Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - A Wrinkle In Time

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Today we covered the 1962 scifi classic by Madeleine L'Engle. We talked about the beauty of the individual overcoming oppressive systems, why God seems to show up in every novel, and the power of hot moms. Follow the show @SwordsNSocPod or email us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69  patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction. Again, today I have myself, Darius, and with me, my co-host, Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Howdy. Today, we are doing a shorter novel that was a classic from my childhood, and I assumed it was then a classic for everyone else because i read it uh maybe but apparently not therefore it is universal

now you know i was one of those kids where i thought i'm like well if my parents had to read this book i assumed everyone else's parents had them read it i guess i mean to be fair this book was published a long time before even you were born so it's like this was a classic for a lot of kids it's true um it's got the this was a classic for a lot of kids. It's true. It's got the little metal on the front that said it was good. Oh yeah. The Newberry metal. Today we are doing a wrinkle in time by Madeline L'Engle.

I always thought it was L'Engle, but then the audio narrator just called her L'Engle. I'm sorry. L'Engle is my lady, but it's got some. There's an apostrophe it's like French I thought it was like Le Angle

but then the audiobook narrator was like this is Madeline L'Engle alright, sure but no, we're doing A Wrinkle in Time I'm just going to call her Madeline so this is of course the 1962 novel about children and their parents who figure out how to do wormhole space-time travel through a thing they call tessering. But it's basically a

family of scientist parents and their kids. And the scientist parents have basically figured out how to do long-distance space space time travel by um as the novel as the title of the book um describes you essentially sort of take the fabric of space time and pinch it up into a wrinkle and then you can do a little wormhole from one side right to the other side without doing the time it would take to do long distance space travel which has long been a theory of space and time travel in sci-fi as far as I'm aware. Well, it's a long time ever since Einstein.

Okay. Because these are all fundamentally based on relativity. Okay. Yeah, because it's the idea that space-time is like a plane and that wormhole travels being able to go in here and come out over here without actually traversing anywhere. yeah and so the idea with a wrinkle in time is that it's described to the characters by putting a wrinkle in your shirt and passing from one side to the other so it takes almost no time but you can travel great distances or whatever yeah that's funny that people would get

it from einstein because my copy of the book has like a little Q&A with the author in the back. Yeah, the author. It says that one of the areas she got the idea for The Wrinkle of Time was reading what Einstein wrote about time. Interesting. Which I'm going to point out, it's a pretty high level concept for what is essentially like a book for middle school kids. Yeah, especially since this wasn't that long after Einstein wrote the stuff he wrote. Like this is the 1960s. This is like maybe 20, 30 years. Yeah. kids yeah especially since this wasn't that long after einstein wrote the stuff he wrote like this is the 1960s this is like maybe 20 30 years yeah within the sphere of einstein's like einstein

fever yeah and i don't i don't know like the author's what her background really is but the fact that she was reading like einstein's like space time travel theories and being like you know what this would be great for a middle school kids book. Turned out it was. Turned out it was. Also, as we're going to get into later, what is something that is apparently a permanent fixture on this podcast is God. We apparently can't do any fantasy or sci-fi without talking about religion.

It's barely possible. As someone who spent like, you know, a large portion of their life, atheist, I always imagined sci-fi as being a sort spent like you know a large portion of their life uh atheist i always imagined sci-fi as being a sort of you know non-religious genre you know i mean it's about technology right like it's about science it's science fiction but now the more sci-fi i read it the more i'm like oh god's everywhere man bizarrely i think bizarrely i think that that um fantasy and sci-fi are a great way to make someone less of a reddit atheist as the stereotype i mean it worked for me yeah because

it's oh yeah you you had mentioned before about about dune um yeah which we'll get into in detail sometime soon perhaps sometime soon but yeah yeah i mentioned literally reading that is like what helped like one of the things that helped break me out of sort of i wasn't like actively you know sort of read an atheist but like i had a background in it like in my early 20s um and so like break me into being like yeah you know maybe really just not so bad yeah i mean a lot of them especially when you have a book like this i'm gonna be honest that really does cherry pick some of the best bible quotes there's some pretty good ones in here yes to be honest um almost all of them coming from was it mrs who yes the one that speaks all in quotes yeah that

that being said uh like i i don't want to be like, wow, I recently read a little bit of Nietzsche. I mean, we can. We can pretend to know things. I'm not going to pretend to know too much, but he would really dislike this book. He would dislike a lot of things. That's true. But I just thought it was funny. I'm not going to go into Nietzsche, everybody,

because I've read so little that it's not worth it for me to get into it. And you know what? There's probably some book out there that we'll read that will require us to know about it. There's probably some fantasy or sci-fi book that relates to him somehow, and we're just going to come across it someday. Yeah, there was just a quote in here

that made me really think of what I'd been reading about his idea of what slave morality was. Oh, yeah. So, Wrinkle in Time. Again, like I said, it's a story about some kids. Our main characters are Meg, who is

11, right? Yeah. 11. Or 11 or 12. 11 or 12. May 12. I think she's 12. I was going to say 11 or 12. May 12. I think she's 12. I was going to say, I hope she's 12. I hope she's 12. I think she's 12. So Meg, who is 12, her little brother Charles Wallace,

who is 6, and their friend Calvin, who is 14. Who just kind of shows up. We say he's their friend because he just sort of appears out of nowhere and instantly becomes best buds i will say for for storytelling i think him being introduced and becoming their friend is like the most rushed feeling part of the narrative yeah because he just sort of appears and is instantly like part of the family and i'll be

honest charles initially is being kind of a butthole charles is a butthole always i mean yeah but he's being a massive like dingbat to calvin when they first meet and then suddenly calvin's like you're kind of smart hey i think we're supposed to get that Calvin immediately falls for them because of how like nice and friendly they are. And he comes from a fairly unloving or inattentive household. He's got like a billion siblings and a mom who has got way a bunch of other stuff going on.

And so like the fact that he finally meets somebody that like accepts him and likes him, I think that's how we're supposed to like sort of accept that he just sort of falls in with them immediately right it's that he's never had anyone like he's the like i'm a popular jock but secretly i'm sad secretly i'm sad and a nerd yeah secretly i'm a sad nerd despite uh like everyone imagining me as a jock which i of course don't relate to at all as someone who did who you know who's doing three sports like three season sports forever throughout my childhood then then would come home and you

know read lord of the rings and play medieval to total war that's the three characters calvin meg and charles wallace charles wallace spends the first half of the book being insufferable and way too smart for his own good but then then by the second half of the book, you realize that him being too smart for his own good is on purpose, and it's actually his biggest flaw. And then the second half of the book is Meg being angry at everyone for not caring about stuff, which she's sort of right. But also, it's the fact that it's directly her flaw, because she's stubborn and hotheaded and struggles to see things from other people's perspectives so if you're just reading it the things that i find you know sort of annoying from like a reader's perspective as an adult are actually intentionally overdone character flaws because the whole point is the characters using and overcoming their flaws so like it's me

remembering that this is meant for like 12 year olds to read. Yeah. And especially, I think, especially on the Charles Wallace case, because there's a, aside from the fact that obviously it's shown to be his flaw. I find, I find him easier to read than as an adult than say, going to read Artemis Fowl as an adult. as an adult than say going to read artemis fowl as an adult um this is an example i loved those books as a kid but i've tried to go back and read them and i'm like you're kind of an insufferable piece of garbage artemis like i mean clearly the best character in that whole book is butler so oh yes either either butler or that really weird dwarf who yeah the dwarf the dwarf that's like a criminal yeah who like eats things and then like farts he's like wario he kind of is yeah clearly clearly the best characters in that are the butler and war and dirt war yeah and and dwarf wario well we'll save that for when we do artemis foul

i mean this one yeah charles wallace is, like I said, it comes off, but then again, his whole character design is that he's too smart for his own good. That's the whole point. Like, I think it's actually more endurable that he's not the POV character. Oh, yes. If he was a POV character, it would be awful.

