First edition, May 1982, of Battlefield Earth, the perennial bestseller.

After a thirty-year absence from fiction to devote himself to the development of Dianetics and Scientology, Mr. Hubbard returned in the 1980s with two monumental bestsellers, Battlefield Earth, science fiction’s largest single-volume epic, and the ten-volume, 1.2-million-word, Mission Earth. Heralded as a “huge, rollicking saga,” with what A. E. van Vogt called, “the great Pulp music in every line,” Battlefield Earth soon earned both the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films’ Golden Scroll Award and the Academy’s Saturn Award. The work was also the recipient of Italy’s Tetradramma D’Oro Award (for the story’s inherent message of peace) and a special Gutenberg Award as an exceptional contribution to the genre. (Read the introduction from the book Battlefield Earth, entitled An Introduction to Science Fiction.)

First edition of the Mission Earth series, each volume of which was a New York Times bestseller.

No less acclaimed was the Mission Earth series with the Cosmos 2000 Award from French readers and the Nova Science Fiction Award from Italy’s Perseo Libri (a particular honor inasmuch as Mr. Hubbard was the first non-Italian writer to receive the award). The series was also notable for the fact that every one of its ten volumes immediately rose to international bestseller lists. In fact, along with his nonfiction works, Mr. Hubbard had twenty-one consecutive international bestsellers in the 1980s and 1990s, a feat unmatched in publishing history. Both Mission Earth and Battlefield Earth have further become the model work in several colleges and universities.