On Typewriter in the Sky

Besides the coming of television and the change of readers’ tastes, it was the paper shortages of World War II and a rationing system biased against them that virtually extinguished the golden age of the pulp magazines as a cultural phenomenon. Though some of the magazines reinvented themselves and survived through the 50’s and beyond. The pulps (named for the pulpwood paper they were printed on) are remembered mostly for the authors and stories that they made famous—Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, de Camp and L. Ron Hubbard among them

While Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown were star systems of their own specializing in science fiction and fantasy respectively; the pulps encompassed a broad galaxy of genres and subgenres. Weird Tales of blessed memory printed the Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith stories that have become genre classics. Argosy All-Story, where most of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s early tales saw the light of day, not only printed in serial form his stories of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars and Carson of Venus but also straightforward adventure stories with little or no fantastic element by him and many other authors.

Most pulp authors turned their talents to different fields with playful abandon; Robert E. Howard, for example, did boxing stories and historical and contemporary adventure as well as his better-remembered ancient realms of barbarian heroes and evil sorcerers. L. Ron Hubbard wrote aviation stories, tales of the French foreign legion, adventures in the South Seas and China as well as Westerns. And he did that all before his science fiction and fantasy tales.

And there was the oldest staple of all: actual pirates, with a concentration on the Spanish Main, but branching out all over the world and including East Asian settings. Pirate tales had been popular as far back as the golden age of piracy itself in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; tales of Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham and Anne Bonney were being eagerly read while those un-worthies were pillaging and burning through the Caribbean and the southern oceans. It’s a fascination that persists today, as Pirates of the Caribbean and the wonderfully over-the-top TV series Black Sails have shown. L. Ron Hubbard made his own contribution to the pirate mythos … but with an intriguing, ironic and subtle twist.

Hubbard frequently published in the prestigious Unknown magazine; many of his stories can be read with pleasure (and, for a writer, profit) today. I’ve enjoyed much of his work. Slaves of Sleep, from Unknown in 1939, is a gorgeous romp with an interesting story of noire-style family betrayal and intrigue that delighted me in my teens and which I’ve reread many times since. But my favorite of his pulp-era works is Typewriter in the Sky, which also appeared in Unknown in 1940 and is in my opinion Hubbard’s tour de force as an adventure writer … and something more as well.

Typewriter in the Sky has a magnificently complicated plot that doesn’t get in the way. It’s a straightforward action story with a multilayered meta approach to fiction and to reality that is vastly amusing if you take the time to look at the underlying structures. It’s very impressively done by someone who was really in command of his tools and material. And at the same time you can tell that the author loved what he was writing.

Typewriter was probably Hubbard’s most influential literary work; influences from it have been traced in writers such as Philip K. Dick, and in films by directors like Woody Allen.

Rather than focus on the story (which is delightful), I’d like to highlight some truly noteworthy aspects that can make another writer laugh, wince, or give a nod of rueful admiration to Hubbard’s command of the tools of the trade.

Irony is a literary mode that can easily become mannered and irritating, but Typewriter is a story written in the ironic mode that is also an effective “straight” adventure story. And it is highly “meta”—a writer’s reflection on writing and the relationship between real life and fiction, and between an author and his characters that is both knowing and reflective yet done with a genuine love of the whole process and of the genre that it wildly satirizes.

In Typewriter, Hubbard uses a deft story-within-a-story structure; the bulk of it is a Yo-Ho-Ho-and-a-Bottle-of-Rum pirate tale replete with duels, clashing cutlasses, broadsides, swinging between ships on ropes and a beautiful maiden in peril. It’s set in the Caribbean in the year 1640, when the original buccaneers flourished and their bases of Port Royal and Tortuga were infamous dens of scum and villainy. Or possibly an alternate, fictitious 1640, for the protagonist of the book—transported from the “present” of the 1940’s—recognizes buildings that weren’t in place until a century later.

That is the central conceit of the novel, the framing device of a contemporary, present-day narrator dropped into the action, with scenes from the prosaic “present” bookending the seventeenth-century blood and thunder.

There are in fact two protagonists, one on-screen and one off; the writer Horace Hackett (significant name!) a depressed, penniless churner-out of adventure stories for the pulps who’s finally made it into actual novel-writing and the other his friend Mike de Wolf, an aspiring musician.

Hackett is desperately pounding out, or hacking out, a behind-deadline novel whose advance from the publisher he’s already spent, and decides to use Mike de Wolf as the model for the villain to save time and effort. I’ve done the same myself; taking bits and pieces of real people for your work is a venerable tradition, ranging over into revenge at times. And as the saying goes, worldbuilding is good occupational therapy for lunatics who like to think they’re God—devising a whole personality, much less a whole world, de novo and from scratch is a humbling lesson in one’s own limitations. So we plunder our acquaintances, literature and history!

Mike electrocutes himself in the bathroom of Hackett’s grungy apartment in Greenwich Village, NYC—in those pre-gentrification days, a refuge for starving artists of all sorts. That’s also a venerable trope; de Camp’s hero Martin Padway in Lest Darkness Fall was sent back to Gothic Rome via a lightning bolt. Mike de Wolf doesn’t go so far; he wakes up on a Caribbean beach, in seventeenth-century garb with a sword at his waist, and we’re off.

