n early 1980, in celebration of his fiftieth anniversary as a professional writer, Ron returned to the world of popular fiction with his award-winning international bestseller, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000. Heralded as a masterpiece by critics and readers alike, the 430,000 word epic (the largest in the genre) tells of a mankind on the verge of extinction following the invasion of a monstrous alien race known as the Psychlos. In an ultimately triumphant response, a classically heroic Jonnie Goodboy Tyler leads a determined band of survivors across a vast and thrilling canvas. The recipient of numerous literary awards, the novel further serves as a model work in several colleges and universities.

Yet Battlefield Earth also served as the inspiration for something else -- the first-ever musical soundtrack to a book. Reflecting the mood of a futuristic earth grown primitive following an alien assault, Battlefield Earth, the album, offers thirteen LRH compositions based upon significant events and characters from the novel. To best convey the sweep of the saga, the album utilized elements from several genres -- from honky-tonk and free-swinging jazz to cutting-edge electronic rock. The result is a wholly new dimension in space opera sound, and what critics declared was a most “auspicious recording debut.”

To achieve what has, in all truth, only recently been approximated, Ron employed a then wholly unexplored device, the Computer Musical Instrument (CMI). Manufactured by Fairlight (which itself had not yet recognized the instrument’s full potential), the CMI represented not a new form of synthesizer to replicate sounds, but a means of actually turning natural sounds into thirteen note octaves, so that the natural sounds are the notes of the music. The howling wolves are singing the blues, the blast of guns are playing the rhythms and the alien voices are the horn solos. In other words, all manner of previously nonmusical sounds are suddenly “singing” the song and pounding out the rhythm.

The point is significant, even if Ron had been only one of a very few to have recognized it at the time. For whereas the natural sound had long been employed as a musical gimmick -- most memorably in the yapping dogs and honking geese used to punctuate the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band -- it had never been integrated as music. In concise explanation, Ron wrote: “Computer music can incorporate natural sound into musical scales. A bear can growl two 13-note octaves. In a synthesizer it is not a bear growl -- it is a synthesizer growl. There is a difference. Natural sound can then be combined with real (not synthesizer) instruments. Add to that the zing of real space opera music and you have a new era of music.”

    A Note for the Fairlight