A Swiftly Tilting Planet

A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Hardcover - USA - 1st edition.

Author Madeleine L'Engle Published 1978-07-?? Type Fiction Genre Fantasy, Historical fiction, Speculative fiction Themes Adventure, Fantasy, Time travel Age Group Teen

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a speculative fiction novel by Madeleine L'Engle first published in July of 1978. It is the third book in the A Wrinkle in Time series, the sequel to A Wind in the Door, and was followed-up by Many Waters. The title is an allusion to the poem "Morning Song of Senlin" by Conrad Aiken.

Ten years have past since the events from A Wind in the Door. The Murry family learns of a nuclear threat that might destroy the planet, and Charles Wallace must travel through time to learn from various ancestors how the crisis might be averted.

Personal

Own?	Yes. Mass market - Dell.
Read?	Yes. Audiobook read by Jennifer Ehle.
Finished	2025-04-22.

Being a fan of the first two books, I started reading this one in my 30s, but got bored with it and gave up. When I found an audiobook of it, I gave it another shot. I got bored again, but was able to push through it.

Review

Overall:

Good

• As usual, the Murry's house is very homey. The way L'Engle describes it makes the reader feel safe and comfortable.
• The opening, with the storm and Mrs. O'Keeff's rune, has the nice eeriness that I've come to expect from the series.
• The preacher depicted as a zealot eager to burn anyone different from him as "witches" seems pretty on-brand.

Bad

• This book diverges significantly in the style from the first two books.
  • The differences begin small: rather than save a member of the family, they're trying to save the human race from nuclear annihilation at the hands of a crazy dictator. This feels a bit off.
  • There is again a strange being to help the Murrys, but, instead of there being a slow building of intrigue leading up to the introduction someone like Mrs. Whatsit or Proginoskes, Gaudior just sort of shows up without any fanfare.
  • Rather than focus on the Murrys, the story travels through time and mostly focuses on the ancestors of Mrs. O'Keefe.
  • In the previous books, anything that was supernatural ended up being the result of complex alien technology that humans hadn't yet figured out (essentially following Clarke's third law). In this book, there is a variety of divination and magic, but the author doesn't even attempt to give it a natural origin, and the characters only ever ascribe such phenomena to gods. This changes the genre from science fiction to fantasy, which is a massive shift from the established universe.
• The echthroi are an unimpressive villain. For most of the book they are left unseen and just make traveling through time a bit dangerous. They only get appear as tricksters once in a brief scene.
• By switching to a new set of characters every couple chapters there wasn't enough time to become invested in any of them, so I didn't really care about any of them.
• Having a bunch of ancestors throughout history using variations on the same couple names for centuries is hard to believe, but not as hard to believe as them all looking very similar despite having generations of new people marrying into the family. That's not how genetics works. And having dozens of characters, all with very similar names, makes it very hard to keep track of who's who. Finally, having L'Engle handhold the connection between the names "Mad Dog," "Madoc," and "Maddox" is insulting to pretty much anyone old enough to read the book.
• The book uses the "noble savage" trope where ancient people were almost entirely devoid of greed and violence until the complexities of modern society made them evil. This is completely ahistorical as most evidence shows ancient people to be especially brutal and that humans have been gradually becoming less evil over time.

Ugly

• War is adverted, not by reforming evil people, but simply by changing their lineage. I think it is meant to be implied that the children will be raised by better parents, but the implication is that there is something so seriously wrong with an ancestor's genetics, everyone who is sired by them turns out evil. This is awfully close to eugenics.
• The combination of a large divergence in story style and a huge cast of dull characters across several centuries made it very hard to enjoy this book. I spent much of it wishing it were over.

Media

Covers

• 

  Hardcover - USA - 1st edition - 1978.

• 

  Mass market - USA - 1979 - Dell.

• 

  Paperback - USA - 1980 - Yearling.

• 

  Paperback - USA - 1991 - Dell.

• 

  Paperback - USA - 2007 - Square Fish.

Representation

Strong female character?	Pass	Though she plays a lesser role, Meg is still strong.
Bechdel test?	Pass	Meg, Mrs. Murry, and Mrs. O'Keefe all talk to each other about various things.
Strong person of color character?	Pass	The members of the Tribe of the Wind are important and beneficial.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no queer characters.

Adaptions

The book has been adapted to audiobook at least twice, by both the author in 2002 and Jennifer Ehle in 2012.

Links