A Wrinkle in Time

"I borrowed it from the public library and ended up inhaling the whole series. A Wrinkle in Time is the first book of the Time Quintet, and it’s followed by A Wind in the Door , A Swiftly Tilting Planet , Many Waters , and An Acceptable Time . In a sense, it’s science fiction. But it’s laced through with a deep thread of theology. The protagonist, Meg Murray, encounters angels and she encounters an absolute evil. In this book, a deity—in the sense of absolute good—does not show themselves, but their subordinates, the messengers, the ones who help to do the will of the supreme being, are all very present. The spiritual elements appear side by side with the physics aspects in a way that you don’t often see being done either in children’s literature or in speculative fiction. In A Wrinkle in Time , when Charles Wallace and Meg encounter ‘IT’ , the idea is that enforced conformity is the evil they have to push back against. I honestly don’t know if this is a bias of artists, but a common theme in many of these books is that, as the result of an epiphany, the person has to push back in some way against society as they think they know it. The structured place, the rule-abiding place, the place that I described to you in Flatland, is actually the bad place. It’s the place that is ruled over by people who are trying to keep you in a box, to keep you within certain structures and rules, and it is not a place for free thought. “In a sense, it’s science fiction. But it’s laced through with a deep thread of theology” Here is a book that presents to the young reader the idea that conformity is bad, that you shouldn’t say everything everybody else does. You shouldn’t bounce your ball in time with everyone else; you should be able to bounce your ball to a different rhythm. In a book that’s supposed to be middle-grade level, that’s quite a subversive message, and I find it lovely that it’s presented. A lot of people have not understood A Wrinkle in Time very well. Some people are offended because of how it treats Christianity, and some are offended because Christianity is mentioned at all. I say, strip away those things for a second: yes there are cherubim and guardian angels and the fight between good and evil, but look at that message about conformity, question your society, push back against what society expects of you. That’s the bit that I think everybody should be looking at and thinking, ‘wow, that’s right.’ Start them off early because they’ll need to know this, especially if they’re creative. You raise an important point, because fictional gods do run the gamut. Your question leads into the next two book choices. On one hand, it could be that an entity has more power than you do, so you must bow down to it no matter what. On the other hand, it may be that an entity has a different consciousness than you have. For example, as much as you may love your dog, you accept that your dog has different mental processes to you, and that they may have a different perception of getting shots at the vet, or being on the leash, or whatever. Some of that is simply difference, but some of it is having a higher consciousness of your brain. In the case of an omniscient entity with a literal ‘galaxy brain,’ what you think of as morality doesn’t apply because you don’t have all the information. In literature, you have various fictional depictions of gods, ranging from the brutal and cruel to the benevolent and loving, and you see the same spread within the religions of the world. Some of this has to do with us not understanding fully what their motives are, and some of it is us projecting our own selves onto them: ‘If humanity behaves like this, then our gods must behave like this.’ We don’t have a clear definition of what divine essence is. I do. The protagonist is a celebrity, when we encounter him. Celebrity worship is coming up quite a bit in the discourse lately, although it’s not a new thing in human civilization. The protagonist’s mentor tells him that his job is not to be a god but to be glue, the idea being that when you have that attractiveness, when you have that charisma, your job is to create community, to bring people together, to have them face each other, make bonds with each other, and not to have everyone turn and worship you. Because he has this unique capacity, he’s tempted to use it in different ways, but he has examples from his past—his father had a similar quality and misused it terribly. So he’s conscious that having that much power, in a setting where no one’s strong enough to stop him, is a terrible terrible tightrope to have to walk all the time. I won’t spoil how he manages to resolve this dilemma."