Monday, December 15, 2025

"A Swiftly Tilting Planet" by Madeleine L'Engle

Yup, this one is weird. It's got time travel in it. Also, like half the book is unconnected snippets of time travel, which only really become relevant near the end.

The plot revolves around "Mad Dog" Branzillo, the dictator of the fictional South American country Vespugia, who's about to start a nuclear war. So Charles Wallace teams up with a unicorn to go back in time and stop Branzillo from being evil.

Except, because this is the most infuriating time travel system in the history of time travel systems, they can't actually travel back to specific points in time, nor can they actually be physically present any of these places. So they have to go where the unicorn's time travel magic decides they can go, and they have to be present by having Charles Wallace use their pseudo-telepathy to sort of become the people they're meant to see. There's some sort of Point in there about how you shouldn't try too hard to control everything, but any deep meaningfulness is outweighed for me by how irritating it is to read about this time travel system that just time travels you to where it thinks you should go.

The evil demony things from A Wind in the Door show back up to make the time travel even screwier than it's supposed to be.

Meg is now married to Calvin. She's part of the POV of this, too, though she's little more than a framing device; the only real reason I can see for her to be in this is so it can count as a second sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. The actual book is about Charles Wallace.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for violence.

3 stars.

(Endnote: I don't know what's up with the title of this one, either.)

No comments:

Post a Comment