But the fact that he's just there along for the ride, because our POv for most of the book is if like the entire book is meg well and it's it's great for a number of reasons just because i feel like if you were inside charles wallace's head that would defeat the point of some of this mostly because he's presented in a way he's honestly a little like eldritch like like you don't really know what's going on with his brain like he's presented as being like almost a new kind of being like as a human like his brain is on operates on another level that most humans can't perceive where he can literally like look into your brain and read

your thoughts not directly read your thoughts but like he can kind of get the vibe for like intuit your thoughts through you in the later, he and Meg actually eventually get to the point where they can essentially just communicate telepathically. They call it kything, I think, or kything, K-Y-T-H-I-N-G. In some of the later books, we're like Meg and Charles can like literally just like telepathically communicate to each other. It's like something they develop over the course of their lives. So later on, there's a name for it. And this first book, he can just sort of like, Charles Wallace can just like stare really hard at you

and his eyes go kind of vacant. And then he can like read your mind, kind of. Kind of. So it's good that he's not the main character. But I think you were saying when you were talking to DMs yesterday that for being a relatively short, I mean, the book is only, it's 198 pages. Yeah, I was about to say it depends on your print version because mine's 232. However, it's big print.

It's a short story. And it again is what you call middle grade. It's like a middle grade story. This is like not fully what someone would probably classify as young adult literature like usually with young adult lit like the the characters are either a little bit older than this well because books are generally meant i think right like the protagonist is generally portrayed as being like a couple years older than what the intended audience is correct usually kind of like so like if yeah so if meg is 12 what the intended audience is correct usually kind of like so like

if yeah so if meg is 12 then the intended audience is like you know 10 to 14 kind of like 10 to 12 kind of range but so despite being relatively short and for middle grade there's kind of a lot going on here which is what you pointed out in the dms yesterday that like i was kind of worried when i suggested it that there might not be as much as I thought. And then you read it and you're like, actually, there's kind of a lot going on. There's some pretty high-level nonsense happening in this. Einstein stuff aside even. Yeah, even aside from the fact that we're talking about relativity and space travel through a scientific method. So we're going to go through

in order here the themes as they pop up. So we're going to go through in order here, the sort of the themes that they pop up. And one of the first ones is immediate one, which obviously is really important for kids, for the targeted group, obviously. But I think it's actually really important to people like us that may, you know, sort of ascribe to certain political beliefs, such as like school abolition, right? Is that one of the

main things you learn right off the bat is that the structure of school as it stands is actually kind of bad for some kids kids who are quite smart and very talented but don't fit the like the mold of the system and even if she didn't intend it to take quite the political connotation that we can take from it, that's still a pretty bold statement from the 60s. And that's also kind of the point of what we're doing here is to find an inch and take a mile. Yeah, it's true. True. And that mile we're taking here is that like her point is that characters who are objectively portrayed as being very intelligent, like Charles Wallace and even Meg to an extent, even though Meg gets referred to as the dumb one, she's not dumb by any stretch of the imagination. By any stretch. It's that she doesn't fit well in a standard school system. And that's's a pretty important point going all the way through, even to the like all the way to the very end. Because because the later conflicts in the novel are directly of the same mindset of there are forces that seek to in this instance at the beginning, it's school that kind of seek to make everything the same assimilation.

Yeah, it's this kind of like cultural like forcing like forcing every different shaped peg into a round hole. You know, it's like there are square pegs, star pegs, triangular pegs, all getting shoved into this circular hole. And that's kind of like this idea of difference being squashed in the name of equality is kind of something that pops up throughout the book. You're right. Now that you put it that way, that really is like sort of the overriding theme because it happens at school. They're different people. But the school seeks to enforce that sameness on everyone.

You have to fit the system. And then later on, once they're fighting it and you know, the the blackness, what does it do on Kamazats? It enforces sameness. Everyone must fit the system. Anyone that doesn't fit the system is reeducated or killed, right? And obviously that's – Or put to sleep.

Yeah, put to sleep, which like – once we get to the back third of this book on Camazotz, we're suddenly also going to be like looking at the giver because there's a whole lot of similarities going on there between Camazotz and the world of the giver. But it starts early on when we're talking about school. It's forced assimilation, forced like you must fit in the boxes. If you don't fit in the boxes, it's going to go badly for you. Like Meg has to go see the principal a lot. Like we only see the confrontation once, but it's implied that she sees the principal constantly for not fitting the mold in class.

And it's repeated that everyone thinks Charles Wallace is stupid. Like they think he's like mentally handicapped because he doesn't interact well with a school and the rest of society despite us being shown that charles wallace is like the smartest character in the whole book yeah but like everyone thinks he's dumb because he does not interface well with other people with other people and with school as the the structure that it is and this is like a debate you see having a lot on the left, particularly about sort of like the abolition of school as it stands. You know, it's a reform or complete abolition.

Yeah, because it is seen by a lot of people as a force for assimilation. It is a force to squash differences to create nice little, you know, boxed workers that can just do the job that they're assigned. It's a very common critique of the left of like schooling the way it is, especially in like America and the UK. And it's just wild to see like a non-political author

essentially making the exact same point from a different direction like in a middle school novel like we were saying this this is just one expression of that central theme that kind of runs through the whole novel um what is what what is the actually the line that they say when they're there when when that Meg has, she has when they're fighting, uh, fighting it, the one you mentioned up. Oh, I said, uh, like is not equal and equal is not like, like it's, if I find the exact phrasing,

I'm looking at right too. Cause believe it or not, I actually have a physical book for this one. Um, I do wasn't didn't just do the audio. Neither of us were very fond of the audio book. So I would highly recommend reading this physically if you were going to. Yeah. I mean, maybe there's more than one audio recording, but the one that we found was not personally a fan of the narrator.

And I find when it comes to like podcasts or audio books, I really need to like, you you know i need to enjoy the author like the narrator yeah uh here's the bit though um it says but that's exactly what we have on chemisox complete equality everybody exactly alike and then uh for a moment her brain reeled with confusion then came a moment of blazing truth no she cried triumphantly like and equal are not the same thing at all and then a little bit farther down it has it italicized like and equal are two entirely different things which i think is honestly one of the theme i think is possibly the overriding theme of the entire if you're gonna if you're gonna have me like right in one line what is the theme

of this book that that's it it's a theme that i think is can be somewhat common for younger people because when you're going through like puberty that time in your life there's a lot about like finding your own personality versus you know like assimilating with what's like cool or except you know i mean you see that a lot but it's usually more around like what your friends think is cool but like you're different you know what i mean that sort of like interpersonal type of establishing your own personality which is an important part of coming of age stories. Um, I think the unique twist here is that it's not set in like a person versus their friend group or person versus like, you know, child versus their equals. Cause a lot of these coming of

age stories are like kids interacting with like their peers and establishing their individuality against their peers she's doing that sort of thing but it's against systems it's like against ideologies it's not meg fighting with her peers it is a little bit right at the start but even then at the start it's mostly meg versus school meg versus structure meg versus school and later on it's mostly meg versus school meg versus structure meg versus school and later on it's literally meg versus like ideology yeah what what's essentially a like society like it's it's meg it's meg versus a whole way of being yeah and which I think is an interesting step to take a pretty common, like coming of age theme. Right. Which is why I think it's actually why the more widely applicable, because it's not just a teenager figuring out who they are. It's also about the greater issues of

likeness and equality and sameness and the importance of like individuality yeah so again the first part school school's bad folks like for some people you can get through it like i got through school fine because taking standardized tests worked for me yeah i could i could look at a scantron test and just be like that it's probably these and like do fine yeah i had a lot sorry go ahead like um when i when i was in high school i took the act not the sat um and same same i got a 32 on my first try i didn't prep i didn't do anything i took it and everyone was like, wow, so good. Then I got to college and my GPA was absolutely horrid. So it's like none of this has any bearing on actual intelligence.

But the way that these systems work is they require some sort of categorization in order to put people. This continues to sound more and more horrible the more and more you contextualize it but to put people into categories so that they can be you know ordered about you know adequately given opportunity whatever broad nebulous nonsense you want to pull out um but at the end of the day, it's like, these things are so stifling. They're structured in such a way that they expect certain things. And if they don't get those certain things, they just tell you that you're wrong. Yeah. Well, you need to be able to be categorized so you can be organized. Then you can be efficiently ordered, right? Like you can be put

in a box. Then you need the boxes because the machine runs by everybody being a box i think one of the things that popped out of me on that note at the beginning of this book is meg getting problems wrong in math because she did the wrong method of getting to the answer yes yeah She takes too many shortcuts. Because her dad is literally like a math genius. Yeah. And so it's like, yeah,

her, her, like, uh, miss Dr. Murray, the father, Mr.

Murray is like a polymath genius. And Meg is too. Yeah. Yeah. They said she used to do math with him for fun. And so when she got to school, she already like, she's like, well, I don't need to go through these steps. I can just do it this way.

