Dontaná McPherson-Joseph Interviews Alexandra Oliva, Author of The Radiant Dark
Science and fiction—you can almost sense the tension between those two words. Science is serious, it wants evidence and facts. Fiction is playful, it imagines and creates and does whatever the hell it wants.
All of which makes the science fiction genre irresistible. The talent needed to hold those two opposing notions—science and fiction—together in the same literary work is surely proof of superior intelligence.
In The Radiant Dark, Alexandra Oliva delivers on that promise—Dontaná McPherson-Joseph’s starred review in Foreword‘s May-June issue confirms as much—and we were thrilled when Alexandra agreed to take a few questions from the reviewer’s probing mind.
The Radiant Dark is about many things, but it is a novel of first contact. The Rossians, so named because their home planet is known to Earth as Ross 128 b, reach out with a repeating pattern of flashing lights. Have you always been interested in space and the idea of humanity not being the only intelligent life in the universe? How did this idea come to you?
I grew up in a beautiful, rural mountain town that had the most incredible night skies, and while I never had much interest in memorizing constellations, I loved to find my own patterns and think about what might be out there. I also read a ton of science fiction as a kid, and for as long as I’ve wanted to be a writer (pretty much forever), I’ve wanted to write a novel involving extraterrestrials. It was just a question of when, and how I would make the story uniquely my own.
I found my angle in 2017 while listening to a podcast in which a linguist and an astronomer discussed the movie Arrival. The astronomer made a comment about how the movie is a fantastic portrayal of how we might try to communicate with an alien species if they were to just show up, but, in reality, if we do ever make contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, it’s much more likely to be via radio waves. The civilization could be tens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of light-years away, in which case, communication would take generations to unfold. I remember him making a jokey comment along the lines of “but there’s no way to make that exciting,” and I immediately thought, “I can! I can make that exciting!” The basic framework of the story came to me then and there, though the execution took years.
There is a lot of science in this book. It is fascinating and filled with big concepts like mathematics, spectroscopy, deep space communication, and space exploration. They are so well-explained and integrated into the narrative that they aren’t overwhelming. What was the research process like for the technical aspects of the book?
It’s such a relief to hear the science is coming through well—when I started writing this book, I was very intimidated by that aspect of the story. I’ve lost track of how many lay-person science books I read, how many memoirs of astronomers and astronauts, how many scientific articles I could just barely wrap my head around. But the most important step in my research process was attending the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, a fantastic week-long program led by two astronomers (Mike Brotherton and Christian Ready) who are passionate about getting accurate science into pop culture. Throughout five days of classes, I took eighty pages of notes, asked countless questions, and gathered so many ideas. It was incredible. Never in a million years could I have written this book the way I wanted to if not for that experience. The revision process was also very important for the more science-heavy scenes; it took many iterations and refinements to find that sweet spot of conveying what needs to be conveyed while keeping the story moving.
At the center of the novel are Carol and her children Michael and Ro. Michael and Ro have such different relationships with their mother as a result of their childhood and the discovery of the Rossians. How did you find the emotionality, tenderness, and angst in their collective story?
I’m a daughter, and a sister, and a mother. The emotional core of this story comes from life experience and an honest effort to find and establish empathy for individuals on all sides of difficult relationships. The timeline of this book (the main action takes place over about five decades) also provided the perfect opportunity to take a deep dive into the way relationships change over time. Sometimes that change involves decay, and when you’re on one side of a broken relationship it’s very easy—and tempting—to frame the person on the other side as being entirely at fault. But just because it’s easy doesn’t make it true, and one of my goals with this novel was to write nuanced relationships with complex, real-feeling dynamics where individuals make plenty of mistakes and bad decisions, but no one is a villain.
In a book that is so much about the possibilities of the universe, what made you choose to also root the story in this very contentious relationship between Carol and Ro, a mother and a daughter relationship that remains estranged despite their similarities?
The central irony of this book is that we have Earth and an alien civilization eleven light-years away communicating with each other fairly effectively, but people living in the same house who can’t. Exploring this tension was one of my favorite things about writing The Radiant Dark, and as soon as I had the idea for the book, I knew I wanted to root the story in a mother-daughter relationship. Probably because I was pregnant with my first (and only) child, and because my relationship with my mother has been consistently difficult since I was a preteen. Carol and Ro’s dynamic is its own thing and the specifics evolved over time (and many rounds of revision), but from the beginning I was really drawn to this idea of digging into how a parent-child relationship could deteriorate over the course of a lifetime and how painful that must be for the people on both sides of the relationship.
We’ve heard the phrase often in recent years that “no one joins a cult,” they’re looking for like-minded people in search of connection. Carol finds that in the Universalists. Are the Universalists based on any real cult or community based in extraterrestrial spiritualism? What was the experience delving into that aspect of the book?
Creating and writing about Universalism for this book was so much fun. I knew I wanted Carol to go on a spiritual journey and I, personally, don’t find organized religion very interesting, so it was clear to me early on that a cult was the way to go. But I also understand that people join these things for a reason. By the time Carol is introduced to Universalism, she is desperate for any sense of warmth, connection, and belonging—which she finds there. My primary inspiration for the organization of the group was The Theosophical Society (with a bit of Scientology and the Moonies thrown in), as it was important to me that Carol have a public-facing life and continued contact with her children, versus being isolated in some compound somewhere. The specifics of Universalist ideology emerged as I found ways to draw connections between Earth and Ross 128 and thought about how someone who was so inclined might distort scientific facts into comforting pseudoscience. I often get impatient and annoyed when people do this in real life, but doing it in fiction was really fun. I can see the appeal!
Finally, what do you hope readers will connect with and take away from this novel?
My answer for this tends to shift, as I didn’t write the story with any specific takeaway in mind, but a number of early readers have told me that the book gives them a sense of hope for the future. That’s a pretty amazing thing to hear, and if this story helps even a handful of people shift into a more hopeful place, I’ll consider that an incredible accomplishment.
Dontaná McPherson-Joseph
