One of the most influential writers of my life, Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time (among many, many other books), has died. I'm crushed.
The moment I picked A Wrinkle in Time off the library shelf in elementary school stands out in my memory as a pivotal act in my history is both a reader and writer. Seriously, there should have been trumpets and light streaming from heaven. It was easily the smartest book I'd read up to the age of . . . let's see, I must have been about 8, and one of the first children's books that didn't assume I was an idiot. It used multisyllabic and wholly unfamiliar words like "tesseract" which I didn't again encounter anywhere until the fiction of Robert Heinlein in graduate school (The Number of the Beast, specifically, where it's used as a plot device in a such a similar way that it's almost a rip-off*). And they weren't made-up words, either; they were the names of real scientific concepts. This was my first inkling that science might be something cool. And not just science in general, but physics and cosmology. From there, it was a quick downhill slide into the hard stuff. Within a few years I was reading Heinlein, Clark, Asimov, and Asimov's non-fiction about chemistry and biology and astronomy. Then Niven and Pournelle. I was doomed.
This shaped my reading habits for years to come, and whetted my appetite for mixing science and philosophy, science and mythology, science and the ineffable. Years later, when I came across Clarke's Rule—"A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"—that made perfect sense to me. It still does. Magic is just a code word for Things We Don't Yet Understand, or Haven't Yet Built the Right Instruments to Study, like dark energy and dark matter. (The dark energy link will take you to a video of Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll explaining both concepts in the most basic way possible, a skill at which Sean excels.)
Though I didn't realize it at the time, the most important concept I learned from A Wrinkle in Time was that Women Could Be Scientists Too. Mr. Murry was some kind of physicist working on something secret with echoes of the Manhattan Project, but Meg's mother wasn't just a housewife and mother, either. She worked at home—as a chemist. There were Bunsen burners and beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks in their house, in a real lab. And though the Murrys were considered weird because they were smart and sciency, their status as the book's protagonists made everyone else who made fun of them seem mean and small-minded. Science involved the fundamental nature of the universe and life, which made it both cool and important. And Meg and her mom weren't too stupid to grasp this just because they were women. Amazing, that.
As one of those kids who was usually ahead of the curve, I identified with Meg and her family, who were scorned by the locals for being "too smart for their own good" and "better" than other people because they were smart. My soon-to-be best friend, whom I would meet the following year, was the school district's brainiac and only avoided the torture of our schoolmates by virtue of being cute and blonde and highly musical as well. But I was like Meg: dark-haired and dorky. And A Wrinkle in Time made that okay. I read the book over and over again to reassure myself of this fact.
It was also important to see a woman writing smart books with hard science in them, especially one like L'Engle who wasn't a scientist. That meant it was comprehensible to the ordinary person, and not some secret club. L'Engle's work made me seek out others, like C.J. Cherryh and Ursula LeGuin, and gave me a life-long love of both science fiction and the many disciplines of science itself.
Thanks Ms. L'Engle. I hope generations of girls to come enjoy your work as much as I did. You've left quite a legacy.
*I like to think that Heinlein is giving a nod of recognition to L'Engle when he reveals that Hilda Burroughs built models of tesseracts in the gifted program when she was in school.
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