And again, school enforcing that like, no, no, no. You need to solve it the way we tell you to. Which, to be fair, I also ran into at school sometimes. Yeah, it has her in like towards the end of the book, like when she's initially struggling against it, just saying the square roots of numbers, like saying the square root of five. She's like the square root of seven,

which like I couldn't figure that out now if I wanted to. Yeah. Like the square root of five is 2.236 because 2.236 times 2.236 equals five. Yeah, probably. Yeah. I'm just going to believe. Like the author could be lying to me right there and I would not know. Yeah.

But again, not a theme I expected. I expected to pull out here was a very sort of structural critique of like forced assimilation. Right. Like it's not what I was expecting it into. And you're like oh yeah wrinkle in time they like time travel and save their dad from a brain and then you're like oh no this is a story about like the uniqueness of the individual and the necessity of each individual's uniqueness to create beauty and love in the world is what actually saves us from

the darkness which is a manifestation of sameness and ignorance and it's like damn holy shit okay suddenly we're like again we're going next next level here so let's talk about the next people they're introduced to the people that take them off planet so i should say if you didn't know meg's dad is a scientist who is a spook. I mean, he works for the U S government. He's a cop. He's a cop who it's not explained at the beginning, but you're sort of hinted at and you figure out later, he figured out how to do Einstein wormhole travel to Tesser and accidentally got himself caught on a dark planet on a, in a bad,

bad place camisots um he's been gone for like five years or some nonsense because charles waltz was just born when he disappeared well he's he's been working for five years he sent his last letter one year ago oh that's true actually so he was working for the government for those four years in there, separate from everybody else, but was still on Earth until after his last letter. He's only been on Kamazots for a year Earth time. So the characters that come to get the children, you know, kick the children off on their adventure into space time. into space-time. These characters named Mrs. Who,

Mrs. Witch, and Mrs. What's-It, who sort of appear as old women, but you learn pretty quickly that's not what they are. Like, what are they? Well, that leads into a whole thing about this book's presented theology. Because did you guys know fantasy sci-fi books are full of theology? It's like everything. And the more you sit down and think about it, the more it makes sense.

It's like Lord of the Rings might not have it on its surface, but it's there. Like C.S. Lewis has it on its surface, and it's there. And then you have something like Dune surface but it's there like c.s lewis has it on its surface and it's there and then you have something like doom which it's there and then you have something like a wrinkle in time which is for children and it's really there uh his dark materials oh yeah well yeah in a way that's almost like his dark materials is almost like a reaction to how much theology is in young adult literature yeah kind of is um maybe i don't know maybe it's not the same by being one of the most excessively theological books i'm sorry just um i so before we say the side note here is i wonder if it's the same for sci-fi and fantasy

that's non-western because all the sci-fi and fantasy we read is english language meant for either british or american audiences right for the most part for the most part and so it's all like le guin aside who was doing like eastern theology i mean we can call it theology or daoismism it kind of is it is in a way philosophy sort of theology type stuff so aside from like her all the rest of it it makes sense to me is heavily

influenced by Abrahamic faith specifically Christian faith because that's what all the authors were but like I wonder if sort of eastern fantasy or sci-fi have as many religious overtones as our books do i mean i'd be curious to find what i understand is one of the first you know technically fantasy novels ever fantasy stories in that journey to

the west that's pretty that's pretty religious yeah yeah yeah i'd say so um interesting we don't have to follow that brain just the thought i had but so yeah tell me about the theology of of of of miss madeline angel at first you don't really know who these three are you can have guesses but um the first moment that you get an idea of there being some sort of religious overtones to this is they're flying along on the back of Mrs. What's it who's turned into like a weird centaur thing with wings. And yeah, so they're off on a different planet. They have transport. And then, yeah, they get on the back of Miss which one it's what's it?

Yes, it's what's it? What's it? Yeah, they've flown up into the air on the back of this weird winged centaur so yeah she like stumbles out uh turns from an old lady into a giant centaur with wings and as they're flying upwards alongside these mountains that are so tall you can't see the tops there are these garden even more beautiful okay in it were gathered many of the creatures like oh mrs what's it become some among the flowers, some swimming in a broad crystal river. So they're more of these big, not quite as big as Mrs. What's-It from what I can tell here, but these creatures that look a lot like her that are singing. And they're singing in a language or

a way of singing that no one else can understand except Charles Wallace, because Charles Wallace is special. By the ways, I just realized this at the beginning of the book i think charles wallace is a combination of her kids names charles and wallace because the beginning intro to the book has a thank you for charles wadsworth camp and wallace colin franklin so i'm assuming it sure is that that she either yeah okay so those are probably her grandkids, maybe? I don't know. Could be her kids in the 60s, yeah. But as they're flying along,

Charles Wallace tries to communicate to everybody else alongside Mrs. What's-It what they're saying and what they're singing about. And it just out of nowhere, and this kind of took me off, you know, it knocked me off kilter for a second. Because it's been pretty... This is like a third of the way into the book.

And it's pretty vanilla up to this point. Obviously, like, wild parts and time travel and stuff aside, but like religiously, there's been nothing. So a third of the way into the book, you get this song that in Vegas terms says, sing unto the Lord a new song and his praise from the end of the earth. And then it continues for essentially a whole paragraph. And then the very last line is let them give glory unto the Lord.

I am God out of nowhere. God out of nowhere throughout her entire body. Meg felt a pulse of joy, such as she had never known before. When Mrs. What's-It sighed, it seemed completely incomprehensible that through this bliss could come the faintest whisper of doubt. Which I think is an interesting line, because I wonder what she's doubting. But I think that has more to do with what she's about to show them, because this is the scene where she's about to show them the darkness, the blackness. I think that's what Mrs. What's-It's doubt in her sigh is, because she knows she's about to show them the darkness the the blackness i think that's what mrs what's its doubt

in her side is because she knows she's about to show them the evil right yeah so she's she's about to show them that the world that they're on is in some way shrouded by the blackness i'm just gonna go ahead and make my mandatory uh reference here and point out that we again have similar to the mr jrrt we have the glory of the lord god being presented through song which is pretty much a foundational aspect of the lord of the rings like the world was literally created through music so this seems to again be another theme that pervades sort of christian thought here yeah especially with tolkien because it's like sure he doesn't say god but he it's every like iluvitar is is just it's it's just god but and like the creation of the music i just it's again it's

interesting that in this completely unrelated book the first time we're introduced to the concept of like of god in the book is through song yeah so you eventually go on to learn that there's this blackness this thing that's kind of uh endangering everywhere there is life it's like an eternal fight against this black thing um i do enjoy her her naming conventions and she just calls it the black thing and like the enemy is just called it yes which makes sense in the story but also i think it's just good world building because she's like i don't even know what a cool name would be so i just called it yeah um well in the case of it it makes a little bit more sense because it's like everything is it because it's like a hive mind so it is um but in in the case of the the black thing the darkness

the blackness like no one gives it like an official name when i first read it i could only assume i was like okay so this is like this is like satan is this is this kind of or at least the way i put it when i said it to you was satan is the expression of is like the human interpretation of the blackness um yeah like the humans the human name for the blackness was you know we would call it satan yeah like we would call it satan i would call it Satan. I suppose others would have different names for it, like outside of Judeo, not even Judeo-Christian.

That's the right buzzword nonsense, but Christian fashion. In Zoroastrianism, it would be Druge, right? It would be the opposite of Asha. It would be druge right like it would be there'd be it would be the opposite of asha it would be the lie yes so like there would just you know this is the this is the uh more goth of this universe um the melkor of this setting um and uh and it it's it's a whole thing we see it more once

we actually get to the the dark world the kamazots but she sort of starts to explain here in this scene that we're talking about where they're up and looking at it from space that like its whole thing is like enveloping worlds and it doesn't like destroy them in the like you know it like blows everything up and kills everyone since it destroys worlds in that it destroys it snuffs out science and knowledge and faith and individuality this we're now we're heading back to that first theme we talked about which is like it the the darkness the black thing's whole deal is that that forced assimilation yes and and to kind of build on that i'd like to point out that at the very least there's something really interesting this book does that um for a book that's so blatant with its kind of religious themes it does present other forms of inspiration

as equally valid as ways to fight the blackness. So when it lists famous people that might've been resistors of the darkness, the first one they bring up is Jesus, obviously, because that's, you know, she's a Christian. So that's like the first thing that would probably come up.

But the second thing they do is Leonardo da Vinci. And they, they, they start listing scientists and artists so as well as religious figures i do want to point out that i think almost all of them are white but um she does say gandhi oh she does say gandhi oh which by the way which is a typically good white person answer for someone who's not white. That's a kind of – yeah, that's a kind of, ooh, this non-white person is good. And when you actually look at them, they're really not. Let's be fair.

