"Where is everybody?" Thats the question physicist Enrico Fermi posed to his Manhattan Project colleagues now 70 years ago. They knew what he meant. Decades of reaching out to intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, and no response. Zero. Nothing. A fact which remains true today. Mont Babel sling-shots off the Fermi paradox using the opposing forces of father and son. Jim Benedicts a humanist, a man of the word, his son an engineer whos bored by Shakespeare and likes the NFL. 'In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was the Big Bang: two party bumper stickers of our current malaise,' writes Jim Benedict. Father and son rarely communicate. If they do, it is by email. What brings them together is the lovely Iris Doubt, Tom Benedicts south African geologist girlfriend, one of the Ariel School children who claimed to have been visited by aliens. Now working in Canada, she spends her free time as invitee to UFO conferences and as investigator of impact craters, one of which is loeil du Québec, Mont Babel. Macrocosm meets microcosm in Mont Babel, quantum mechanics and astrophysics, neutrinos and black holes, raising questions about perception and consciousness, heaven and family peace.
Keith Henderson has published four other novels with DC Books, The Restoration (1992), The Beekeeper (1990), The Roof Walkers (2013) and Sasquatch and the Green Sash (2018), political essays from when he was Quebec correspondent for the Financial Post (Staying Canadian, 1997), as well as a prize-winning book of short stories (The Pagan Nuptials of Julia, 2006). He led a small provincial political party in Quebec during the separatist referendum of 1995 and championed anglo language rights and the strategy of partitioning Quebec if ever Quebec partitioned Canada. He has taught Canadian Literature for many years.
Keith Henderson was born in Montreal. Educated at McGill, Concordia, and the University of Toronto, he teaches English at Vanier College in Montreal. He was elected leader of Quebec's Equality Party in 1993. He was an intervener in the historic 1998 Supreme Court of Canada decision of unilateral declarations of independence.
"Mont Babel explores the prickly edges of Science and Religion as Hendersons protagonist, Professor Jim Benedict, is unexpectedly invited by his estranged son, Tom, to meet a beautiful geologist, Iris, famous in the ufology scene since her childhood close encounter 'experience'. In his precarious efforts to navigate this father-son reconciliation, Benedict reluctantly contemplates the possibility of alien visitations through conversations with Iris who shares her impressions of the extraterrestrial visitors as non-interfering, discreet/discrete masters of 'existential decorum'. As the young scientists, Tom and Iris, challenge Professor Benedicts 'literature and epistemology' worldview, in their common quest for knowledge, they scale philosophical as well as geological heights, the Stratosphere of Las Vegas, and plummet into sinkholes, both emotional and volcanic. An intellectual tour de force worthy of Umberto Eco, this novella will fascinate the reader with its dazzling bricolage of poetry, philosophy, ufology lore, and esoteric histories of Quebec." -- Susan J Palmer, McGill University School of Religious Studies, author of Aliens Adored: Rael's UFO Religion (Rutgers University Press, 2004)
