I guess I haven’t been paying enough attention to the various Republicans elbowing each other for the next presidential nomination, because I somehow missed the initial reports that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s favorite novel ever is Battlefield Earth, a massive science-fiction epic written by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1980s. John Dickerson describes the choice as “so wacky…there must be something we can learn about Romney by examining [it],” and concludes that “you simply need a deep level of weird” to like the novel. Not quite, says Boston Globe blogger Joshua Glenn, who read Battlefield Earth when he was 15 and points out that it’s really “no worse than some of the lesser works of… Robert Heinlein.” (Having read it at approximately the same age, when I literally worked my way through the entire science fiction section of my public library, I’d say that’s a fair assessment; say what you will about Hubbard’s kookier aspects, he knew how to keep a story moving.) Anyway, Glenn adds, people who read these kinds of books (translation: “science fiction fans”) aren’t abnormal. “They’re worried about where our society is headed, and whether we have what it takes to defend our way of life,” he argues. “The real weirdos are those who never give a thought to such things.”
Honestly, I might’ve expected Romney to go with another novel from roughly the same era, Orson Scott Card‘s Ender’s Game…then again, I suppose the story of a boy trained to become the perfect warrior who, as Wikipedia summarizes, “has come to hate himself, because in order to win his battles, he has to know his enemy well enough to love them—and, thus, is constantly destroying those he loves” might not exactly fit the current GOP platform.