In like 62, I don't think most people knew all the weird – most especially white people didn't know any of the weird bad stuff about Gandhi at the time. Yeah. I guess it had the image of like a Mother Teresa. Who's also a terrible person. who's also a terrible also a terrible person you know it's that same shit where you're like okay i'm trying to find the i don't trying to find the page i don't remember the page where um she actually lists oh i've i just found it on accident so yeah what you're putting out there, though, is obviously the sort of Eurocentrism aside. Oh yeah, she points out Buddha.

Oh, Buddha. The interesting point is that she makes sure to list non-theological figures as being equivalent to theological ones in the fight against the darkness. against the darkness because the way to fight darkness is by faith uh kindness scientific progress working for the good of humanity like she doesn't say it specifically but that's sort of the like in in a way you're supposed to be getting in a way anything that fights the darkness is anything that resists homogenization in a way anything that breaks the mold and that it's breaking the mold and also the propagation of like kindness yeah and love so like she lists things like uh like people like madam curie and einstein people who i i think from the perspective of this story are people who like meg and like others resisting it resist it by essentially being an individual

yeah being a unique thing maybe which okay no i was about to i haven't read enough sterner to comment but it's like um egoist egoist langle on all these things repressing the uh miraculous unique ego i mean kind of again i haven't read enough so to like do it and i know there's probably at least one or two listeners that would be very angry if we say something say like inaccurate things about egoism yeah so but it is interesting it's very much the like the fight against the darkness is the triumph of personal uh ingenuity and creativity and faith which is a very very pretty message i do enjoy that message because you know it prevents i think it prevents her her like theological presentation here from becoming too from being c.s lewis yes from being

c.s lewis no real shade thrown at c.s lewis but a little tiny bit of shade thrown at c.s lewis well specifically just the last battle yes yes the most alienating book in the series um uh which um that should have that'll have its own episode I'm sure yeah I figured we'd do one episode like per Narnia book I think I think we should save

generally we'll save that because I think most people are pretty aware of the politics in those books okay okay lying Jesus anyway so

and what we also learn here is that these three entities that are helping their children, we'll help them throughout the rest of the book, the Mrs. Who's and whatever, are angels, more or less. More or less. They're angelic beings. But you also learn pretty shortly here when they go see the medium, that one of the ways to fight the,

obviously you fight darkness with light. Okay. On their own stars fight the darkness because stars are beings of light. Like stars are, have souls in L'Engle's work here. Stars are soul bearing entities and they fight the darkness through the light they give off. And we see a situation which a light light a star literally like goes supernova essentially to like in like a big self-sacrifice to blast away the darkness around it um and then we find

out that that's essentially what the missus who and what's it are they're dead or fallen stars they were stars that did the sacrifice play to fight the darkness and now have to inhabit these somewhat lesser forms that are at times corporeal and incorporeal right um the the so they so it's like the soul of the dead star. Yeah. They're essentially the soul of a dead star. So in this world, stars are angelic beings and that after they die, they then can, it's probably not clear always, but they can then go on to these sort of, sort of lesser incarnations.

I don't want to call them beings cause they're not always corporeal. Like it takes them effort to appear in corporeal form, which I'm just going to point out again that in the Tolkien legendarium stars are sort of a gift from you know, the gods and the stars are always a symbol of hope in the legendarium and that anytime you see stars is supposed to be a representation of hope and that also the gods in tolkien's world are just spirit beings that have to spend effort to uh appear in corporeal form just had to if i didn't point that out there i would explode so

so they go see this cool like seer lady who just like has a crystal ball and can look at anything in the world whenever she wants i don't know what she's supposed to be a representation of but she's weird um she just kind of is she's a meat they call it the medium she can just like look in her crystal ball anything she's probably the most most lightly comedic character in maybe the whole book. Yeah, because she falls asleep. I can imagine if this were in a film that someone could just have that scene where she's just like – she's just talking to them and immediately just face plants on her crystal ball and just falls asleep. And everyone just sits around like –

But it's like a moment where everyone in the audience goes you know they chuckle a little bit there was a film adaptation of this i didn't see it it was not reviewed well yeah no um i had a difficult time based on what i knew of the movie i had a difficult time taking the introduction to the audiobook very seriously um oh because i didn't like the director or one of the actors or something? It was the director. And she's like notable

because she was like one of the, I don't remember if it was specific to Disney films because I believe Disney produced it. But she was a black woman director, which was a big deal at the time and was incredibly disappointing when the film came out. Well, they also cast like a black girl as Meg, which that's fine. I honestly like I don't have a problem with any of that. I just I just have a problem with what I know about the direction of the children as far as how they were presented as actors.

Like, just, like, especially the bits I've seen of Charles Wallace are really embarrassing. Oof. Like, obviously, children actors that are that young are obviously very difficult to get good ones. Yeah. But the thing about kid actors is it 99 of the time does not come down to the child it comes down to direction from the not everyone can be macaulay calkin but it's like but it's it's christopher columbus funny enough that his name is chris columbus he directed those films as someone who had done almost his entire career directing films

with kids yeah he also did like the first didn't he do like the first couple harry potter he did the first two harry potter movies um and actually what's really funny is he also directed the really terrible percy jackson movie um he intentionally aged up those characters purely because he didn't want to work with kids anymore because he'd spent like 25 years of his career working with kids. And he's like, I don't want to do children. Um, wasn't there an autumn, wasn't there an autumn, wasn't there an autumn as foul movie too? A what?

Wasn't there an art Artemis foul movie too? Oh yeah. That was a disaster too. That was a little bit ago. That was a Disney plus exclusive thing. Um, again, it's hard. Some as, as I was actually having a conversation with someone recently uh about uh the uh the dune movie that just came out and we were like talking about like

you're projecting the series further out when you get to some of the later novels and there's just some things that uh aren't meant to be on film yeah yeah there's some things you just can't adapt i don't i don't want to see later too on film ever to be honest with you it's not a thing i want to see um if you haven't read the later dune novels i'm not going to tell you if you should or not yeah sure is the thing the first one is one of the greatest books i've ever read in my life the other ones are. They're books. They sure are books that Frank Herbert wrote. So the unfortunate sort of failures of the movie aside here, we now get to these angelic beings now

take the children. The whole point, the children are going to rescue their father wherever he is. And the angels tell them that their father has been fighting this darkness, the black thing. And to go rescue their father, they're going to have to go onto a world that has been consumed by the darkness. A dark planet, as they call it. Because they don't have the ability to go in and do it. Yes. Cause these angelic beings can't like go in there and just do stuff themselves because of the power of the darkness.

However, they can send the children in, uh, because plot. Yes. So they can do just enough to get them there and get them out later. So they get in this dark planet. This is the, you've heard us reference. This is camerasazotz. Kamazotz. So you get to Kamazotz.

Kamazotz is a planet where everyone is exactly the same. All the houses look exactly the same. They have the exact same number of flowers. All the children play at the exact same time, the exact same way, and they all bounce their balls at the exact same time. The whole world is synchronized and technically it's technically everything is synchronized and um all the colors are very drab i don't think it's not black and white but like it's just drab everything is not presented as black and white but i had a hard time not imagining not imagining

it as just like gray scale right maybe with some there's a lot of gray going on yeah gray and i imagine a lot of brown there's red in specific places because she mentions it when they get to like the central intelligence she made sure not to call the place the cia she called it the cib the central intelligence bureau i think yeah either way she didn't just directly call the bad guy the CIA, but whatever, we can call it that. I'm going to say that would be cool. So Kamazats is a war

that's completely going on to this uniformity. What you learn almost right away is that they're not inherently uniform. It's a uniformity that is enforced from above. And it's enforced from above by the Central Intelligence, which we then later learn is it, the thing, the hive, the sort of overwhelming presence or mind that controls everything.

Now, it doesn't control all citizens directly. It's not like it doesn't have its little tendrils in every brain. citizens directly it's not like it doesn't have its little tendrils in every brain but it's just high level programming where people are conditioned to do exactly what they're supposed to do at exactly the right times uh to enforce this uniformity yeah one of the most like disturbing scenes in the book is that a child that you saw at the beginning that flubbed up bouncing his ball at the correct times you then see later in the prison of, in the, in the central intelligence thing,

essentially going through electroshock therapy while bouncing the ball in order to bounce it on time. Yeah. This child is taken and give you, I give an electroshock therapy to learn to bounce the ball properly. It's there's no, like there's none of the diodes or anything, but he's essentially in a room that if he bounces it incorrectly,

it torches it for him. So yeah, that's easily in my mind, that's easily the the diodes or anything, but he's essentially in a room that if he bounces it incorrectly, it torches him for it. So yeah, that's easily in my mind, that's easily the most disturbing thing that happens. It is. It is one of the most, and it's like almost like a throwaway. Like you just see him for a second and he's gone.

