Synopsis
Naval Lieutenant Tom Smith discovers that he has a double, the notorious South American revolutionary and spy, Pedrito Miraflores
Reviews
An original story by Hubbard (Battlefield Earth), who's deceased, has been expanded into a novel by Anderson (several X-Files novels), with mixed results. The original story, according to Sherman's foreword, is based on Hubbard's involvement in U.S. intelligence operations, particularly in Latin America. Pedrito Miraflores, a swashbuckling Che Guevara type, is the exact physical double for painfully straight (and excruciatingly bored) U.S. Navy lieutenant Tom Smith. A Russian-Cuban plot leads to their switching places, whereupon they proceed to make love to each other's girlfriends, alternately sabotage and uphold each other's causes, and join forces against the CIA and the FBI. Parts of this book are just as zanily satiric as Hubbard's celebrated lampoon of pulp writing, Typewriter in the Sky, and, as you'd expect from both Hubbard and Anderson, the pacing is brisk and the action plentiful. The central conceit wobbles under the load of a full novel, however, and too often the satire slides into silliness or relies on gender and ethnic stereotypes. Even so, fans of nonstop, slightly goofy SF should enjoy this one. Simultaneous audio; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Before his self-glorification as the founder of Scientology, Hubbard was an inhumanly prolific pulp-fiction hack. This time, his original story is turned into a novel by Anderson (three X-Files novels, not reviewed here, and Ignition,1997, with Doug Beason). Hubbard insists that the tale is based on real incidents that sprang alive in his memory during the time he wrote Battlefield Earth (1982)--yet this somewhat comedic mistaken-identity novel also describes the shallow loyalities and convoluted worlds of American and Russian intelligence after the fall of the Soviet empire. When Russian and Cuban intelligence in Cuba notes that Lt. Tom Smith, of the USN Missile Security Section of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and Pedrito Miraflores, the notoriously mad but faithful Communist revolutionary leader, are exact doubles for each other, a plan is put into motion for switching their identities, with Tom Smith taking the fall for Pedrito's misdeeds south of the border and Pedrito assuming Smith's place in naval intelligence. Is this the greatest intelligence coup of the century? Well, not whenas the subtitle warns--intelligence goes wrong. The obligatory face-out scene comes when Smith and Miraflores are locked up together in a Cuban cell and one of them--the ``real'' Pedrito Miraflores--must be sent to Havana to be shot as a traitor. Dreadful preadolescent plotting in comic-strip prose. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
