I keep bumping into social media threads lately that are talking about gateways into genre fiction for kids, whether the focus was science fiction, fantasy or horror. Some are nostalgic, wondering if everyone of a similar age shared the same gateways. Others are proactive, readers with kids or even grandkids wanting to share their love of a genre down the generations. What would work? Should I go back to what got me into it way back when or are there newer, more relevant authors to visit? It all got me thinking about my gateways and whether they'd stand up today.

The thing with me was that it was generally adult fiction that I was reading as a young teenager. In science fiction, the trigger was watching the 1982 BBC mini series version of John Wyndham's 'The Day of the Triffids'. That told me what science fiction was and, after I reached out, my mother gave me Robert Heinlein's juveniles, Isaac Asimov's Lije Baley books and Clifford Simak's 'Way Station', a trifecta that hooked me for life. For horror, it was James Herbert, who moved British horror into the modern era, because schoolkids were handing his books around in the playground so we could all read the juicy bits.

Only with fantasy did I knowingly read it as a kid. I believe that my parents read me 'The Hobbit' as a toddler and it was probably the first real book I read for myself, a few years later, but I probably didn't see it as a genre and I didn't explore it further as I started to frequent charity bookstalls at the age of six or seven. And what all this rambling introduction means is that I haven't read a lot of the pivotal gateways into these genres because I skipped past them to the adult stuff.

And it's well past time that I went back and looked at what I should have read as a younger kid and whether it's viable as a gateway in this new millennium for wannnabe readers. I'll tackle a host of  books I already have on my shelves and a few key titles that I don't, all of which are over fifty years in age, and I'll collate these reviews in a future Apocalypse Later zine.

First up, 'A Wrinkle in Time' by Madeleine L'Engle, an American author who wrote a few YA science fiction books in her time, none more famous than this one, which is now the first in a series of five books called the 'Time Quintet'. It was rejected many times before landing a publisher, eventually reaching shelves in 1962, but it promptly  won a string of awards including the Newbery Medal and it's had legs. It's never gone out of print and it's been adapted into a graphic novel, at least three plays, two movies and even an opera. I followed up this reading by watching the 2018 film, which is not remotely as good as the book.

One common suggestion for those rejections is that it fundamentally deals with the idea of evil, a problematic idea for a children's book. Another is that it features a female protagonist, which was unusual at the time, even if Heinlein's 'Podkayne of Mars' was right behind it. I don't quite buy into that but would suggest it runs deeper. Sure, Meg Murry is a female protagonist but she's also in a book written by an obviously female author who wasn't abbreviating her name to initials and most of the supporting characters are also female, including the most powerful of them, the three Mrs. Ws. Maybe the industry would have allowed one of those things, but not all of them at once.

I found Meg an interesting character, not because she's female but because she's a plain thirteen-year-old who isn't popular and who thinks herself stupid. In short, she doesn't fit where she thinks she ought to fit and she struggles with that. Also, while there is a little coming of age here, it isn't really a coming of age book, just an eye-opener that the people who matter aren't necessarily the people you think and everyone has potential. While Meg is a little annoying here, because she's so judgmental, it's important for her journey and she ends up a more knowing character than when she started.

She's the eldest child of scientists. Mum's beautiful but a very capable scientist anyway, another crucial eye-opener: you don't have to be one or the other. Why not both, as the memes say. Dad is, well Dad's gone, and we don't know how, why or where but Mum certainly isn't telling all. Meg has three younger siblings but the important one here is Charles Wallace, who's weirdly knowing and weirdly polite for a boy of six. We soon realise that he's emphatic or telepathic or some such and that ability has greatly affected how he interacts with the world. The twins in between, Sandy and Dennys, aren't important here but I believe they become so in the sequels.