And Charles and the, uh, it speaking through the body of Charles Wallace is like, yeah, you saw that. That's what happens. He won't, he won't mess up again.

Like that's kind of like what that's basically what it says to them it's like yeah you see yeah and then it mentions like offhandedly that anyone who continually resists the stuff just gets put just put to sleep in quotation marks yeah so this is where i think um we can immediately we can do a little comparison bit with the giver for anyone who i i't know. I assume most people have read it. Cause I think most people, a lot of people have to read it in school. I don't think I read it for school.

I think I just read it. Cause I was a nerd, but so the giver obviously is this world where they've even like removed color and being a key thing, but like everyone is assigned a job. You do it the way it's assigned. If you get married, you're assigned a partner. And do it the way it's assigned. If you get married, you're assigned a partner.

And like whenever somebody gets too old, they get euthanized. They obviously in the giver, they call it there. It says they're released with people thinking that they then get to go live somewhere else. But obviously there's being euthanized. That's essentially what's going on here on Kamazats. Everyone has been forced to into their drab existence to follow the schedule on schedule even says like anyone that gets sick if you get like a cold euthanized if you like i don't know get a different disease euthanized you bounce the ball out of order too

many times euthanized so like we're talking genocide on like a mass youth we're talking like eugenicist like genocide on a mass scale here, planet wide scale, which got to be honest, a little heavy for a book for 12 year olds. Yes, pretty, pretty fucked. I think it's now. Now's the time. I think we can have a little discussion. We kind of had it in the DMs yesterday, but I think we should have it now is what angle the author is coming at here because a shallow reading of her critique of camazotz with its central intelligence and its uniformity a shallow

reading of it could be sort of the popular like american vision of what the ussr was you know what like the American life under communism. No one has fun. Everyone works in factory. Like it can be read that way, right? Like the sort of popular American view of communism, which wouldn't be that out of line considering she wrote this in 1962. There would have been a lot of anti-communism floating around.

But what we talked about is it doesn't necessarily we never get any indication from her that that's what she means inherently like she doesn't say it yes and what we talked about is that it could be what we talked about at the start which is simply a critique of hegemonic sameness right yeah just like systems kind of imposing sameness on everyone which like we talked about it can be a critique that the left makes of the american like way of life because even though people have sort of fake individualism we still have sort of uh enforced sameness right like we still have to fit this well yeah and and the the system still inherently rejects those who do not like fit within it who

do not like assimilate to it that's a that's especially why i think i think this book surprisingly despite being written in the 1960s and having zero queer characters whatsoever is a surprisingly this would be an empowering book this would have been an empowering book for me when i was a kid um as someone who would self identify as queer it's like this is like that idea of oh you don't fit well that's good it's a good thing it's like everything else around you that's wrong for telling you it's wrong yeah you know i well it just came to my head but it's like you're totally you're totally right it's if you know it's it's saying that like i mean it's meg's whole thing is saying yes i'm different and i like it

and that's what ends up leading to her being able to succeed in the end yeah she succeeds because she's different yeah she's different than it no i like that sort of that that the angle is that it could be empowering for anyone who's you know does does outside those outside those lines could be you know seed is queer positive or sort of neurodivergent yeah because the whole that's the whole message and here on kamazats it's just right it's just amped up to like 11 where like the punishment for not fitting in is death yeah basically every scenario um where while slightly exaggerated really isn't that much exaggerated past the way reality functions to a degree so it's like i mean in america right now what is like i i don't it's not too much of like

hyperbole to say that um variation from the norm in a lot of cases can lead to death well yeah at the very least leads to well yeah i mean obviously the hot button topic right now is is trans issues and it's like you see that happening constantly like the stuff just suddenly getting rolled back which i don't think we should have to state but i'm going to just for the record this is incredibly trans positive and supportive podcast and if you don't agree you can you know fuck off at all yeah like like i like it shouldn't have to say but i just want i i want that clearly on the record like even just i think it was even just yesterday i'm gonna i'm gonna come up with more pronouns

just so we can have more of them to make people mad even just yesterday there was like a tweet some some british organization hold on a second the organization didn't do anything wrong here but i know you're giving me that look this is legit i'm not going to say anything controversial some british organization hold on a second the organization didn't do anything wrong here but i know you're giving me that look this is legit i'm not going to say anything controversial here it was it was a post from a charity organization for young women like about asexual awareness and it was positive in that regard and all the comments underneath it were like the fuck like like i feel like none of these people knew what the word asexual meant because they were like they were like this is grooming and it's like what the fuck are you talking about this is like the opposite of

grooming this is telling people not wanting to have sex is like a thing that you're allowed to have that it's fine it's fine to not but these people were like apparently incapable of gleaning context even though i understand like for some of these people like anything with it that fits under the lgbt bubble is like seen as the same thing but at the same time it's like you'd feel like the prefix a attached to the word sexual put next to each other there should be some sparks in there as to what those words mean together like what it means syntactically now they don't learn that they don't learn that in british in english i'm like it's like apparently they couldn't even work that out to figure out like the roots of these words well enough to be able to interpret what

the word might mean i don't know if if that's just a thing that I do. I might be thinking too hard about this. The British Isles. They're just like the most openly vocal about it, I think, which is why they're so known. It's also actively creeping over into American politics now, which is – The thing is it's been under the water and on the surface sometimes in American politics for a long time.

Yeah, but it hasn't been like a preeminent issue in American politics. But it seems like it's getting more that way now, largely thanks to British culture war nonsense. I blame a crap ton of it on J.K. Rowling because of how big her audience is. Definitively blame a significant bit on J can very easily pin a huge amount of it on her just because of if her like umpteen bajillion twitter followers she tweets one thing on someday we're gonna do an episode on her and the whole episode is just gonna be uh shitting on her for like the whole episode will just be fart noises um it could be, yeah. We'll refocus here, but contrary to that sort of view that we're just talking about,

L'Angle presents a world in which those differences are literally like the most important and celebratory part of you. That neurodivergence, that which separates you from others is the part of you that it was most deserving of praise and celebration which i again you can read it shallowly as just like

yeah kids need to develop a personality as they go through puberty it's coming of age thing but because she scales it up to like a societal level i feel like her critique scales up with it it's not simply children coming of age and becoming themselves there's a lot more going on here because she presents it as a fight against such great forces you know it's not just it's not just that base level like teenager stuff like it's literally you can you're fighting you're fighting satan by like you know being the most pure expression of you your individual as you can be yes like you can literally fight satan by like embracing you know your like neurodivergent tendencies which which is... I'm just saying, as you know, like we were saying already, this is just egoist Madeline.

I'm just, you know, suddenly that little... I'm suddenly morphing into that little smoking drawing. Oh, yeah. Of Sterner that everyone knows. The drawing of him by Engels. The only...

It's an Engels self-portrait, is what it is. Sorry, i don't actually think that but it is a very funny not enough beard for it to be in it is it is a very funny meme that angles might have just made up sterner to fuck with marks um because if he did he came up with someone that i i i like a little bit oh is that a theory that stern that sterner is literally just Angles? It's a joke. Like, we know that that's probably not the case. Probably not.

Probably not the case. But it's a funny joke because the only image we have of him, the only record we have of him, is the stuff that Angles said about him and, like, the stuff he presented about him. So, like, all those drawings that everyone recognizes of stern are all angles drawings imagine being so powerful that the way you're remembered through history is your is like your opponents talking about you like constantly no one has any record

of you directly but there's a bunch of records of you existing because all the people that disagreed with you that's powerful that's just really funny um like i just i just love i just love thinking of it as as angles just fucking with marks like one day just coming into the coming into the office like have you heard about have you got volume three done yet have you heard about this guy he hates you it's like this is a theoretical are you against it god i hope to be someday so powerful that I'm simply remembered by all my enemies for being a cantankerous asshole. And then somehow that enemy of yours draws and pictures you. It is so awesome.

