With Intersecting Eternity (paperback, Kindle), author Margaret A. Babcock is presenting a follow-up to her 2021 science fiction space opera novel Eden.2.
Except that, as she explains in the following email interview about Eternity, this novel is less a sequel and more like a chronologically distant relative.
For people who didn’t read it, what was your novel Eden.2 about, and when and where was it set?
The time frame for Eden.2 is from 2062 to 2079, so not too far into the future.
A small group of humans, including scientists and settlers of different religions, embark on a journey. They escape a dying Earth, facing challenges of space travel and creating a viable community on a new planet. The protagonist, Jerry Nichols, is an Episcopal priest and his husband Rob is the crew’s exobiologist. They receive help from a mysterious entity, which changes them all and opens unforeseen possibilities. But then a sister ship arrives and upsets the delicate balance they’ve achieved with their new world.
The epilogue in Eden.2 takes place sixteen years after the main story, and cracks the door for the sequel.
And then, for people who have read Eden.2, and thus can ignore me writing SPOILER ALERT, what is Intersecting Eternity about, and when and where does it take place in relation to Eden.2?
My tagline for Intersecting Eternity is: mysticism meets science fiction in this tale of a sentient planet gone silent as humans struggle to survive.
It begins with a prologue set in 2121, just twenty-six years following the end of Eden.2, which forms a bridge between the two stories. Then it jumps ahead to a new era.
The first novel solves the mystery that the planet, called Goldilocks — or Goldie by the settlers — is sentient and can communicate with them. But now, 130 years after first contact, the bond between people and the planet has broken. Plagues and hunger threaten the human population’s survival.
Alice, a young woman on the brink of adult life, discovers the history of the forgotten partnership with Goldie, which even her lover, Dinah, now denies. Together with unlikely allies, she seeks to reestablish the link between people and planet, but time is running out to save a future for humanity in this new world.
When in the process of writing Eden.2 did you come up with idea for Intersecting Eternity, and what inspired this second book’s plot?
Sometime after writing the first or second draft of Eden.2, I put it away for a while to let it stew and wrote a short story. That story grew by fits and starts into this second novel. None of the characters in that tale were in Eden.2, but it was the same world…though the community had evolved in ways that intrigued me. I liked the idea of exploring how a society develops or devolves and what forces shape that change. I had a suspicion that how we connect with our past and how seriously we take a reality that exists outside of our human limitations influences us a lot. I got the protagonist wrong for a long time, though. I thought she was going to be a wise old woman and instead, Alice showed up and stole the show.
So, is there a significance to this story being set in 2203 as opposed to 2033 or 2112 or even 12203?
I actually struggled with this a bit. I needed at least one person to remember the relationship between people and planet that had been established in Eden.2 so that memory could be passed on. Elena, the protagonist’s great-great aunt, serves this purpose. She was born at the time of a major turning point in the planet’s history (which the reader experiences in the prologue) and lived through the crises which bring the population to the point where the novel starts. Her stories of the past become a kind of map for Alice as she navigates the present, trying to find a way into a viable future. So, calculating the years from the flash point of change to Elena’s advanced age of 83 gave me the beginning year of the novel.
Eden.2 and Intersecting Eternity sound like they’re sci-fi space opera novels, though I could see them also being hard sci-fi stories, or hard sci-fi space opera stories. How do you classify them, genre-wise, and why that way?
These stories are character driven, rather than heavy on science and technology, so I suppose they fit in the space opera box. I hope, though, that they are not formulaic and shallow, as some people have come to think of the genre. Truly great space opera taps into the deep questions and challenges of being human, and that is what I aimed for.
The lovely thing about science fiction is that it lets us shed the boundaries of life as we know it and grapple with these basic issues from new angles and perspectives. Both of my books, but especially Intersecting Eternity, explore mysticism, i.e. our capacity to be jolted out of the confines of time and space into moments which somehow connect us to the Whole.
Having said that, both books are action stories. I love a good mystery and in both novels there is a central mystery to solve and lots of barriers and dangers to overcome.
Intersecting Eternity is obviously not your first novel. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Intersecting Eternity but not on anything else you’ve written, and especially not Eden.2?
A long time ago, before I wrote either book, I read a fantasy novel in which the protagonist was an old man setting down memories in his journal. The author was so skillful at this device that the form stayed with me even though I can no longer recall which book it was. (It may have been one of the great Robin Hobbs’.) It had a vibe like C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, which consisted solely of letters between two demons. Peeking over someone’s shoulder to read their thoughts creates a very intimate experience of the character’s world view and I wanted that feel for Intersecting Eternity. I initially thought Elena and the stories she wrote down for posterity would be the spine of the book, but, as I said above, Alice came along and insisted on more action. However, I came to love the back and forth between Alice and her elderly aunt in a way that surprised me.
