A Wrinkle in Time

L'Engle, Madeleine (Madeleine L'Engle Franklin). A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Ariel, 1962. New York: Dell, 1975. A Yearling Book.

Children's/young-adult novel in the religious-education tradition of C. S. Lewis's "Space Trilogy"—That Hideous Strength especially —and Narnia stories, but lighter on specifically Christian doctrine than Lewis.

A father is the "prisoner of IT, a giant brain that pulses and quivers and desires to control and subjugate all human life." The man's son has his mind captured by IT, but the heroine "Meg, in a climactic struggle with the computer, resists . . . and wins her brother back through the force of her love for him" (M. Esmonde in her TMG essay "From Little Buddy to Big Brother: The Icon of the Robot in Children's Science Fiction" [p. 94]); see Wrinkle 204-209. Meg also rescues her father.

See WIT for space-time travel without a machine and for associations among a disembodied brain, bureaucracy, large computers, demonic possession, monstrous evil, and with a regimented, conformist, "mechanized" society of highly humanoid aliens. Cf. and contrast 'Star Trek, "The Apple", and "The Return of the Archons", and Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Justice". As much as IT can be conquered, the force of darkness here is bested by (non-erotic) love.

Ava DuVernay's 2018 film, A WRINKLE IN TIME drops most of the science-fictional tropes. A couple of relevant shots put crossing an almost mystic portal to vastly-distant spaces in a room with computers and science-teaching paraphernalia. This juxtaposition is not developed in the film.

(RDE et al., 17/09/95, 9Mar18)