The Mission Earth series is a big, bloated, fun and funny dekalogy* of pulp and satire and non-stop action. It's not a serious work, nor was it intended to be; I believe Hubbard wrote it simply out of fondness for the field, the way it was when he was beginning his career. He surely didn't need the money. It lampoons everything from economics to law enforcement to crime to space opera to science and all stops in between. It's not a particularly well-written work of literature, but is engaging and interesting and, despite the length, fairly fast-paced throughout. It was de rigueur in the publications of the field when it first appeared to vilify it entirely, I suspect both because of who Hubbard was and the old-fashioned themes and tropes of the work... not to mention the ubiquitous advertising campaign that surrounded the publication with the ever-present asterisk definition that I just couldn't resist reproducing here. However, I decided to see what all the fuss had been about and gave it a shot, thought it was fun, and read the whole thing straight through one summer. It was fun; I liked it. *A series of ten books.
The pulpiest of pulp, I'm almost ashamed to admit I enjoy these books. This is the first one Ive read as an a adult, and if you take it seriously at all it's definitely extremely offensive in gender and sexuality areas. The best decision he made was to tell the story from the villain's perspective, which not only gives it an interesting POV, but also provides some cover to all of the offensive thoughts (not enough though). Read to today it could be taken for a funny unintentional critique of American foreign policy, as the villain spends the entire series excecuting complicated evil plans that inevitable only make matters worse, without ever realizing that he spends all of his time running around dealing with the consequences of his own actions.
