A Book Can Be A Star

Linda D. Voss

In my mind’s eye, I have a picture of my astronaut sister, Janice Voss, floating, motionless, curled up by the middeck window of the space shuttle Endeavour. Bits of brown hair, having escaped her French braid, float about her face. It is sleep time. Most of the crew has retired to their sleep lockers. The middeck creaks, slightly flexing under the forces of free fall as Endeavour orbits the Earth upside down and belly up. The noises are mechanical—a slight hiss of airflow, a computer ping. The lights are low with the day’s activities battened down or locked away.

Out the window, the glorious Earth turns slowly against the blackness of space beyond. The first sight of the radiance of our blue planet suspended in the desolate void of space has brought grown men to revelation (Edgar Mitchell[1]) and despair (William Shatner[2]).‍ ‍

At the end of her day, Janice is in a world of her own, attention absorbed, reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time by earthlight. For Janice, reading the science fiction story that inspired her journey by the light reflected off the Earth was a highlight of her first spaceflight. It was a moment unique to space, an off-world experience she had dreamed of since childhood.

For potential space travelers like my sister Janice in sixth grade, L’Engle’s story laid out a map for navigating a challenging, uncharted world. The fictional adventure starts with Meg Murry, her younger brother Charles Wallace Murry, and classmate Calvin O’Keefe traveling across time and space to rescue her missing father (and incidentally the Earth) from a darkness emanating from a distant planet. What appealed to Janice reading L’Engle was the sense that “you just figure out what you need to do to solve the problem. You use all the resources, and you pull all these interesting technologies together, whatever you can find . . . with the help of your family and friends.”[3] What really meant something to Janice at nine years old was that it was up to Meg, ready or not, to step up. Adults can’t always fix things; sometimes it’s up to you. You don’t have to know how to succeed. You just have to take the necessary next step. Janice thought A Wrinkle in Time was the best thing she had ever read and promptly went back to the library and checked out the entire science fiction section, beginning a lifelong love of the genre, or as our oldest sister, Vicky, calls it, “not yet science fact.”

Published in 1962, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time captured the mind-expanding excitement of the 1960s Space Race. Something new rising. While L’Engle was drafting her novel, NASA was building rockets and testing candidate pilots to see who would carry the nation’s aspirations off planet. Much like L’Engle’s fiction speculated about what traveling through space might be like, NASA was guessing what “right stuff” a space explorer would need. They decided to use military test pilots as their model to select astronauts. While the Russians launched the first female cosmonaut, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, into space in 1963, women in America weren’t allowed to apply to be astronauts until 1977.

What was closed in the real world lived in possibility in L’Engle’s fiction. Thousands of young girls around the world could find themselves the heroine at the heart of the story. For the four girls in my family, imagined worlds made more sense than the world we lived in. In the real world, women couldn’t be astronauts and boys were supposedly better at math than girls. But for the female math whizzes of our family, one of those things didn’t make sense and the other wasn’t true.

Although L’Engle thought A Wrinkle in Time was the best book she’d written of her previous five books, publishers didn’t know what to make of her young-adult story featuring a girl in a male-dominated genre. The manuscript was rejected 26 times before finding a home. For the same reason it almost didn’t get published, A Wrinkle in Time was the perfect story to empower my sister to find her path at the beginning of the Space Age.

When the book was finally published, L’Engle went stratospheric. The book even won the Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious honors in children’s literature, in 1963. It has been in print ever since, continuing to sell as new generations discover it.

If Janice grew up wanting to be Meg, in some sense, I think L’Engle wanted to be Janice. When Janice asked L’Engle if she would like Janice to fly her book in space, L’Engle had replied, “Of course I would! But I had to ask her why she wouldn’t take me!”[4]

Later, when asked about the possibility of life in outer space, L’Engle remarked, “To think that we’re the only [planet] with life on it would be mathematically irrational.”[5] She made that statement years before Janice became the Science Director on the Kepler Space Telescope looking for Earth-like planets. The Kepler was launched in 2009, two years after L’Engle died and three years before Janice herself died of breast cancer in 2012. The Kepler Space Telescope data showed that one out of every four stars likely hosts at least one planet in the zone that supports life.[6]

L’Engle intended her books to lead “young people into an expanding imagination.” Somewhere in that space of dreaming that belongs only to the very young, where all things are possible, L’Engle’s space adventure ignited in Janice a passion for an impossible dream.

L’Engle said, “A book, too, can be a star . . . a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”[7] The bold vision of A Wrinkle in Time, published against all odds, accomplished its mission. A journey through time and space, a footstep in moondust, and an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star all whisper, “Imagine.” A heart that hears that song can take the second star to the right straight on 'til morning.

Notes

[1] See globalacademy.media/edgar-mitchell-how-science-approaches-the-study-of-consciousness.

[2] See variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113.

[3] From an NPR interview between Jacki Lyden and Janice on September 8, 2007, npr.org/2007/09/08/14266537/lengles-fiction-inspired-real-science.

[4] Found in a transcript from an undated Scholastic interview, web.archive.org/web/20180129140358/https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/madeleine-lengle-interview-transcript.

[5] Found in a transcript from an undated Scholastic interview, web.archive.org/web/20180129140358/https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/madeleine-lengle-interview-transcript.

[6] From a NASA email announcement for Office of the Chief Scientist Seminar at the Ames Research Center, August 5, 2019, “Search for Life in the Universe,” by Dr. Simon “Pete” Worden, former Ames Center Director and Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

[7] This quote is from Madeleine L’Engle’s acceptance speech for the Newbery Medal. It was reproduced at the back of later editions of A Wrinkle in Time.