Customer Reviews

Typewriter In The Sky

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is truly a shame that L. Ron Hubbard will likely be remembered only for Dianetics. The truth is this. He was one of the greatest writers of science fiction ever published. Books like Battlefield Earth are a testament to the talent of this man. And then there is Typewriter In The Sky. This is a magnificently funny book! The lead character, Mike de Wolf, finds himself transported into a novel being written by a friend. Here he is known as Miguel de Lobo and he quickly learns that he is not to be cast as the hero. Knowing that the villain must die in the end Mike has to find some way to stay alive in a world that is chock full of anachronisms and stereotypes. He must find a way to outsmart the author who is unknowingly guiding his fate. And he must do it while staying within the parameters of the character he has been cast into. This is a great book and very much worth the cover price.

Rating System:
1 star = abysmal; some books deserve to be forgotten
2 star = poor; a total waste of time
3 star = good; worth the effort
4 star = very good; what writing should be
5 star = fantastic; must own it and share it with others

STORY: From back cover - "Through it couldn't be real, pianist Mike de Wolf suddenly finds himself the embattled main character in an adventure story being written by his friend, Horace Hackett. Transported inexplicably to another place and another time, he is embroiled in a desperate battle, fighting for his life as the notorious Spanish pirate Miguel de Lobo."

MY FEEDBACK:
1) Once I experienced L. Ron Hubbard's stories I've grown to really like his work a lot. He always has a character who is larger than life and extremely likeable. Also, his action is engaging and his plots satisfying.
2) This was a short (abridged) but fun pirate story with action and romance and humor
3) The end left me chuckling in appreciation...nuff said.
4) Jim Meskimen does the voices on the audio tape and is fun to listen too. He did seem to slip a few times on Mike de Wolfe's Irish accent but overall it was a well done acting job.
5) This is one of those stories not to take seriously. It is a very fast paced book full of clichés but delivered so well that it becomes a spoof on the pirate genre.

OVERALL: Very fun story that I couldn't guess the end to. Engaging at every level.

First published in 1940, in Unknown Fantasy Fiction, this book is a timeless classic. The story is about someone that finds himself shifting between this world and a world created by an author. Will the story play out as written or will he be able to change the story world he is stuck in?

One of L. Ron Hubbard's pen names (René Lafayette) even makes an appearance in the story. This is a great fantasy book that reads very quickly and it a lot of fun.

A well-known pulp fantasy. Our hero, hanging out in a New York apartment, suddenly finds himself on the Spanish Main of the 17th century, cast as the bad guy in his pulp-writer buddy's latest thud-and-blunder pirate epic. And knowing what happens to bad guys, he has to figure out how to change the inevitable pulp ending...

A brisk funny read, on a concept that a modern writer would make overwrought and boring. A good story.

But an awful book.

TYPEWRITER IN THE SKY really is a novella; it isn't that long. To turn it into 190 pages, the publisher first reduced the size of the book, and then used every trick they could come up with to run up the page count. Blank pages at the ends of chapter. Double-spacing between paragraphs (I kid you not) which makes the reading experience very difficult. And Hubbard already writes plenty of one sentence paragraphs anyway.

Had they paired it with another Hubbard novella, or a couple of short stories, you be getting your money's worth. As it is, be advised that you're paying for a predictable pulp story in a crummy format. If you have the money and are OK with that, then you know what you're getting into.

L. Ron Hubbard, Typewriter in the Sky (Bridge, 1940)

Why I continue to dabble in the writings of good old Elron is completely beyond me. Perhaps it is because his writing style is the kind that will let you breeze through a two-hundred-page hardback in an afternoon. Or maybe to remind myself why I read so little forties pulp sci-fi. I don't know.

Typewriter in the Sky is, above all, the story of Horace Hackett, a very bad pulp fiction writer during the Depression. Horace has a friend named Mike de Wolf, a down-on-his-luck pianist with an upcoming audition. As we open, Horace is trying to fend off his agent, who wants a book and wants it pronto. Horace comes up with the idea, the plot, and the plot twists (all of which, we get the idea from his agent, are old news), and models his villain on Mike, who happens to be in the apartment at the time. All well and good, until Mike finds himself actually living out the novel as Hackett writes it, able to hear the keys going in some other dimension (the typewriter in the sky of the title).

All of this would be painful, were Hubbard not to inject some details to make it, well, funny. De Wolf, in his seventeenth-century swashbuckling Spaniard incarnation, has a habit of noticing things Hackett doesn't research or puts out of place (for example, de Wolf stays the night in 1642 in a castle not built until the 1700s, and finds a 1900s Steinway in another building), while every once in a while we go back to the present day and listen to Hackett agonizing over his book. The end result is saved from awfulness by a sense of self-deprecation.

Unfortunately, said sense of self-deprecation is not applied to Hubbard's own writing. The book is chock-full of painful one-sentence paragraphs, overloaded with exclamation points, and other such pulp conventions stolen from the pens of G. A. Henty and his contemporaries. They are slightly forgivable thanks to the humor, but that doesn't make the book any less painful a read.

Quick, easy, but not all that good. **

Mike de Wolf somehow falls down the rabbit hole and becomes a character in a
book by a hack author. Unfortunately, the character is a nasty villain, quite unlike
Mike in Real Life. A not-too-interesting premise, but Hubbard comes up with a cute twist.

You see, Mike, playing cruel Miguel de Lobo in the pulp novel, fights against the cruel straitjacket of fate that is the plot of the book being written. Not just fighting for his life, but also struggling to break out of type by trying to be an enlightened mid-20th-century man and treating his fellow characters with fairness and consideration. Not wanting to rape and pillage as the Typewriter in the Sky demands!

Hubbard probably didn't have this in mind, but it certainly has broader implications, such as whether we readers, Characters in Real Life, can break out
of the mold and become better persons than Fate has shaped us to be. Elron Hubbard
certainly tried -- not content to be a lowly pulp writer he founded his own religion.