I get remembered forever by drawing somebody made of me when they're trying to make fun of me. Like that's honestly that drawing of Sterner is just cool as ice it's powerful um so the children get in here uh this is where you finally see the children's like flaws finally being brought to the like to the forefront and sort of flipped whereas charles wallace's like hyper intelligence that's been an asset up to now is now exposed for the arrogance that it is and the flaw that it is. Cause he believes that he can personally fight it on his own, like go in and come back out again,

which he obviously cannot. But in the same vein, this is where we see that script being flipped where Meg, what has been a flaw of Meg's up to this point, her orneriness, Meg, what has been a flaw of Meg's up to this point, her orneriness, her stubbornness is now an asset because that stubbornness allows her to resist the pull of of it. Right. Of the mind control, essentially. Now, I'm just going to throw this bone out there for anyone who's listening who may have read Mysterious Benedict Society that it strongly reminds me of the end of the Mysterious Benedict Society,

if anybody else knows what I'm talking about. I don't know if you've read it. It's a bit newer, but it's a similar, like, the reason that the heroes succeed is through stubbornness, essentially defeating the villain through... I just... Pure orneriness. Pure orneriness. I respect that so much. I just wanted toneriness, pure orneriness. I respect that so much.

So just I just wanted to throw that out there. If anyone has read one, but not the other. It's just a thought that came across my head. Well, so in this point, the children like interface with some guy that's essentially a puppet of it that like tries to mind control them and it goes through a lot of the typical what i would call typical stuff for like originally he originally tries to win them over through like sweet talk through words like oh don't worry we're on the same side relax you don't need to be stressed out everything's cool just hang out with me relax let me in and everything's gonna be fine and he sort of follows what i sort of call the typical trajectory where even though he doesn't really end up getting like getting too

upset it's that very much starts off with flattery switches to like you know sort of cajoling to berating you know sort of amping up the anger He kind of bargains a little bit where he's like, well, if you don't do this, I might not give you food. Yeah. It's very like manipulative in that. Like it starts with like sweet talk. And then when the sweet talk isn't enough, there's bribery. When bribery isn't enough, there's like sort of bargaining and cajoling, you know, and that's not enough. There's like veiled threats, right?

Like threats about their father. So it's a very like, you know, sort of handbook for manipulation, right? Like start with the love bomb, move on to like bribery that eventually escalate to veiled threats. Charles Wallace, of course, falls for it because he thinks he's smart enough to fight it and he's not. Meg resists it because she's stubborn. Calvin resists it because he's aggressively normal. Like, even though we're just saying

that uniqueness is the key, it's weird where Calvin is almost the opposite end of the spectrum, like all the way on the other end end where he's just so aggressively normal that like the brain does that. It doesn't know what to do with him because the brain's like, don't you want to join me and be normal? And he's like, I don't know, man, I'm pretty normal already. You know what I mean? Like Calvin sort of resisted by being so aggressively vanilla.

Like Calvin sort of resisted by being so aggressively vanilla. And I mean, his weird place in the story, he's called a good communicator, but it's like, I don't like she tries to establish him as being good at like communicating with other people. This is the Ron. I don't really.

Yeah. He really is the Ron character, but like way more personable than Ron. He's not nearly so like grading as Ron tends to be, especially in the later books. Like I found Ron to be somewhat insufferable in the later books. He's just grumpy the whole time, but not in a fun, grumpy way. Calvin's whole thing is just being like the facilitator. He's like, Hey guys,

what about just get along? You guys remember, we got told some hints before. Do you remember the hints? I remember the hints. You know what I mean? He's like, hey, guys, let's get along. You guys remember we got told some hints before. Do you remember the hints? I remember the hints. You know what I mean? He's just he's like a facilitator for like the two like the two weird kids. But again, just an aggressively normal boy. They managed to find the dad, Mr. Murray.

They kind of rescue him, but they can't rescue Charles Wallace. They have a confrontation with the brain, but they can't rescue Charles Wallace. They have a confrontation with the brain, which they can't do with it. They can't win because it's really powerful, so they test her away, leaving Charles behind. They go to a planet where no one can see. There's no eyes, so they can't describe vision, which even

as a kid, I'm like, okay, that's kind of it's not necessarily important to the story, but it is kind of a weird mindfuck as a kid. Yeah, to realize that you can't describe a sense to anything that doesn't have that sense. Excuse me, it reminded me of, what is the, there's a book where they have to go to a world that's 2D. Oh, well, that technically happens in here too. They go to a 2D world and they just get flattened. Yeah, they almost die.

But what's the name of the book? There's a book where they go to a world where everything is 2d and then there's like a struggle for the main characters trying to describe concepts like like left and right or up and down because the world doesn't have those concepts flatland flatland i just found it i just i literally searched 2d world book yeah so uh flatland flatland i just found it i just i literally searched 2d world book yeah so uh flatland is a story where um it's from 1884 it's quite old but it's it's a world where they like they get sent to like a 2d world and then like part of the struggle is obviously like concepts that can't exist in a world that does not have that dimension so when they go to this planet they test her to away from kamazots none of the creatures have eyes none of them ever had eyes they're honestly kind of like eldritch abominations they're a little bit cthulhu-esque

they're cthulhu-esque but soft and like kind of furry when they first showed up i was like what's this what's this like scion of cthulhu approaching from the deep holes of Relais? Like these big like tentacle monsters that are. They're tentacle monsters with no eyes, which seems weird. But then they're like super gentle and loving. Yeah. And covered in a soft fur. But one of the things is that like they don't have eyes and they've never seen.

So, and it realized sort of the limitations of humans that, like, we describe nearly everything through sight. Which, you know, you could also take as sort of a commentary on how we treat people with, you know, like disabilities, like people who are blind. But our whole world is described through sight. You know, how do you relate then to someone who's never seen anything? Right. Which now my brain just made a connection. I think you could connect a little bit of the theme here with all the way back to our first couple of episodes with Redwall, where the author seems to be, excuse me. I was woken up very early this morning by my upstairs neighbors banging on the ceiling, or their floor, my ceiling. Making sure there's a space in the story for

like people with disabilities, which is something that Brian Jakes did a lot in Redwall, right? Like we talked about that with his history with like working with children, especially disabled children and i think you you can pull that a little bit here with their world and camazotz with these creatures that have never seen the fact that they experience the world through a whole separate set of feelings like feeling the sun they feel the heat of the sun not see its light right and that their world is not lesser for it yeah it's. It's simply different. Meg then has to go back all on her own for plot reasons.

I don't know if they explain it. Calvin's not the right one and Dr. Marie's not strong enough. I don't know. Meg goes on her own because she has to. And she goes back and she has to face it one more time to free uh charles wallace and her hint is that she has to use the one thing she has that it cannot have and that of course is love the power of love it cannot love because all it requires all it requires is uniformity and obedience uh which is the antithesis of love because love is unique love is special like the love you feel for each person is a unique kind of love compared to the love you feel for somebody

else and so that love in and of itself is a powerful uniqueness that it and the the dark cannot comprehend which is an interesting take Like it obviously follows your themes directly because you wrote it, but I thought that was, I wasn't surprised that love was the answer, but I think it's interesting sort of relating it to the fact of like the uniqueness of it. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's a, that's, it's another way of presenting what's a pretty classic solution for especially fantasy or science fiction for young adults or children

they tend to lean on you know love is the answer yada yada um we had already mentioned harry potter that has you know muddled in there even though it's kind of in bad faith sometimes but like uh you know that's a pretty common trope throughout many, many young adult and middle grade fiction. You know, love will out. But presenting it as an expression of uniqueness is something a little new that I was very happy about. Yeah, because for the most part, it all does really fit nicely and neatly into that one central theme. Which is something I've always appreciated about middle grade and a lot of young adult novels. Is I think a lot of adult novels

especially novels that are that their target audience is adults sometimes get away from their central theme and i think a lot of the best ones attach themselves to a theme and stick to it very well and i think that's something that fantasy especially does very well um at telling these single singularly thematic stories about like a central core idea that has been expressed in 80 different ways we already talked about it with leguin where the whole shtick with earthsea was for all intents and purposes you know the that that central daoist theme of do by not doing is the act of the act of inaction is essentially one of the most important core elements of that whole story and because none of this shit would have gone wrong if he had just not done the thing and then his solution was to effectively stop trying to fight it. So I am

always impressed when singular themes are used to such extreme coverage. And I think the more and more we've talked about this, the more and more everything seems to fit that same central theme of difference and uniqueness being essentially the ultimate expression of good. being essentially the ultimate expression of good. Because that was also a central theme in our last episodes of His Dark Materials. Yes, it was. I would argue that uniqueness and that the ultimate good

is the epitome of self-expression for the individual. The creative will of man. That's what dust literally was in that series. Yeah, the creative will of man is the highest good you're right that's that's all over the place it's like it's like a running theme through a lot of things and i don't know i'm sure there are some people out there that would be like oh i'm sure there's some people that blame that on like western liberalism yes and like the enlightenment

well i'm gonna blame they're gonna blame that on the Enlightenment liberalism and the lifting up of the individual over society. individual collective dichotomy. It's like, I have a tendency to distrust anybody who thinks too hard about that being like an actual dichotomy that people follow along. When in reality, it's like these two things are intensely intertwined. It's like you don't really have the freedom of the individual without the freedom of the collective, and you don't have the freedom of the collective without the freedom of the individual. So it's like, I've always seen the argument over individualism versus collectivism in a very negative way. So, well, yeah, I would say that some of the ideas – because it's not like these people are like radical authors for the most part. I mean Le Guin is an exception. But like Pullman, he's a liberal.