The full beauty of the introductory part of the story is perhaps only fully apparent to someone “in the trade.” But after all these years every aspect rings true, though chosen with comic effect.

Even the picturesquely sordid apartment of the struggling writer isn’t just a cliché, or rather it became a cliché because it’s so often accurate—writing, like acting, is a profession in which a few make a fortune, a few more make a living, and myriads wait tables and drive taxis, or these days Uber. I wrote the first short story I sold commercially and my first novel on a portable manual typewriter in the 1980’s while living in a three-room slum apartment with a hole in the floor of the kitchen which gave me a ringside seat to the quarrels of the two cross-dressing streetwalkers. This is the sort of experience that’s much funnier looking back from a reasonably successful career than it is at the time when the future is unknown—and risky.

Stranding a modern (as the 1940’s thought of it) in the past is also a venerable genre trope—L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, like Hubbard’s Typewriter, published in Unknown. But Hubbard is doing something more multi-layered and subtle here, wonderful though de Camp’s story is. Mike de Wolf recognizes quite quickly that he isn’t in the real past. Not only are there visible anachronisms, he’s not just a time traveler from the twentieth century. He has a role, a place. He’s a preexisting character and everyone surrounding him recognizes him. He even speaks, faultlessly, the Spanish language … for he is Admiral Miguel de Lobo, sworn enemy of the dashing hero, the buccaneer Tom Bristol, the swarthy and sinister foil to Bristol’s stalwart, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon manhood.

Even the villain’s name is an amusing play on his “real” twentieth-century name, de Wolf and at the same time a sly send-up of naming habits in adventure fiction. Just giving someone a moniker like “Thorstein Hardiman” was a signifier of significance, and here Hubbard is both using the convention and gently mocking it. Miguel de Lobo, in a pirate tale written in English and set on the Spanish Main, was equivalent to calling someone “Señor Evil McKillingYouGuy.”

There’s even a black mustache to twist.… Fairly soon, Mike even recognizes what sort of story he’s in, since he knows his friend’s headlong romantic style. And Mike knows that the villains in Hackett’s works usually come to sticky ends, not to mention gory and fatal ones, often involving staggering backward after being stabbed through the torso by the hero and falling off a balcony after a few sneering last remarks.

He thinks, however, that he has an advantage the villains don’t: he isn’t an arrogant idiot and he’s not going to ignore obvious opportunities to turn things.

Here Hubbard introduces the titular Typewriter in the Sky, and his most daring and imaginative twist in the story. Every time Mike … or Miguel … tries to do something sensible, like notify other Spanish commanders and governors and get them to work with him against the heretic terrorist Bristol, he hears a typewriter in the sky.

And every time he hears it, his words and actions are no longer his own. Others mysteriously refuse to see the plain sense of his recommendations, or there’s a brain-fuddling time-skip and his preparations never happened!

Mike, who really is a resourceful type, is thrown to the brink of despair. But he notices that when he does not hear the typewriter, he is in control. It’s a question of agency. Is he the puppet of Fate … i.e., of the godlike Author Function? Or is he in charge of his own life, the author of himself and the maker of the world he inhabits? The answer he comes up with is rather sophisticated: he’s not the master—the Author is, as the Typewriter in the Sky mandates. But he’s not simply the creature of the Author, either … something which actual authors can often attest to in relation to their characters!

His freedom lies in his ability to see and understand the plot of the story he’s trapped in. That gives him the ability to predict the broad outlines of what’s going to happen as it rests at the end of the story. His agency, his ability to control his fate and his environment, reside in his ability to use his wits to navigate in the cracks left in the structure of the plot.

A well-known writer once remarked that human beings make history—but that they don’t make it just as they please. Mike takes advantage of this phenomenon.

Even outside the narrative of the pirate story he’s tormented by the thought.… Is he free, or is he just imprisoned in the role of a character even now? If he was “native” to this plot, he wouldn’t know that he was, after all. The characters don’t … even though Hubbard included many of his own pen names, René Lafayette and Winchester Remington Colt, as subsidiary characters. And what is this as he squints upward? A godlike figure in a tattered bathrobe, and the doom-laded pounding of typewriter keys?

This final cunning twist casts a light backward through the body of Typewriter in the Sky, changing it in the reader’s mind from a lighthearted twist on time travel and the buccaneer yarn to something that is, for a moment, both funny and profound. The world that human beings inhabit is in many ways a collective fiction.… No two realities are the same. Human memory is notoriously unreliable. And then there’s fate and luck which are seemingly out of one’s control. Are we, then, anything more than puppets of an Author?

Perhaps not a literal Hacker/Hackett in the sky, but are we similarly the Author of our own creation?

And besides all that, there are damsels, rogues, sword fights in picturesque locales, surf beating on white-sand shores overhung by palms, and glittering piles of pirate loot! What more could a reader want?

I give you … Typewriter in the Sky!