There's an unrelated character more crucial to this book and that's Calvin O'Keefe, who goes to the same school as Meg, but joins her and Charles Wallace through some unexplainable sense. He just knows that he needs to be at a particular place at a particular time, even if he doesn't know why. I like this and it plays strongly into why I felt kinship with these kids. They're all different but they're not seeing that as a positive, as their peers certainly don't. Arguably, they're all neurodivergent and they're learning how to do what they do but in a way that doesn't break them in society.

And then there are the Mrs. Ws, the gods in this machine. They're introduced almost like a trio of witches, but they're much more than that, even though they're also neurodivergent in their ways. Mrs. Whatsit used to be a star and has deep problems understanding social norms on our planet. Mrs. Who can't verbalise well, so talks in quotes, even though they happen to be in a wide variety of languages: Latin and Greek, French and German, even Portuguese. Mrs. Which is so old and so different that she's almost forgotten what it's like to be in a body, which makes it hard for her to manifest on our plane of existence.

Again, society would see them all as broken but they're easily the most powerful characters in the book and they're the ones who do the tessering, that wrinkle in time that's in the title. What this means is that, using only the power of their minds, they can do incredible things, like whisking our three lead children away to the planet Uriel, just like that, as the first stage in a journey to locate and rescue Dr. Alexander Murry, who they believe is somewhere on the planet Camazotz, possibly being held captive. They can't go there themselves, however powerful they are, but the kids don't have the same limitations and they'll happily help.

For a book that's now over sixty-years-old, this doesn't feel particularly dated. There are details in it that do, like the fact that everything computerised is tapes and punchcards, but the core of the book is abstracted enough from our reality to remain equally as accessible today. Minds are minds and they don't date, unlike the physical technology we use to store data. The core concept of good and evil is universal, as are other important themes like loyalty and nurture and love. L'Engle has a good eye for prose and she livens it up with quirkiness that feels just as worthy today as in 1962.

You've already met Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit, quintessential names for a kids book. They introduce Meg and the others to the Happy Medium, who's, well, a happy medium, without a gender but with a crystal ball that allows her to see far behind her environs on a planet in Orion's Belt. I also appreciated how Aunt Beast acquired her name, given that she's a gray tentacled alien living on a planet without light, so clearly doesn't speak the English language. She merely plucked the most useful terminology out of Meg's brain to describe her and happily accepted it as a name.

Most of the book plays out as adventure and discovery. The children visit alien planets, encounter a formless evil known as the Black Thing and battle IT, the disembodied telepathic brain that rules Camazotz. It's as weird and wonderful as children's genre literature should be and it's enjoyable in both a surface manner and if you want to dig into what it's talking about. All this works well.

Most of the negative side isn't really negative, just needed to ground the story. I mentioned Meg being overly judgmental, but there's a good reason for it and she grows as a person through the book. There are no grand resolutions, the eternal battle between good and evil just as apparent after we're done as when we started, but that does imbue the finalé with a little disappointment, as if we've gone through all this to achieve nothing but a rescue. The ending is a little quick, but it probably ought to be a little jarring, given how it all plays out.

The only real negative that I'd throw out as valid is that there's a minor religious angle that feels a little out of place, even in a story so fundamentally about good and evil. L'Engle was a Christian and she apparently channelled some of her beliefs into her writing. If anything, that's the part I'd call most dated, tapes and punchcards aside. I'm not talking here about the fact that the Mrs. Ws are phrased somewhat like guardian angels and some of the place names have religious meaning. I'm talking about spiritual intervention and the meaning of God. It's not a major part of the book, perhaps why fundamentalist Christians have opposed, even banned, the book because they see it as promoting witchcraft and anti-Christian sentimentality. It doesn't.

This certainly seems to be a good place for me to start a journey through classic children's fiction, especially in genre. I enjoyed 'A Wrinkle in Time' a lot and don't see why it wouldn't work today as a gateway into science fiction and fantasy, especially as it's more substantial and less stylised than the 2018 Disney movie. ~~ Hal C F Astell