Heres the excerpt from my paper, it focuses on the the Scientology controversy surrounding the books release.

Upon Battlefield Earth’s release it immediately joined the best seller list and has sold over 800,000 copies in its first three years at press. Part of the controversy of this fact is that it seems that members of a particular religion, The Church of Scientology who L. Ron Hubbard helped found, seemed to be buying up copies to artificially keep the book on the list. It seems publishers were promised that the Church itself would buy a specific number of the books, and also bookstores told of Scientology members buying armfuls of books. In some extreme cases stores would receive shipments of books with their price tag already attached, meaning that the books were being sold and resold.

Despite L. Ron Hubbard’s claims that Battlefield Earth was not a Scientology propaganda piece, the book does present some Scientology themes. The Psychlo race is run by a group called the Catrists, which seems to be a shortened version of Psychiatrists. These Catrists are called “mental health experts” and are trying to fix what they see as wrong in the Psychlo society. This strongly parallels Hubbard’s view in real life that psychiatrists persecute anyone who disagrees with them, and uses such tactics to ensure their funding. The word Psychlo itself is revealed to have meant “mental patient” and that the Catrists came to power during a bloody revolution and placed modules in every Psychlo’s brain to govern their behavior. There is also a short reference to a resistance movement comprised of some sort of “church”. Scientology has a running theme of war between humans and other aliens, paralleling the war between Scientologists and Psychiatrists.