AI! Pedrito! Book

"New York Times" bestselling authors L. Ron Hubbard ("Battlefield Earth") and Kevin J. Anderson ("The X-Files" and "Star Wars" series) have combined forces to deliver an action-packed espionage adventure that takes readers through the world of spies and double agents.It's been said that somewhere in the world each of us has an exact double. While that's very likely to be true, it's quite unlikely that your own, personal dead ringer will ever turn into the excitingly dangerous vividly funny problem it becomes for U.S. Navy Lt. Tom Smith when he discovers in this fast moving, action crammed espionage adventure that his exact look-alike is a notorious South American revolutionary and spy, Pedrito Miraflores.

Based on an original story by L. Ron Hubbard, his first new fiction work since his runaway 'New York Times' bestsellers "Battlefield Earth" and the 'Mission Earth' series a decade ago, and novelized by bestselling X-Files author Kevin J. Anderson, "Ai! Pedrito!: When Intelligence Goes Wrong" follows the irrepressible Pedrito when he heads north from his native Colodor to assume Smith's identity, leaving behind a crowd of both ardent admirers and vengeful foes.

The straightlaced Smith, meanwhile, unwittingly inherits both factions when he arrives in Colodor (don't look it up on a map of South America, though: Colodor's map makers have been on strike for years) for what he's been misled into believing will be a quiet, all-expenses paid vacation only to find himself attacked in a surprise set up, hilariously orchestrated by rival intelligence agencies.

As the intrigue builds and the plot and complications unfold, Hubbard and Anderson take Pedrito, Lt. Smith and the reader on a rollicking, unpredictably explosive journey through the world of spies and double agents, lovers and enemies.

Inspired by a series of real incidents in the life of L. Ron Hubbard, "Ai! Pedrito!" is a fun-to-read, richly entertaining novel of what can sometimes happen when intelligence goes wrong.

Publishers Weekly

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.