Sabotage in the Sky: A Heated Rivalry, a Heated Romance, and High-flying Danger
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Bill Trevillian is as ruggedly handsome as he is bold and brave. Kip Lee is as strikingly beautiful as she is fiery and fearless. And they’ve got something in common. They’re both test pilots . . . for rival aviation companies. Put them together and, like a young Tracy and Hepburn, sparks are bound to fly.
The Second World War is raging in Europe, and England and France are looking to America for a fighter plane to match up with the superior Nazi Messerschmitt. The competition between Bill and Kip is fierce, and the stakes are stratospheric. Because there’s an added element in the mix: a deadly saboteur.
People say all’s fair in love and war, but when there’s Sabotage in the Sky, the flight path from heated rivalry to heated romance could lead Bill and Kip to crash and burn.
“If you crave air adventure written by an airman who knows what a hot plane can do, don’t miss Sabotage in the Sky,” wrote the editor introducing the story in 1940. And Hubbard’s knowledge proved prophetic—unknown to the FBI, the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, was actively gathering intelligence about American military aircraft designs and manufacturing. The author also had personal aviation experience, earning a reputation as a daredevil pilot barnstorming across the United States, landing in farmer’s fields and skimming over the top of telephone wires—experiences he put to good use as a well-known aviation correspondent and one of the most accomplished writers of aviation adventure.
L. Ron Hubbard
With 19 New York Times bestsellers and more than 350 million copies of his works in circulation, L. Ron Hubbard is among the most enduring and widely read authors of our time. As a leading light of American Pulp Fiction through the 1930s and '40s, he is further among the most influential authors of the modern age. Indeed, from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, there is scarcely a master of imaginative tales who has not paid tribute to L. Ron Hubbard. Then too, of course, there is all L. Ron Hubbard represents as the Founder of Dianetics and Scientology and thus the only major religion born in the 20th century.
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Reviews for Sabotage in the Sky
5 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This 1940 adventure story dates from that bygone era where America was poised on the brink of war. The devastating events of Pearl Harbor were still a year away and many Americans were in favor of staying out of the European conflict. Of course, that would all change, and Hitler’s mad plan would be dashed by Allied Forces. Hubbard’s story taps into these events with a patriotic tale about Bill Trevillian who finds himself caught up in an international scheme involving the latest design in pursuit planes meant to out-maneuver the German Messerschmitt. Hubbard’s use of the fictional Messerschmitt 118D appears to be a variation on the Messerschmitt BF 109E-3, which was already in action over France. The BF 109E-3 had an advantage of the eight gun British fighters in that it could fire a greater weight of metal and thereby cause more destruction. Hubbard’s use of an advanced version is a thrilling plot device that adds credibility to Sabotage in the Sky. In fact, various versions of the Messerschmitt BF 109 would become the mainstay of the Luftwaffe. Hubbard also refers to the L97 as the secret American design to counter the threat of the Messerschmitt 118D. The L97 would be a fictionalized version of the British Spitfire or the American Bell P-39. Of course, readers following international news at the time were well aware of the war raging in Europe and it’s interesting to note that Hubbard’s villain here is Erich von Straub, an unsympathetic Nazi. Sabotage in the Sky appeared a year before America entered the war but already the Nazi regime was being reviled by adventure writers. Sabotage in the Sky is an excellent example of a patriotic air adventure story. Hubbard’s knowledge of current events and airplane technology (circa 1940) add another level of enjoyment to this fast-paced tale. I found myself swept along by the adventure where “The whistle of wind in the wings made the night seem mysterious and lonely.” And Bill Trevillian is cut from the cloth of the American experience. I love Hubbard’s description of him: “He was good-looking in a sleepy sort of way, very tall, very languid, always looking for something upon which to lean his obviously weary soul. Down in his eyes there lay a watchful spark of humor, and upon his lips there always lingered the ghost of his last smile and the beginning of the next.” That reminds me of the All-American Gary Cooper in a lot of ways. The fast pace, snappy dialogue, endearing characters, and the air action scenes all carry the reader along on a breathtaking adventure of thrills and spills. Highly recommended.
Book preview
Sabotage in the Sky - L. Ron Hubbard
SELECTED FICTION WORKS
BY L. RON HUBBARD
FANTASY
The Case of the Friendly Corpse
Death’s Deputy
Fear
The Ghoul
The Indigestible Triton
Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep
Typewriter in the Sky
The Ultimate Adventure
SCIENCE FICTION
Battlefield Earth
The Conquest of Space
The End Is Not Yet
Final Blackout
The Kilkenny Cats
The Kingslayer
The Mission Earth Dekalogy*
Ole Doc Methuselah
To the Stars
ADVENTURE
The Hell Job series
WESTERN
Buckskin Brigades
Empty Saddles
Guns of Mark Jardine
Hot Lead Payoff
A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s
novellas and short stories is provided at the back.
*Dekalogy—a group of ten volumes
TitlePgArt.jpgPublished by Galaxy Press, LLC
7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200
Hollywood, CA 90028
© 2008 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.
Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.
Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.
Cover art and Story Preview illustration: Argosy Magazine is © 1936 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc. Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-59212-607-1 ePub version
ISBN 978-1-59212-782-5 Kindle version
ISBN 978-1-59212-297-4 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-279-0 audiobook version
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927532
Contents
FOREWORD
SABOTAGE IN THE SKY
STORY PREVIEW:
THE SKY-CRASHER
GLOSSARY
L. RON HUBBARD
IN THE GOLDEN AGE
OF PULP FICTION
THE STORIES FROM THE
GOLDEN AGE
FOREWORD
Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age
AND it was a golden age.
The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.
Pulp
magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class slick
magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the rest of us,
adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.
The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.
In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.
Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.
Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.
In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.
Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called Hell Job,
in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.
Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.
This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.
Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.
L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a