Like I don't know Le Angle, but I'm going to – I'm going to pull out – I i'm just gonna i'm gonna go out and say she's not some sort of revolutionary just because the vast majority of people are are yet aren't like revolutionary like a vast majority of people are at least in this modern age influenced by enlightenment liberalism like that's that's like core to almost every nation on earth because nations are a very liberal concept so whenever somebody's like core to almost every nation on earth because nations are a very liberal concept. So whenever somebody is like, oh, man, this is liberal individualism. I'm like, whatever.

Like, what? Shut up. Like, shut up. Maybe. Maybe. It's like who really cares? Because at the end of the day, in the instance of this book, they're not wrong. No. It's like if anyone's going to sit there and try and tell me that the expression of the individual is a bad thing, like I'm just going to dismiss pretty much everything else you have to say.

Yeah, I don't really trust. I don't really trust. I think that like the personal must be entirely sublimated. Yeah. entirely sublimated yeah it's the individual must be entirely sublimated for the good of society because as we just discussed if you as an individual are entirely sublimated you can't possibly have a good society like well it's it's in essence there's that there's that central anarchist critique for for many anarchists a lot of people that you know some ancon like you know ancoms would probably call like posty

like a post lefty kind of thing of society itself being restricted to the individual yeah but of course things are a lot more complicated than that like even the people who criticize society as a whole i don't think are saying there should be no organization ever for any reason you know it's like that's not a thing that people i mean unless you literally are sterner well i don't even think that he necessarily because like the union of egoists is the thing so it's like he still had you know there were moments where people do have to work together to do things and he's like he just thought of a way that it would work in the least repressive way to the unique individual. And I think anyone that tries to argue that either the individuals aren't unique or that individual uniqueness is not something

that should be celebrated to an extent definitely falls out of my view of what I consider to be someone we should not really be taking seriously. Just because at the end of the day, it is kind of a false distinction you can't really have a free collective if the people within it aren't free to be themselves yeah it's like you could free them from all the exploitation you want it's like if they can't be themselves but but that goes to kind of but that but that leans into like the kind of vulgar conservative critique of communism when they don't really know what that means. It's like, well, everyone in communism wears the same pants and they all have to work at the same place at the same time and nobody can make any choices on their own.

Or where they're just like, oh, it's all about forcing people to be exactly the same. forcing people to be exactly the same and i'm like of course if your only impression of communism is from propagandized versions of marxist leninist states like it's it's pretty easy to twist the the external view of marxist leninist states into this sort of bizarre regimentary but the problem is is that most of the critiques they get leveled on that regard can be applied to liberal democracies too so it's it's just really bizarre just it's all it's a question of aesthetics yeah so because like yeah but so what we're saying is madeline l'angle max sterner's favorite fantasy author again this is sort of the shortest and most bare bones of the stories we read so far but there was still more here than i expected

to find right like the fact that we could even get off on like a tangent about the sort of the distinction between the individual and like, and the collective on a story that's based on like a 12 year old going to space to save her dad from a sentient brain. Yeah. Like from a hive mind blob brain. I think one last thing I think we should talk about is something you brought up, and it's not necessarily like a grander theme here. I think it's probably a bit of a leftover

from possibly the era in which this was written. But we wanted to talk a little bit about storytelling here in like, I think sort of in the way some of the children are portrayed can be a little off putting, I think, to a modern audience if you're reading it now. And not just like the pretentiousness of Charles Wallace or whatever. To me, it was like there's just some little weird bits. You specifically mentioned how like possessive Calvin kind of is over Meg, who he literally just met like a week ago i think in that in that instance it was one line that kind of threw me for a roll then also at the end it's kind of weird like calvin kisses her which i think is a little weird because he's 14 and she's 12

i mean i don't know but that's just like a middle school novel nonsense yeah i mean that's it's kind of the same thing in his dark materials where you have you have two kids that fall in love and smudge and then decide they can't love each other for the good of the universe. Yeah, that's a pretty big sacrifice they made, not going to lie. Hold on, where's the... Oh, yeah. Freaking, I'm passing the scene where Calvin came down from reading Charles Wallace to sleep and it turns out he read him the book of Genesis because as we know, Charles Wallace picked the book of Genesis. Which actually – so we need to amend an earlier statement. This is the first time we see a weird Christian – the Christian theme.

But it's – Charles Wallace's bedtime story is Genesis. But hold on. There's a bit here where calvin sees meg without her glasses because she's kind of she needs glasses oh it's just a bit where he's like i wouldn't want anyone else to see you without glass because then they'd realize i'm like do you know that this is the first time i've seen you without your glasses a blind as a bat without them i'm nearsighted like father well you know what you've got dreamboat eyes calvin said listen you go right on wearing

your glasses i don't think i want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have and i'm like dude you just freaking met this girl dude you met you literally got introduced to her like literally like that day i think that's the same day and then charles and then charles wallace is the cock blocker he comes in and he's like okay hold it you two i wasn't spying on you yeah it's i think it's literally later that same day like yeah it's later the same day they meet they meet calvin in the woods become instant best friends he shows up at home he's like your mom is really pretty therefore she's better than my mom yeah okay yeah maybe we should point that out maybe that's something we should point out about the like meg's mom mrs murray many times they reference how pretty she is to an equal or often more extent than the fact

that she's she's also a genius scientist she's like some sort of like bio molecular biologist or something oh yeah yeah she's a biologist her dad was a physicist so yeah um so she's like some sort of like a phd in biology doing experiments from home i don't know who for but they talk all the time about how hot she is she's a real dude like meg talks about how hot her mom is everyone else talks about calvin talks about how hot her mom is It's referenced that like other people In their town Talk about how hot she is In that it's weird that she hasn't

Left her MIA Hasn't like sort of in absentee Divorced her husband To like remarry Cause she's still young and hot Oh yeah like the principal and other people are like Yeah the principal is like your mom's so hot Why hasn't she remarried does she still think your dad's coming back pathetic and then meg's like why would why would my dad leave someone who's so hot like it's a little

like it's like an ongoing theme for like the whole first half of the book is how hot mrs murray is but like calvin literally comes in he's like gee whiz ma'am you're smoking you're way cooler than my mom my mom's ugly and you're like i don't i don't know if i enjoy this theme very much are you trying to find the page yeah i'm definitely oh yeah do you know how lucky you are it's like a mother like that a house like this gee your mother's gorgeous um you should see my mother she had all her upper teeth out and pop got her a plate but she don't wear it uh and most days she doesn't even comb her hair not that it makes much difference when she does but i love her that's the funny part of it yeah my mom ugly as fuck but i still like her uh but your mom is really hot can your mom be my new mom? She's hot. Fucking Fountains of Wayne starts playing in the distance.

Oh, God. And like. Stacy's mom has gone. Yeah, exactly. So like, yeah, just I did. I forgot about that when you started talking about how Calvin was talking about Meg. The fact that like everyone talks about how hot Mrs. Murray is and how it's weird that she had.

And the fact that she hasn't like moved on from her husband and father of her children, who's been gone for a few years. What I want to know is how this mom manages to still be a biologist, a very busy biologist, while also being a mother of four a single mother of a single mother of four well that's why she's doing her biology in her like lab that's attached to the house i hope she doesn't know she she better be getting paid well who does she work for who knows i think not explain i think there's i assume it's the government yeah i i i think there's a possibility that she's also getting stipends for her husband.

