Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator” is a rare sequel that picks up at the same location where the previous book left off.
Charlie Bucket and his family are aboard the “great glass elevator,” en route to the Mr. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, when a piloting hiccup sends it hurtling into space. For those wondering if this is a “space elevator”—a transport you come across in hardcore science-fiction novels, such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312,” it’s not.
It’s unlike a space elevator in that it doesn’t go up and down along a cable, whose one end is attached near the equator; the other, to an object in space. The “great glass elevator” is more like a spaceplane—an amphibian vehicle that can fly like an airplane in the atmosphere as well as sail in space—in that has rockets for its mode of propulsion. But then again, it’s unlike it in that it has no wings.
In fact, it’s an ordinary elevator that can do extraordinary feats. It can even tunnel through Earth’s crust, capable of ferrying passengers to the netherworld, not to forget that it can travel sideways too—powered, of course, by a force rooted more in magic and less in technology.
During the orbital adventure, the party saves an American capsule from invasion by hordes of weird, egg-shaped extraterrestrial lifeforms. Back on land, trouble hits again. Two different pills, one of which can reverse age and another that can accelerate senescence, wreak havoc when the young man’s grandparents take an overdose of them. They swing between getting too young or too old.
One mind-expanding thought that this book threw up is that when a human being ceases to exist in material form, he or she goes from being a “Plus” to a “Minus.”
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