Typewriter in the Sky

L. Ron Hubbard

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.