Well, I think that is true. Because the government still considers him under employ and doesn't tell her that they don't know where he is. Well, because to be fair, they don't know where he is. Well, yeah, but they don't tell her that. Because you put later that the group of scientists literally just like tests her away and then like everyone's like, where'd they go? Well, they drew straws and someone else went first. Henry, I think. and then i don't know later books but he they don't know where he went i don't i don't think we ever hear about it

oh he probably died yeah probably um but yeah then so i mean to be fair as we discussed in the timeline he's only been gone actually gone gone like one year earth time so i assume she's still receiving paychecks for him. Like, cause I mean, our government's bad, but like they would probably still be filling his paychecks. Cause like,

as long as he's considered an employee, alive and employed, alive and employed. Yeah. And even if he, if he was, if he was dead, then she'd get like his pension or whatever.

Well, yeah. In the 1960s, a government job. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. Yeah.

He'd be getting his pension. And so I'm assuming she also worked for the government. Cause I don't know who else would like just fund her to do science. Well, yeah, in the 1960s, a government job? Yeah, fuck yeah. Yeah, he'd be getting his pension. And so I'm assuming she also worked for the government, because I don't know who else would just fund her to do science experiments at home. It could be some university or some shit, I don't know. It could also be a university. Regardless, it doesn't really matter that much, but it is just kind of funny. There's just little quirks about it, because it was written in 1962. Damn, Meg, your mom is smoking.

Yeah, it's pretty intense. Can I be part of your family? He immediately decides to become part of her family,, your mom is smoking. Yeah. Can I be part of your family? He immediately decides to become part of her family because her mom is hot. That's about the level of decision making I was probably at in my early teens, so whatever. 14-year-old, he kind of checks out.

I don't know. Is there any other final thoughts? I don't think there's too much else to dive deep in this book. It's relatively simple but like there are way worse things to read oh yeah if you're like a middle school kid and like you want to read a book that like celebrates that you can be unique and that's cool and that like you know you can read into the themes that being you know being queer is fine or that being neurodivergent is fine and are actually assets to you in a world that's actively trying to destroy you and that's kind of implied that the reason the our world is

like that is because the darkness is trying to get us oh yeah the dark thing is the world yeah the dark thing is shadowing our world so it's sort of implied that like the things in life that are trying to beat you down into sameness are like is the dark stuff and so And so there's a way, way worse stories you could have for like a child who possibly, you know, doesn't necessarily feel like they fit in. Like you could have them read Harry Potter, for instance, would be way worse for them. So for what it is, I obviously, I think there's, there's a lot more than meets the eye for what it is, but in the end, it is still just a nice little, you know, kid's book about a hot mom and her kids that have to save their dad from an interdimensional space hive brain. Yes. I think the only one thing that I find funny is that every time they test her,

even with her dad, they somehow end up on a planet. And I'm like, do you know how difficult that would have to be? Yeah, they'd say that Mr. Murray's not even that good at it, but he still always manages to hit a planet. He doesn't test her into just the vacuum of space which is the most of everything kind of like they kind of in a way mention kind of wave it away in one instance when when the uh the missus the many missuses the three angels essentially say that like everything is essentially weighted the same so that even even a speck as small as the earth on a span can create so many great minds yada yada they kind of in a way write it off um as like everything being weighted the same and every point of importance being just the same as

everything else which i i i forget exactly how they describe it maybe that's what happened to the first guy he just tessered into the vacuum of space oh yeah it's his uh i know it's hard for you to understand about size how there's very little difference in the size of the tiniest microbe in the greatest galaxy you think about that and maybe it won't seem strange to you that some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet and it's a little planet out on the edge of a little galaxy you can be proud that it's done so well fun fact if you go into the later books they're essentially doing the same fight against the dark thing in a wind in the door and swiftly tilting planet. But in some of the later ones,

you actually see the other end of it where you go to the micro. At one of the books, they literally go down to like, they're inside of Charles Wallace's mitochondria. They're like inside of a cell. She really likes reading the newest hot science and then including it in her books.

They're literally like looking at like DNA strands. They're looking at the powerhouse of the cell yes like but like literally they go in and like charles wallace is sick because his at the cellular level his cells are experiencing disharmony and disruption due to like you know evil or whatever and then they have to like it's it's pretty pretty poetic from what i remember but the way like each little individual part of his cell has a personality and a job. And they literally shrink down to heal Charles Wallace. I don't remember which one that is.

It might be A Wind in the Door, Twipsy Tilting Planet. I don't remember. It's been forever since I've read them. So yeah, if she's just reading the latest science and then including it in in her stories that's kind of cool like a like a sort of a fantasy light version of michael crichton it was like what new science can i talk about in my book um but unless you have anything else i think that's it i think we should be good and so no any final thoughts there katho nope i think we've really covered the breadth of this just a very enjoyable simple, simple book that has, I think, a really decent message. Just don't listen to the audiobook.

Yeah, I would not recommend the audiobook. Get it. Read it. It'll take you like two days. Yeah, I was about to say, once I actually finally sat down to read it, I'd gotten like a third of the way through, but it had taken me so long because I was super busy. In one night, I managed to punch out the rest in an hour and a half. It's meant for young kids, but even as an adult, you can get a little joy out of it. It's fun.

Just please be easy on Charles Wallace in the beginning. He gets better. You're not going to like Charles Wallace for the first four chapters. You're not going to like him. It's fine. Yeah, I think that should be it for us. Next episode coming up is probably going to be sort of like a bonus, unique episode on not a novel,

just a different topic that we want to have some thoughts about, because the one after that is more than likely is going to be on at least one or two of the major themes from Dune because we are hot and topical, but there's way too much in Dune for us to cover in a episode or even a short series of episodes. We're probably just going to cover a, you know, a theme or two that we want to pull out. Maybe we'll just stay on theme and talk about the religious parts first. This boy certainly needs to make time to reread Dune. Yeah, so since we both have jobs and need time, we're going to spend a couple weeks rereading Dune.

And because of incredibly dumb DRM bullshit, my library has a handful of digital copies of the Dune audiobook instead of an unlimited number of them because DRM is really stupid and companies are unnecessarily charging your libraries for repeated access to audiobooks. Um, the most, the shortest or potentially the estimated wait time for me to get ahold of the book is 22 weeks because there are 19 people ahead of me again. It's because we're topical. Yeah, I know because the, well, they just released the audio book at my library. Like the version of my library got was released at the same time as the movie. Oh, see my library already had a version. I will say I enjoyed the the narrator for the dune of the audiobook that i listened to uh so hopefully the one you get if you do

eventually get it and listen to it it's good but in the meantime we're gonna have to read it yeah i'll probably just have to read it physically because i'm sure that these books that the versions of that i have have appendices and i'm gonna have to reference those so i'm gonna keep a hold of that yeah right um but no so next up uh next week will be probably will be one where we probably chat about like i don't know a video game or a movie or something like that that we think has some fun themes to talk about uh but then ideally the week after that will be uh an episode about the worm planet. Yeah, the highest selling science fiction novel of all time.

Dune. You know, like I said, maybe we'll stay on theme and we'll start with religion. And we'll start with the religious parts of Dune. Since that seems to be the theme we're on. Who knows? But thank you all for listening. I appreciate you downloading the show. You know, do

the podcast stuff, go to iTunes and tell them we're cool. Tell your friends we're cool, you know, fulfill my teenage fantasies and have tell people I'm cool. And, you know, in order to keep up with whatever we're putting out,

we try to release, well, we're starting to try to release things once a week, usually on a Sunday night night or monday morning um yep but uh in order to keep up with whatever we're putting out um you can go ahead and follow us on twitter which is where we're most active as most lefties are uh if they're if they're active on social media at all uh well that would be at swords in sock pod. That's S W O R D S. The letter N S O C pod. You can follow me at himbo underscore anarchist,

and you can follow Ketho at stupid Puma 69. That's right. Again, the best handle on the show. It's okay. Except for when, except for when Nicole's here. I'm just waiting for someone to comment

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or you can send us an email at, I believe that is swordsandsocialismpod at protonmail.com. We have gotten some mail with some people asking us questions, referencing episodes we've already done. That was awesome. We love hearing from you. Yeah, it's really, really exciting um especially if it's if it's good if it's mean i know whatever i don't care but i mean if you want to send me if you want to send me a mean message that means at least you took the time to send me a message so that's something um um you know insert comic here of the guy who peed his pants and thinks he's living and everyone's heads rent free because they're

laughing at him so even if you spend the time to send me angry mail you're still sending me mail uh yeah thank you very much for listening uh we will see you next week for something fun question mark yeah goodbye bye