Libraries can save society, but you have to leave the books in them.

5. In the Circle of Time – Margaret J. Anderson

It’s 1979 in Scotland and it’s time to be worried about the environment. Get on it. Because the future is going to involve barbaric peoples and a bunch of peaceniks hunting for resources and living with chosen families and Robert and Jennifer find that out via standing stone time travel. Weirdly, the peaceful society babies are sort of “everyone’s babies” like in some modern cults, which is totally scary to me.

Jennifer is pretty whiny and quick to give up once she realizes no one knows how to get them home to their own time, even though it was her idea to start digging and trying to find the stones that used to be standing but must have fallen over and that’s what causes the time travel in the first place. With such impatience, I’m not sure she’ll be that great at archaeology like she says she wants to pursue. Robert is more grounded and willing to figure out what this whole weird future is all about; he’s a learner of lessons and the first one to get back through a different kind of magical situation. He also listens to his grandpa, which is particularly sweet in this book because his grandpa’s totally been to the future too, he wasn’t just weirdly hung up on watching the standing stones.

One thing I’ve always liked in books where there’s an ecological disaster and society collapses is that the left behind people seem to realize the value of reference books in libraries and that certainly happens here. The internet is permanently down and so they remember where knowledge is still waiting for them to actually physically look at it. They break in, find some Time Life series and old school non-fiction that never got weeded, and now they have electricity back and can mill grain. That’s right, support your local libraries for the apocalypse because you’ll need them then and you need them now whether you know it or not.

 

I would trust Belvedere to lead people to public libraries in the event of societal collapse and/or time travel; that said, he would probably take them to Mime: A Playbook of Silent Fantasy or Great Granny Crochet, only one of which is useful.

 

Peregrine in Pigsploitation posters, making it obvious why we need libraries.
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