Scan barcode
david_agranoff's review
5.0
When people think Anarchist Sci-fi they think Ursala K. Leguin's The dispossessed from the 60's, which is a great book.
Let’s go further back and stay with the anarchist Science Fiction. How about a novel released in 1940 by a man who went on to brainwash celebrities. When I was very young the first long novel I ever read was Battlefield Earth while more respectable than the film L.Ron Hubbard was not the best Science Fiction writer on the planet.
However Final Blackout is a bleak doozy of a short novel that I feel had an anarchist message. Obviously shortly after Poland was invaded but before the Americans joined WW II this novel is quite an amazing feat of speculative fiction. Indeed Hubbard predicted a fair amount of stuff right.
The novel is about a U.S. Lieutenant who becomes a cult leader (hmmm) in the aftermath of atomic devastation across Europe. This leader sees that the problem was in our leaders who created these governments who were bound to fight. The Final Blackout is a rip roaring adventure and makes a clear statement against hierarchy. Hubbard didn’t seem to hold on to those beliefs.
Try to find the Final Blackout used or at your Library because you know where that money is going right?
Let’s go further back and stay with the anarchist Science Fiction. How about a novel released in 1940 by a man who went on to brainwash celebrities. When I was very young the first long novel I ever read was Battlefield Earth while more respectable than the film L.Ron Hubbard was not the best Science Fiction writer on the planet.
However Final Blackout is a bleak doozy of a short novel that I feel had an anarchist message. Obviously shortly after Poland was invaded but before the Americans joined WW II this novel is quite an amazing feat of speculative fiction. Indeed Hubbard predicted a fair amount of stuff right.
The novel is about a U.S. Lieutenant who becomes a cult leader (hmmm) in the aftermath of atomic devastation across Europe. This leader sees that the problem was in our leaders who created these governments who were bound to fight. The Final Blackout is a rip roaring adventure and makes a clear statement against hierarchy. Hubbard didn’t seem to hold on to those beliefs.
Try to find the Final Blackout used or at your Library because you know where that money is going right?
hammard's review
1.0
I felt I needed to read at least one early Hubbard and this one seemed to have the best reputation. The first half seems to be a popcorn response to the First World War, not amazingly deep but easy read of the pointless horror of it. The second half, on the other hand, is downright disturbing not in a good way but in how nativist, vile and fascistic (in spite of hairsplitting claims to the contrary) it is. Really for historians only.
More...