Typewriter in The Sky - Reception

Reception

Writing in the October 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas wrote favorably of Typewriter in the Sky, and characterized it as "an entertaining adventure-farce badly in need of editing". Reviewing the same edition, Groff Conklin termed it "a silly idea inexpertly carried out." New York Times reviewer Villiers Gerson found Typewriter to be "an ironic and jaunty adventure story." George Malko noted in Scientology: The Now Religion that Typewriter in the Sky was "eagerly welcomed by devoted fans". In a biography of Hubbard written by Kent State University professor Donald M. Hassler in The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he noted, "Typewriter in the Sky (1940/1951), which anticipates plot gimmicks now popular among experimental metafictionists, ought to be taken seriously by the critics who will evaluate his strange genius". Everett F. Bleiler, however, found it to be "a routine adventure story carried through competently, with a good central idea."

Peter Haining wrote in The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines, "Typewriter in the Sky, which first appeared in Unknown in 1940, is widely considered to be one of his best works." Michael Ashley wrote in Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, "Typewriter in the Sky (1940) is a rollicking farce of a man written into another's story". Sandy Bauers of The Philadelphia Inquirer called the 1995 audio publication of the work "swashbuckling fun". Janrae Frank of The Washington Post commented, "Much of his best work of the '40s and '50s, Fear, Slaves of Sleep, Typewriter in the Sky, is written in exactly the same style and won reader polls at the time." Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines by Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson, listed Typewriter in the Sky among Hubbard's "best work". In his biography of the author, Bare-Faced Messiah, Russell Miller characterized Typewriter in the Sky as one of Hubbard's works which "would come to be regarded as classics", along with Fear and Final Blackout. Damon Knight gave the book a mixed review, commenting, "The problem is a tough one, and Hubbard does not so much solve it as slide around it.... This weakness is more than compensated for by the ending of the story itself – Three immortal lines".