10. Madeleine L’Engle
If you’re an English-speaking kid of a certain age, then chances are good that you’ve encountered A Wrinkle in Time, the first book in the Time Quintet series. Even if you somehow managed to skip that experience, the impending release of the 2018 film adaptation of the book will put it on your radar soon.
Of course, you can’t fairly reduce author Madeleine L’Engle to a single book of hers. Neither is it entirely fair to call her a “fantasy” author. It’s not just that the books in the Time Quintet throw out scientific terms like “tesseract” or introduce characters like a brilliant family of scientists and heavy thinkers. L’Engle’s work also frequently qualifies to be “science fiction” thanks in large part to her willingness to put out grand ideas on a universal scale. Sure, there aren’t spaceships, exactly, but you’ll hardly notice between the alien planets and powerful cosmic beings.
L’Engle was another author whose personal religious views found their way into her writing. In particular, she was an Episcopalian who believed in universal salvation, essentially a doctrine positing that everyone will be saved regardless of what they did or believed in their mortal lives. Some of these views made their way into her works, though thankfully it’s subtle than something C.S. Lewis would have written for kids.
As you may guess, universal salvation is a contentious stance to take. It led to her works being banned from Christian schools and stores, while other critics thought she had injected too many of her religious views into an ostensibly secular work. Regardless of where you think you might fall, check out A Wrinkle in Time if nothing else. L’Engle has made her way into the young adult and science fiction canons for good reason.