting into good books these days. There is no hope. (And I can enjoy the luxury of not feeling any guilt whatsoever about bashing this one because the author has passed beyond this mortal coil and its book reviews. Also cult leaders are generally not high on my list of people whose potential hurt feelings keep me up at night.)
Try this dissection. There's also a friendslocked one over at das-sporking2.dreamwidth.org. I still just can't get over the alien taking a WHOLE YEAR to teach the guy all this bullshit when the obvious thing to do is just put him where you want him and hand him a shovel. Voila! I just saved you a bunch of time!
(Oh, uh, warning - there's some really nasty racism in it that Battlefield Spork doesn't get into but das-sporking does. I'm talking "entire race of aliens based on offensive stereotypes of the Chinese". And also a less malicious but also offensive and frankly confusing hero-worship of the Scottish, to whom Hubbard had no known connection and as far as can be discovered never set foot in Scotland.)
On further reading, Hubbard has now successfully totally invalidated the entire premise of the novel, TWICE, halfway in.
Terry Goodkind is a great source of lolarity, and one of my favourite things is this comment about him from das-sporking:
L. E. Modesitt Jr. It turns out he's actually written *several* series, which I cannot fathom after reading the first. The first, at least, has sound effects. You know, as in batman comics. Zing, biff, splak, akuff (someone coughing) grrrrm, etc etc. In place of actual exposition. Wait, who won that fight? Play the sound effects back to try and work it out! There's at least one on every page.
Okay, back to Battlefield Earth, and Hubbard just had a character create a circuit board by literally drawing its components onto a metal sheet with some kind of magitech knife. Cargo cult mentality at its finest.
You can draw circuits with special pens, but not circuitboards because the actual circuits on those are like, microscopic
The reviewer thinks Hubbard saw a circuit diagram and thought it was an accurate representation of the real thing, and also had no sense of scale.
I mean, you can actually hand-draw a PCB, it can just be a bit impractical and components will have to be big. Literally just carving a metal plate into the shape of circuit diagram components, though.. That's just stupid.
Yeah, it's really stupid. Especially since circuit boards are not made of straight metal. And the metal they do have is not just one kind.
Yeah, what seems to be going on is he thought the shape was the important part, not the material. Supposedly the magic knife the guy uses can "align molecules" or some shit, but from what we can make out Hubbard seems to have confused conductivity with magnetism, among other issues.
It's been 15 years since I read Goodkind, but that's about what I remember. There'd be all these studious descriptions of murder and rape and torture but everyone would just... be totally matter-of-fact about it. It'd describe things and everyone would coolly tell you how horrible they were while staying calmly, calculatingly composed the entire time.