What about non-literary influences? Was Intersecting Eternity influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?
I’m not remembering any influences from those sources, but I will tell you that a book by theologian Beatrice Bruteau, Radical Optimism, sparked a deep interest in looking at time closely and in a different way. This shows up in the novel as speculation about where the boundary between past, present and eternity exists and how that line may be more porous than we assume.
And how about your cats? Did they influence Intersecting Eternity at all?
My cats and other animals I have encountered teach me that all relationships, even those with such alien beings as felines, shape my soul. In fact, an ability to love what is different is essential to love anything at all.
Now, the planet in my novels obviously can support life, but she is a very young planet. The people who first traveled to her didn’t expect to find any life other than plants, insects, fish and maybe a few lizard-like creatures. So, I sympathized with how hard it would be to leave Earth and the animals here to settle in such a sterile environment. That sympathy led to the short story which later grew into Intersecting Eternity. In Elena’s tale
In the first of Elena’s stories, her memories, “A Bridge To Before,” which Alice reads, the reader will meet Pip, the cat who supervised the writing of Eden.2, and the beginning of its sequel, before returning to eternity herself.
Because we cannot live without cats, we then invited Susan and Lucy (named after the girls in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series) into our lives. Pinkie joined us as a foster when my son and grandsons couldn’t keep her…but I don’t think we will ever let them reclaim her.
Susan, Lucy, Pinkie
Now, as we’ve been discussing, Intersecting Eternity is the sequel to Eden.2. But do the two books form a duology, are they the first two installments of a trilogy or something similar, or are they just the first two books in an ongoing series?
I like your phrase “stand-alone but connected.” My books can be read independently, like you can read Tolkien’s The Hobbit and / or The Lord Of The Rings. The first gives background to the second but isn’t necessary to understand it. And if you stop at reading the first, you still have a complete story. However, like me, the reader might wonder what will happen in the future.
I seem to be the kind of author who keeps speculating about my characters (and in these novels, the planet Goldie is one of the main characters). I don’t have the outlines of two or three other novels just waiting to be written, but I included an epilogue to Intersecting Eternity. That might be the jumping off place for the next connected novel.
On the other hand, I’m experimenting with writing short stories to expand on minor characters who have intrigued me in the two novels I’ve already written. If readers would like a sample, they can sign up for a free story at my website: www.margaretbabcock.com.
So then if, as you just said, Eden.2 and Intersecting Eternity “can be read independently,” what would someone get out of Intersecting Eternity if they did read Eden.2 first?
While the two novels share certain themes and a common planet, they are very different stories. The reader of Eden.2 will meet all new characters in Intersecting Eternity and find that life on the planet has taken an unexpected and dark turn.
It might be worth noting that experiencing Eden.2 first sets the reader up to understand more quickly the nuances of the society which Intersecting Eternity drops them into. Any story taking place on an alien planet will have strange customs and its characters will assume a state of the world which the reader has to catch up with. While most of Intersecting takes place a long time after Eden.2, the first novel provides clues as to why that culture developed the way it did. Again, it’s not necessary to the understanding of the story, but it is satisfying.
Earlier I asked if Intersecting Eternity was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Eden.2 and Intersecting Eternity could work as a series of movies, a TV show, or a game?
I love a good TV series because they have so much more time to develop complex and interesting characters. I think both novels would work well in that context…maybe Eden.2 in season 1 and Intersecting Eternity as season 2.
And if someone wanted to make a TV show based on Eden.2 and Intersecting Eternity, who would you want them to cast as the main characters?
If this was a quiz instead of an interview, I would completely bomb at this question. I don’t keep up with actors at all. I also am so enamored with my characters that it’s hard to see them in real people.
That said, I just watched Silo, a TV series based on Hugh Howey’s Wool novels, and was so impressed with the cast. I suspect the key is to find actors who disappear into the novel’s characters. Wouldn’t it be great to give upcoming performers the chance to star in a new, creative show? (I promise I’ll learn all their names)
So, is there anything else you think people need to know about Intersecting Eternity?
During times of darkness in the world, stories are so important. They not only give us relief from everyday angst, but sometimes jolt us into different perspectives, which bring us back to reality calmer, stronger, more able to see beauty and possibilities in life. Writing Intersecting Eternity has been this kind of journey for me. I hope it will be a similar experience for the reader.
Finally, if someone enjoys Intersecting Eternity, and they’ve already read Eden.2, what sci-fi space opera novel or novella of someone else’s would you suggest they check out?
If they haven’t yet found Mary Doria Russell’s work, her novels The Sparrow and its sequel Children Of God are wonderful and include both spiritual themes and fascinating aliens.
I also recently read Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population. If my readers appreciate the inclusion of a very different protagonist — a smart, funny, independent old woman — they’ll love this book. And again, great aliens.
