Typewriter in The Sky - Themes

Themes

Writing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, John Clute and John Grant characterized the work as the best of Hubbard's stories in the Arabian-fantasy theme. Authors Lionel Fanthorpe and Patricia Fanthorpe wrote in The World's Most Mysterious People that Hubbard accomplished a difficult task of writing about two different worlds at the same time, "even through the medium of fiction Hubbard succeeds in posing deep metaphysical questions about the mind's interpretation of experiential data, and its response to the questions about the nature of being." In their book Mysteries and Secrets of Time, Fanthorpe and Fanthorpe place the book within the sub-topic of "the idea of being caught inside someone else's dream". Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin wrote in The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence, "Typewriter in the Sky can be understood as an old-fashioned alien exploration story, but with a new basis of transfer from one world to another – the thoughts of an outside intelligence."

In their work Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs, authors John Ankerberg and John Weldon observed, "compare Scientology theory with L. Ron Hubbard's science-fiction works, e.g., Ole Doc Methusala, Slaves of Sleep, Death's Deputy, The Final Blackout, The Dangerous Dimension, The Tramp, Fear, King Slayer, and Typewriter in the Sky." Author Harriet Whitehead made a similar comparison in her study of Scientology, Renunciation and Reformulation: a Study of Conversion in an American Sect.