Tag Archive for: story within a story

Breaking the Fourth Wall Before It Was Cool: L. Ron Hubbard’s Revolutionary Typewriter in the Sky and the Birth of Recursive Fiction

What if you heard your life being typed out by someone else—literally? That’s the terrifyingly funny premise of L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky, a swashbuckling romp with a metaphysical twist. Written in 1940, it helped invent recursive fiction long before The Matrix or Stranger Than Fiction wondered if we’re all just characters in someone else’s plot.

On Typewriter in the Sky

S. M. Stirling explores L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky—a witty, ironic, and genre-bending pulp classic that helped pioneer metafiction in SF.