The Liberators

Hood and his army of freedom fighters are ready to start their counter attack against the K'Thraa invaders of Earth. By sabotaging a huge mirror which the aliens have placed in space to raise the temperature on the planet, hood is able to plunge Earth into a mini ice age overnight. Seriously weakened by the freezing conditions the K'Thraa are unable to keep Hoods Army back. But the aliens emperor, Ro'Sharok, is not finished yet. Unless the human forces surrender, he will blow up the entire planet.

The Liberators is the third and concluding volume of Nathan Elliott's Hood's Army trilogy, published in 1986 by HarperCollins under the Armada imprint, and runs to 144 pages. As with the other two volumes (Earth Invaded and the absent middle book Slaveworld), Nathan Elliott is a pseudonym for the British SF writer Christopher Evans, who otherwise has a perfectly respectable adult SF career under his own name and would, seven years after writing this little trilogy, win the BSFA Award for his alternate-history novel Aztec Century. The Hood's Army books are clearly a side project, executed quickly and professionally; the kind of work that a working writer takes on for the YA market while building a more serious career elsewhere.

I have written elsewhere on this site about getting Earth Invaded as a Christmas present at the age of twelve, with The Liberators as its companion. I should add here only that the two books arrived together and that I read them in order, which means I went straight from the early skirmishes of book one to the planetary endgame of book three without ever having had the middle volume to bridge them. That is a faintly disorientating experience even when the trilogy is plotted as briskly as this one, and it does the prose no favours; you arrive at book three and certain characters have grown up a bit, certain alliances have shifted, certain pieces of the K'Thraa world have been filled in that you have missed. Twelve-year-old me, I think, mostly just rolled with it and assumed the gaps were part of the deal. Adult me, in retrospect, can see I would have had a richer experience if the middle book had been in the pile.

What the book itself does is round things off in the way you would expect a 1986 middle-grade SF closer to round things off; quickly, decisively, and with the cosmic stakes turned up by exactly the right amount for a 144-page paperback. The plot turns on a satisfyingly elegant piece of science-fictional engineering, namely the orbital mirror the K'Thraa have been using to warm the planet to a temperature more comfortable for them than for us, and the way Hood and his resistance turn that against them by sabotaging it and plunging Earth into a temperature swing the K'Thraa cannot survive. It is the kind of fix-the-environment-to-defeat-the-invaders trick that runs all the way through invasion fiction from H. G. Wells's microbes onwards, executed here with the briskness the format demands. The introduction of the K'Thraa emperor, Ro'Sharok, in the final stretch, with his ultimatum to destroy the planet rather than concede defeat, lifts the stakes for the climax in a way I remember finding genuinely tense at twelve. As a closing volume it does what closing volumes are supposed to do; it resolves the situation, ties off the trilogy, and sends the reader on their way.

It is not, by any adult measure, a great book. The characters do not deepen, the ideas do not develop, and the alien cultures remain the same broad strokes that the first volume sketched in. But on its own terms, and especially as the third and last act of a trilogy aimed at readers who needed the resolution to be clean, it works. I read it more or less back to back with Earth Invaded over what I am now fairly sure was a Christmas school holiday, and the pair of them sit in my head as a single, slightly truncated, very satisfying small adventure. The Liberators is the volume that pays off what its predecessors were setting up, and on those terms it is well worth having on the shelf alongside the others.