Review: The Whirligig of Time by Lloyd Biggle Jr.

by Chriss Cornish published: August 9, 2010 No Comments

This Book Is About

Jan Darzek, former private detective from Earth and now First Councilor of the Galaxy, has encountered his most baffling case. The planet Nifron D has been inexplicably turned into a sun. A quarter of a galaxy away, a native on the planet Skarnaf has been found horribly disfigured by an impossibly massive dose of radiation. While Darzek searches for a connection between the two events, the populous and prosperous world of Vezpro receives a blackmail letter that threatens it with the fate of Nifron D. In a crimeless society, has a master scientist turned master criminal? Darzek must decide quickly whether the letter is a monstrous hoax. If it is not, how can the impossible demands be met — or five billion inhabitants evacuated in time?

My Thoughts On This Book

The Whirligig of Time is a far future cross-genre detective novel. Humans are scarce in this setting so the reader gets a lot of alien beings and cultures. It’s a nice change from the “Americans…in…Spaaacccce” feel you get with a lot of science fiction.

Because Jan Darzek is a diplomat of sorts, in addition to a detective, you get an interesting political angle to the investigation of who’s threatening Vezpro with destruction via planet-to-sun conversion. However, I’d say that the story and setting is heavier on the sci-fi elements than the mystery ones.

In addition to aliens, inter-universe merchants, teleportation and spaceships you have an entire society of math worshiping scientists. They live on Vezpro’s moon and have a weird sort of amnesty agreement with the planet. They’re stereotypically misogynist and obsessed and seem like an expanded version of the Pythagoreans (an Ancient Greek math cult who wore white and had, among other weird rules, a sanction against touching beans). The author does a good job of making them interesting, though.

Which is good since they play a large role in the plot.

My only serious problem with this book is that its title makes no sense. The nasty device turning planets into suns is never called a whirligig and the explanation of it’s functioning has nothing to do with time. So, there essentially is no whirligig of time in the novel. It’s a cool title, though, so I’m not that put out. Just a little bummed.

Oddly enough, I got this science fiction detective novel at, of all places, a horror genre bookstore in Burbank called Dark Delicacies. Not as strange as, say, having it hand-delivered to my door by a singing squirrel with a steam-powered brain, but still a tad unusual.