You've closed comments on your L. Ron post above, probably for good reasons, but this question has been nagging at me for a long time now, and you seem like the guy who may know the answer.

I'm 35 and I grew up a Sci-fi comic nerd. I thought I was the uber-dork, because I grew up in cowshit-land where nobody read anything. By high-school, I realized that as sci-fi nerd-dom went, my appetite for reading it was dwarfed by the real serious nerds.

So in High School, in the 80's, I was an avid bookstore browser and would study the covers of every sci-fi book that caught my eye. And Battlefield Earth was an eye-catcher. It had these rave reviews from all of these sci-fi authors whose books had also caught my eye. It also had good reviews from people I knew who outdid me in their sci-fi nerdliness and whose taste I could reasonably expect to come near my own. People who also loved Dune etc. These were also people who were creeped out by Hubbard and his whacko church, but dug the book in spite of that. I never got around to reading this book. I was more the fantasy nerd and had Michael Moorcock (sick and worthless but trippy in ways that my teenage mind responded to), and David Eddings (not memorable today) ahead of Hubbard on my queue. Did you every try Battlefield Earth? Did you ever wonder about the number of authors that hyped it and why?

Is there anything to all those raves from every other Sci-fi author on the planet that I saw associated with that book? Where is all that coming from? That movie was one of the most retarded film-going experiences of my life.

I read a few other Hubbard novels in my teens, I remember being mildly amused, but I as in my teens, and nothing specific stick in memory except the parts that were plugs for Scientology.

Can you explain all the enthusiasm of the Nerd community in the 80's for Battlefield Earth? What about it were they so into? And was there anything legitimately worthwhile in that book?