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Jensen Intercepted
Author Jane Jensen on her near-future thriller, Dante's Equation.
With clever science, baffling Torah code, devious secret agents and
just a little bit of romance, what more could you want from a book?
Last month saw the publication of Jane Jensen's terrific near-future thriller Dante's Equation . It's a novel that's bristling with clever science, baffling Torah code, devious secret agents and just a little bit of romance. We tracked down book publisher Orbit's newest star to find out more ... Congratulations on the publication of Dante's Equation. What was the idea that sparked this incredible thriller, and how did you begin to weave together all these gripping plot-strands?
The idea was to convince you not to have desire for anything. What struck me was that yes, all these things were true, but there are equally good things about all of these items that the poem's author was ignoring. The more I thought about it, the idea grew of the perfect symmetry of it, that everything is exactly fifty-percent good and fifty-percent bad, just as everything in our universe is split between opposites - male/female, dark/light. It's only our subjective opinions that make us believe things are relatively better or worse. This was an exciting core idea to me and grew into the story for Dante's Equation. As for weaving together the different plots - a lot of plotting and lay-out work is involved. As your work may be new to some readers, can you describe the novel in a nutshell?
In perfecting it, she discovers a universal wave - a kind of modulator - that's exactly crest-trough, fifty-fifty. She begins experimenting to figure out what this wave does, how it affects matter. In the meantime, there are three other characters in the story. There's a rogue Marine whose job it is to hunt down dangerous new weapons technology for the Department of Defense, an Orthodox Rabbi in Jerusalem who discovers messages in the bible code about a Polish physicist and Kabbalist who died at Auschwitz named Kobinski, and a reporter for a paranormal magazine who's also on to Kobinski because he was said to have disappeared from Auschwitz in a blaze of light. What the book is really about is good and evil, and that's why the story explores not only some of the most evil things that have happened here, like the holocaust, but even explores the ideas of heaven and hell. Kabbalism is of central importance to the story - is this something you've always been interested in? And do you think there's any particular reason why it has become such a hot subject over the last few years? Yes, I think Kabbala is like Nostradamus - it's an ancient science that has the ambiguity to be read many ways and, in that sense, is a great mediation tool, a way to reflect and enhance and expand your own ideas. I honestly can't say that I have studied it extensively. I listened to an audio course several years ago by Rabbi David Cooper, who has a wonderful way of taking these very complex ideas and applying them to our modern lives. His work focused on the sephirot, the different attributes from the Tree of Life. Kabbalists believe everything in the universe if made up of these sephirot. As an example, one of them is Gevorah, judgment or restriction. To me this is the tendency to hold in, to be rigid and closed, conservative. Its opposite is Chesed, which is pure openness or liberality. In Kabbala the idea is to be balanced between these extremes - not too closed and not too open. The sephirot are embodied into my story not only as characters (Handalman is Gevorah and Wyle is Chesed) but they also strongly shaped my depiction of the heavens and hells. These things are subtle - the book, I hope, reads as a thriller to someone who is not into these things, but they are there if you look for them. The physics in the novel is also extremely convincing - is it based on existing theories? Do you have a background in this field? No, this was the challenging part for me. I'm much better at religious theory than science! The main ideas are from books like The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, which I read a long time ago and which never left me. The idea that all matter is energy waves in the higher dimensions has been around a long time and is, in fact, quite true. As well as a convincing multi-strand plot, you've developed some truly believable characters - from very different walks of life. Was it easy to write from so many different perspectives? Did some characters prove more troublesome than others? One of the interesting challenges in Dante's Equations was that I wanted to write my characters based on the Kabbala sephirot. In fact, I was forced to do this, because I had set up my system of heavens and hells based on certain sephirot, and if I wanted my characters to visit these heavens and hells, they had to belong there, they had to be out-of-balance people, each an extreme of one sephirot or another. But this challenge was actually quite stimulating. I think as a writer sometimes it is better to have very strict requirements because it helps you to focus instead of being distracted by unlimited choices. I thought a long time about each sephirot, such as Gevorah - judgment - and what it would mean if you were completely the embodiment of that principle as a person. It gave me the basis for my characters and each of them blossomed quite wonderfully from that core idea. I think Jill was probably the most troublesome because her character is so naturally stoic and cold. It was hard to make her interesting to the reader, so her assistant Nate came to the rescue to make her scenes more lively. DANTE'S EQUATION refuses to be pigeon-holed into a certain genre. It's sure to appeal to fans of thrillers, mysteries, SF and fantasy. Does this reflect your influences as a reader? Yes, I suppose so. My reading tastes are eclectic. Everything I write has a mystery/thriller feeling to it because I plot that way - my characters uncovering elements of some bigger picture or mystery. The fact that Dante's Equation is SF is really incidental - or even accidental. It's SF because it involves technology and in order for me to fully explore my theme I was required to visit other worlds. But I don't really consider myself an SF writer. If I had to classify Dante's Equation or my previous novel, Millennium Rising, as anything, I would call them as Metaphysical Thrillers. What genre - and non-genre - authors do you most enjoy reading? I don't think fiction should be difficult to read, I think it should be fun to read, but it shouldn't be brainless either. Some of the authors I enjoy reading are Neil Stephenson, Michael Crichton, and Dan Brown. I also read mysteries and some of my favorite authors are Minette Walters and Elizabeth George. I also read non-fiction, usually on religion, the occult and paranormal or history. What are you reading now? Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Are you still involved in the computer games scene? And do you think this has influenced your fiction? Yes, I am. I'm working on a new game series that involves a neurobiologist from Oxford and a young American street magician and their search for legitimate powers of the mind. I find that my storytelling is quite similar between the games and books, but I'm not sure if that means my games are inherently book-like or my books are inherently game-like! What are you working on now? My next novel is still a bit of a question. I've started several projects, but I'm not sure which one will become the next book. It will probably be a ghost story. Thanks to Orbit Books (and Ben Sharpe) for permission to post this interview. For more details of their SFF authors and books, visit Orbit at www.orbitbooks.co.uk
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OTHER CONTENT - March 2004
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I
took a class in Eastern Religions several years ago. While reading
a book of Buddhist scripture I came across a poem that described
how miserable everything was - women decay and grow old, your best
friends are really only out for themselves, food turns into putrescence
in your stomach, etc. 
In
Dante's Equation an obscure physicist stumbles across an amazing
discovery - a physical law of good and evil. She is working on an
equation that predicts the behavior of matter particles by translating
them into energy waves. 
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