The Lieutenant Takes the Sky
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About this ebook
American pilot Mike Malloy has learned his lesson: when you join the French Foreign Legion, it’s best not to wipe the floor with two French officers. . . no matter how richly they deserve it. And it appears he has all the time in the world to think about it. He’s been sentenced to five years in a Moroccan penal battalion—which is French for death sentence.
But Malloy, who could easily pass for actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., is about to get a reprieve … if he’s willing to fly into the heart of the Sahara and into the teeth of a Berber rebellion.
It’s an offer Malloy can’t refuse. All he has to do is fly two passengers into the desert and return with a book that disappeared 800 years ago. But as he’s a man who doesn’t go by the book, this expedition could turn out to have unexpected benefits. One of his passengers is a young American woman whose eyes are as beautiful and blue as the wild blue yonder….
Hubbard once said that writers too often “forget a great deal of the languorous quality which made the Arabian Nights so pleasing. Jewels, beautiful women, towering cities filled with mysterious shadows, sultans equally handy with robes of honor and the beheading sword … these things still exist, undimmed, losing no luster to the permeating Occidental flavor which reaches even the far corners of the earth today.” Hubbard brings this unique insight to his stories of North Africa and the Legionnaires, investing them with an authenticity of time, place and character that kept his readers asking for more.
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 The Lieutenant Takes the Sky
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5During the 1930s and 1940s pulp magazines covered the newsstands, which were filled with creative’s stories ranging from romance to adventure; all were written by unknowns and well-publicized authors, such as H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Elmore Leonard, Louis L'Amour, Max Brand, and Ray Bradbury. During those years, author L.Ron Hubbard published countless short stories and all of his stories are being released on paperback and audiobook from Galaxy Press under the Stories from the Golden Age series.Today, I listened to an ARC of The Lieutenant Takes the Sky by L. Ron Hubbard which is a high-flying air adventure centering on the Irish-American pilot Mike Malloy, who happens to find himself thrown into a Moroccan military jail after he accidentally punched a Colonel, a Lieutenant-Colonel, and the General's aide; all of which may have deserved it. His punishment is five long years behind bar, which was actually a little lenient as anybody else would have received the death penalty for such actions.Surprisingly, Mike is released from prison and assigned to a suicidal mission. He, along with another pilot, are to pilot a French politician, Mr. DeLonge, and an American woman, Lois Degann, to the Middle Atlas on an expedition to find the 800-year-old lost Arabian alchemist's book called the L'Aud, which is rumored to contain a recipe to make gold from base metal. It may sound easy at first, but the book is located in the middle of enemy territory. It’s either stay in a Moroccan jail for five years or risk his life for a mysterious book that may or may not exist. Of course Mike chooses the expedition.With two planes at his disposal for the expedition, he may never even make it to Middle Atlas because of the crazy Lt. Renard piloting the other plane, the strange Mr. DeLonge who seems like he is hiding something, and the former model now turned amateur archaeologist, Lois Degann, who's uncle searched for the book 30 years earlier, is a major distraction as Mike is attracted to her. What Mike doesn't know is that the L'Aud is beyond anything he could ever imagine!I have reviewed several Stories from the Golden Age and The Lieutenant Takes the Sky is one of my favorites! It’s filled with likeable characters, great action, and an intriguing plot. Galaxy Audio (Press) has done an amazing job with creating realistic sound effects and for acquiring an amazing voice-cast. The plot is fast-paced; the two-disc audiobook was over before I knew it. It didn't feel like two hours had gone by. I wish Hollywood would pay attention to L. Ron Hubbard's short stories from the golden age (as well as other authors from the era) as the stories would make great feature films, especially The Lieutenant Takes the Sky.
Book preview
The Lieutenant Takes 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
Title Page artPublished by
Galaxy Press, LLC
7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200
Hollywood, CA 90028
© 2013 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.
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. Story Preview Illustration: Argosy Magazine is © 1936 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-59212-582-1 ePub version
ISBN 978-1-59212-769-6 Kindle version
ISBN 978-1-59212-322-3 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-301-8 audiobook version
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903613
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
THE LIEUTENANT TAKES THE SKY
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
STORY PREVIEW:
ARCTIC WINGS
L. RON HUBBARD IN THE
GOLDEN AGE OF
PULP FICTION
THE STORIES FROM THE
GOLDEN AGE
GLOSSARY
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