Writing on the fault line between postmodernism and whatever comes after, Richard Powers has seen the arc of his career rise steadily over the last twenty years. His nine deeply-textured and scientifically-informed novels have earned him a MacArthur grant, a number of literary awards, as well as recognition from critics and other novelists. Writers such as Don DeLillo, John Barth, David Foster Wallace, and Bob Shacochis have all praised his fiction, and superlatives often frame scholarly estimates of his achievement. But while academic readers have begun to explore Powers’s fiction, the tendency of most critical studies, to date, has understandably been to take an atomistic approach, addressing individual aspects of his work — his use of molecular biology, coding motifs, chaos theory — in isolation. Although many of these studies contain crucial insights, this volume is an attempt to provide something more like “the stereo view” that Powers describes in Three Farmers (335): a collaborative synthesis of viewpoints that is designed to open his work up to larger contexts. The animating ideal behind this philosophy is embedded in the title of the collection: Intersections.

The title of this volume is intended to be multivalent. On one level, we believe that the idea of intersections introduces the central theme of Powers’s work. In each of his novels, Powers intertwines at least two apparently disparate ideas, and the thematic heart of his work emerges at their point of intersection, where ideas shade into each other: the growth of a business shadowing the spread of cancer; virtual reality eliding with Islamic fundamentalism. Powers hints at the centrality of such connections to his fiction by using some form of the word intersect in all his books, and he has stressed that the idea of intersecting intellectual currents lies at the heart of his conception of the novel:

In the universe of human activity, a change in the connection between any two nodes in the network changes the entire configuration that the network is in, not to mention all the configurations that we will be able to get to from here. A new discovery in, say, a stem cell laboratory has enormous repercussions for every domain of human affairs: biological, economic, legal, psychological, social, spiritual . . . There truly are no independent disciplines that operate exclusive of any other: just people, acting out of very human hopes, fears, and desires. And fiction is uniquely privileged to place its camera at those imaginary boundaries between disciplines, to show the ways in which the turbulent currents generated by any mode of apprehending the world necessarily cascade into all other streams of thought.

For Powers, then, disciplinary boundaries are artificial constructs, obscuring the multiple connections that his novels (and, in parallel, these essays) work to uncover. But while intersections are important thematically to Powers’s fiction, the term also summarizes the guiding structural principle of his work. In fact, the architecture of a typical Powers novel might be summarized (to use his phrase) as “the geometry of intersections.” Although there is no simple algorithm for defining the structure of a Powers novel — indeed, each work’s structure is clearly fluid as he explicitly seeks to marry form to thematic content — he has, nevertheless, consistently constructed his books around interlocking narrative frames, splitting his novels into two or more story-lines. Rather than advancing toward some melodramatic convergence, these parallel lines typically uncover resonant symmetries in apparently dissimilar situations.

The form of Three Farmers, trisected into parallel narrative lines composed of nine chapters each, provides the template for his early works, with Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Gold Bug Variations each entwining three related narrative strands. The pattern breaks down in Operation Wandering Soul, which, with its many embedded narrative offshoots, is something of an isolated experiment in the Powers canon. But the structure of Powers’s novels continued to evolve with his fifth book, Galatea 2.2, which is a dual narrative pairing an exploration of the narrator’s past, with an account of a year spent at a research institute. In the wake of Galatea 2.2, his next three novels could all be broadly (if imperfectly) summarized as dual narratives: Gain sets Laura Bodey’s decline against the growth of Clare; Plowing the Dark is more complicated, interspersing the story of Adie Klarpol with episodes recounting Taimur Martin’s incarceration, although the novel also includes a number chapters that cannot easily be classified into either narrative frame; while The Time of Our Singing’s mosaic of thirty-three sections pairs third-person and first-person narratives. The Echo Maker, by contrast, maintains three narratives — Karin’s story is laid next to mirrored stories of integration and disintegration (Mark Schluter’s struggle to slowly re-assemble his sense of self parallels Gerald Weber’s gradually-unraveling identity) — but, as Charles B. Harris demonstrates later in “The Story of the Self,” the construction of this novel and its relation to Powers’s earlier work, rewards lengthier consideration.

The idea of intersections, then, encapsulates Powers’s narrative art, and so the same principle also underlies our editorial policy. In assembling this collection we have sought to draw together writers from different disciplines, as well as literary critics with divergent interests, so that the intersection of their ideas can illuminate Powers’s work from as many angles as possible. We find justification for this approach not just in the eclectic synthesis of intellectual systems that make up Powers’s novels, but also in the breadth of readership he has established. The interdisciplinary impact of Powers’s work is unique amongst contemporary writers, and his novels have been cited in such unlikely places as the Annals of Internal Medicine (twice), the Annual Review of Anthropology, in a list of Business Week’s “Best Business Books,” in an essay on the theory of multiple intelligences, in a biography of biologist Seymour Benzer, and in a study of science and religion. Such citations are testament to the broad intellectual appeal of his novels, indicating the conversation between disciplines that his work has provoked. This volume aims to extend and prolong that dialogue.