Willy Wonka takes advantage of their flight and decides to dock with the “Space Hotel”, a five hundred room hotel, not yet open, currently orbiting the earth.

And this is pretty much the least crazy thing to happen in the book.

The book really gets in gear when Grandma Josephine sends the Glass Elevator into space, where it goes into orbit. Charlie and Willy Wonka crash their elevator through the roof of Charlie’s home and pick up his family, including his three grandparents, who still refuse to leave their beds. The book starts immediately after the end of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. One, most people don’t even know it exists. The reasons I chose to bring this book up are twofold. Let’s get back to the subject of this post, “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator”. Anybody who can get a copy of his collection “The Umbrella Man and Other Stories” should do so, as it is excellent.īut enough of that. “Twisted” is perhaps the right word for this one.īut he did publish some other sci-fi stories, my personal favorite being “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”, about a machine that could write books better than most authors, and soon dominated the publishing industry. It was later made into an episode of “Alfred Hitchock Presents”, and is actually considered a minor classic. “Lamb to the Slaughter” is about a woman who bludgeons her husband to death with a frozen leg of mutton, then feeds it to the police. His most famous horror story is not sci-fi related at all, but is in fact a mystery/thriller. This lovely tale was originally published in a Twilight Zone anthology. The man in fact wrote a pretty fair number of horror stories, among them the sci-fi tale “Royal Jelly”, about a man who turns into a giant bee, and his daughter who turns into a gigantic larvae. What? The children’s author? The one who wrote books such as “Matilda” and “The BFG”? Why, yes, that very same author. And no, oompa-loompas and nut-testing squirrels do not make the book fantasy: both have perfectly natural explanations in the book, and are not the least bit magical or supernatural.įirst, let’s talk a little bit about Roald Dahl, a man known as the Edgar Allen Poe of Europe. Gum that changes flavor so that it tastes exactly like a full meal? A special machine that stretches out children to the height of basketball players? A special ray gun that shrinks objects and turns TV screens temporarily transparent? “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is as sci-fi as they come.

Happy Superversive Tuesday, everybody! Today, we’re going to do something completely different: We’re going to talk about the little known sequel to that children’s sci-fi classic, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.

Roald dahl glass elevator