![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Series Intro: to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my FAVORITE BOOK EVER, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, I am filling 2012 with BLOG POSTS EXPLORING EVERY POSSIBLE ASPECT OF THIS BOOK IN GREAT DEPTH. I call it the Year of the Tesseract, and you can see what I've written already by clicking the year of the tesseract tag. There WILL be spoilers for Wrinkle and possibly other books throughout. So just go read it, already. Moving on:
Having started off with all that quantum physics in last week's post, the casual reader of this blog who is for some reason reading these Year of the Tesseract posts WITHOUT having read the book, is now trying to figure out "WHAT kind of nine-year-old girl actually gloms onto such hard-core science fiction in such an extreme life-changing sort of way? What IS this book? This is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard!"
Or, okay, you're going the other way. You ARE a hard-core science fiction-- or plain science fact-- person, and you're thinking, "THIS isn't science! This is gibberish! This is stuff that sounds like science woven together into nonsense! She doesn't even get that a tesseract is a FOURTH-dimensional construct!"
In other words, What IS this book, anyway?
Most often, the good people who Classify put A Wrinkle In Time under the umbrella term "fantasy." This isn't a very good descriptor, though. It's the kind of descriptor that led to People Who Make If-You-Like Lists Without Knowing What They're Talking About putting Wrinkle on "If You Like Harry Potter..." lists a few years back. Granted, I happen to love both Wrinkle and Harry Potter. But they have VERY LITTLE IN COMMON, so it always seemed like false advertising to me.
A few months back the lovely folks at the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
enchantedinkpot tried to figure out where the line gets drawn between fantasy and science fiction. Their post, and the comments, are worth reading. You can go do that now, even. The consensus? IT'S HARD TO DO, mostly because people can't decide on their definitions to begin with. Books with typical science fiction elements-- like spaceships-- may have very little to do with science at all (Star Wars, for example). Books that seem like fantasies turn out to have scientific bases (the recently-late Anne McCaffrey was always VERY INSISTENT that her dragon-filled Pern books were science fiction instead of fantasy. Not that you could tell from reading them). And some books JUST DON'T CARE. They blatantly mix elements of both genres and they're all the better for it.
Wrinkle is one of those books. Science Fantasy, they call it. Really, I think it's just taking science fiction to a new level.
The BASE is science fiction. Warping space-time. Meeting aliens. Battling totalitarian dystopian regimes. And quibbling about the science-- which I've seen people do-- doesn't change that. Sure, some of the science seems funny now: don't you love the "great computing machines" at CENTRAL Central Intelligence, the ones that read and spit out punch tapes? Remember, as I mentioned last week, string theory wasn't developed until 1984-- space-time LOOKED different to a scientist in the 50s and 60s. And let's talk for a minute about the next book in the series, A Wind In the Door: in the 1980s I already couldn't figure out how a first-grade teacher had never heard of mitochondria when, as a fourth grader, I could already name all the parts of a cell. Never mind that there turned out to be no such thing as farandolae. Isn't it still science fiction when science has gone on to disprove the original story's science? What do YOU call Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, anyway?
Of course, there's a strong religious element to A Wrinkle In Time, one that is never shown as false, primitive superstition. Our spacetime-warping Superior Beings are not strict rational agnostics, but truly believe they are serving a Higher Power yet. Your hard-core Science types might not want ANY such unprovables clouding their science fiction, but I don't think this element pushes the story into the realm of fantasy. After all, there is no DIRECT meddling-by-gods into the story itself. This could be merely a cultural thing.
On the other hand, Evil IS a tangible substance in the shape of the Black Thing-- a thing which can literally cast shadows that inspire the worst in people. And stars have souls-- and free will!-- and can give their lives in the battle against Evil! At this point? Yes. You've definitely gotten some fantasy in my science fiction.
But this is where I really like the term "speculative fiction," an umbrella for fantasy and science fiction and horror and whatnot-- the "what if?" genres. Maybe Wrinkle isn't so much a MIXTURE of genres as it is just speculative fiction to its fullest extent. It's science fiction that SPECULATES on science fiction, that asks "WHAT IF there's even more to it than this?"
Madeleine L'Engle was deliberately asking the biggests of What Ifs in this book. She was taking the building-a-story-out-of-science base and digging a little deeper, climbing a little higher, into the unknowable. She writes in the letter I have from her (more on that another day), "I want to affirm that there's more to the world than provable facts.... In A Wrinkle in Time I was quite consciously writing my own affirmation of a universe which is created by a power of love."
As someone who believes in Science AND God, I think there should be MORE of these wacky mixed-up speculative fiction books we call science fantasies. There should be MORE books that take facts and logic seriously but aren't afraid to ask the questions that don't have any answers. "In my life," L'Engle writes earlier in the same letter, "I find that in writing story I come closer to truth than in any other way." I think her stories help the rest of us get a bigger sense of truth, too.
There's a WHOLE lot to discuss on the subjects of religion and spirituality in L'Engle's works, and we'll get there eventually. But before we spend any more time on broad themes or small details, I want to dive a little deeper into our main characters. We'll start, next time, of course with Meg, the Everygirl who's so Everygirl that you (by which I mean I) sometimes forget that she's her own individual person, too.
Having started off with all that quantum physics in last week's post, the casual reader of this blog who is for some reason reading these Year of the Tesseract posts WITHOUT having read the book, is now trying to figure out "WHAT kind of nine-year-old girl actually gloms onto such hard-core science fiction in such an extreme life-changing sort of way? What IS this book? This is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard!"
Or, okay, you're going the other way. You ARE a hard-core science fiction-- or plain science fact-- person, and you're thinking, "THIS isn't science! This is gibberish! This is stuff that sounds like science woven together into nonsense! She doesn't even get that a tesseract is a FOURTH-dimensional construct!"
In other words, What IS this book, anyway?
Most often, the good people who Classify put A Wrinkle In Time under the umbrella term "fantasy." This isn't a very good descriptor, though. It's the kind of descriptor that led to People Who Make If-You-Like Lists Without Knowing What They're Talking About putting Wrinkle on "If You Like Harry Potter..." lists a few years back. Granted, I happen to love both Wrinkle and Harry Potter. But they have VERY LITTLE IN COMMON, so it always seemed like false advertising to me.
A few months back the lovely folks at the
enchantedinkpot tried to figure out where the line gets drawn between fantasy and science fiction. Their post, and the comments, are worth reading. You can go do that now, even. The consensus? IT'S HARD TO DO, mostly because people can't decide on their definitions to begin with. Books with typical science fiction elements-- like spaceships-- may have very little to do with science at all (Star Wars, for example). Books that seem like fantasies turn out to have scientific bases (the recently-late Anne McCaffrey was always VERY INSISTENT that her dragon-filled Pern books were science fiction instead of fantasy. Not that you could tell from reading them). And some books JUST DON'T CARE. They blatantly mix elements of both genres and they're all the better for it. Wrinkle is one of those books. Science Fantasy, they call it. Really, I think it's just taking science fiction to a new level.
The BASE is science fiction. Warping space-time. Meeting aliens. Battling totalitarian dystopian regimes. And quibbling about the science-- which I've seen people do-- doesn't change that. Sure, some of the science seems funny now: don't you love the "great computing machines" at CENTRAL Central Intelligence, the ones that read and spit out punch tapes? Remember, as I mentioned last week, string theory wasn't developed until 1984-- space-time LOOKED different to a scientist in the 50s and 60s. And let's talk for a minute about the next book in the series, A Wind In the Door: in the 1980s I already couldn't figure out how a first-grade teacher had never heard of mitochondria when, as a fourth grader, I could already name all the parts of a cell. Never mind that there turned out to be no such thing as farandolae. Isn't it still science fiction when science has gone on to disprove the original story's science? What do YOU call Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, anyway?
Of course, there's a strong religious element to A Wrinkle In Time, one that is never shown as false, primitive superstition. Our spacetime-warping Superior Beings are not strict rational agnostics, but truly believe they are serving a Higher Power yet. Your hard-core Science types might not want ANY such unprovables clouding their science fiction, but I don't think this element pushes the story into the realm of fantasy. After all, there is no DIRECT meddling-by-gods into the story itself. This could be merely a cultural thing.
On the other hand, Evil IS a tangible substance in the shape of the Black Thing-- a thing which can literally cast shadows that inspire the worst in people. And stars have souls-- and free will!-- and can give their lives in the battle against Evil! At this point? Yes. You've definitely gotten some fantasy in my science fiction.
But this is where I really like the term "speculative fiction," an umbrella for fantasy and science fiction and horror and whatnot-- the "what if?" genres. Maybe Wrinkle isn't so much a MIXTURE of genres as it is just speculative fiction to its fullest extent. It's science fiction that SPECULATES on science fiction, that asks "WHAT IF there's even more to it than this?"
Madeleine L'Engle was deliberately asking the biggests of What Ifs in this book. She was taking the building-a-story-out-of-science base and digging a little deeper, climbing a little higher, into the unknowable. She writes in the letter I have from her (more on that another day), "I want to affirm that there's more to the world than provable facts.... In A Wrinkle in Time I was quite consciously writing my own affirmation of a universe which is created by a power of love."
As someone who believes in Science AND God, I think there should be MORE of these wacky mixed-up speculative fiction books we call science fantasies. There should be MORE books that take facts and logic seriously but aren't afraid to ask the questions that don't have any answers. "In my life," L'Engle writes earlier in the same letter, "I find that in writing story I come closer to truth than in any other way." I think her stories help the rest of us get a bigger sense of truth, too.
There's a WHOLE lot to discuss on the subjects of religion and spirituality in L'Engle's works, and we'll get there eventually. But before we spend any more time on broad themes or small details, I want to dive a little deeper into our main characters. We'll start, next time, of course with Meg, the Everygirl who's so Everygirl that you (by which I mean I) sometimes forget that she's her own individual person, too.
