Calliope
The Worlds of Jack Finche and Kohava Ray
CALLIOPE LITERARY WORKS
INPUT: HISTORY, SCIENCE, SCHOLARSHIP
OUTPUT: STRANGE NEW WORLDS
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ONE NIGHT UNREMEMBERED
One Night Unremembered (~80,000 words) starts on the premise that sometimes, a thing as insignificant as a small anniversary present, or a timely turn to starboard, can profoundly redirect the river of history. Could the 20th Century have become the stepstone to a 3rd millenium of global happiness, prosperity and intergalactic commerce? ONU takes the reader on a high speed roller-coaster ride from the known historical world of 1912 through to a wildly plausible alternate 2027
Mildred Fleet is a charming young woman vigorously enjoying life in her 144th year. In 1912, her husband, Fredrick Fleet received a 1st anniversary present of Bausch & Lomb binoculars just before his ship, Titanic, sailed on its maiden voyage. Freddy was lookout on that trip and fetched the binoculars along on his shift. That changed things. Titanic ported course around the iceberg and arrived safely in New York on April 17th. The passengers who disembarked had knowledge, ambition and destinies that changed worlds. Millie now lives in the State of Israel on Mars and civilization has restructured itself in ways difficult to imagine.
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​Among the passengers, Chikako and Ida are two of the hundreds sharing a small 3rd-class cabin on Titanic. Chikako is an anomaly; a young female aeronautics engineer from male-dominated Japan. Ida is a poor but fiercely ambitious girl from an Eastern European shtetl who envisions a fast-food empire. The two cabinmates weave lives in and out of the tapestry of time, space and cause/effect between 1896 and 2027 as their world morphs into something very different from what we know. World War I becomes a regional police action where the Five Nations Coalition (England, Germany, Italy and the US) bring the dangerous political situation in Bosnia under control by 1915. World War II never happens.
Ho Chi Minh, working in Boston in 1914 emerges as the star of early Kinetophone talking movies (the 'phonies) shortly before the Mosely-Curie reactor begins powering experimental Pierce-Arrow automobiles. Zeppelin airship service links worldwide imperial possessions and by 1917 Concentration Camps have become intensive study centers for children in British India and Palestine. By the late 1920's Adolf Hitler has settled into a position as New Jersey-based illustrator for Hallmark cards.
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This increasingly peaceful and enlightened civilization holds little attraction for those convinced of the inferiority of the brown, black and yellow peoples it knits together in the larger family of humanity. It now 1941. As Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and Chikako, his wife of 25 years, complete their anniversary trip from Japan to Hawaii on the luxury Airship Kumaru, an attempt is made by the Aryan League to destroy the aircraft during its landing at Pearl Harbor on December 7th. The response to this deed initiates a train of events culminating in an edgy visit by the entities who have been evaluating this planet for the past 300 years. Their arrival in 1942 stuns humanity with the concept of DEROS or genetically-encoded environmental ethics. The clock is set for either final maturation of the human species, or its annihilation. Humanity is given 25 years to become civilized by galactic standards.
One Night Unremembered unwinds through the lives and loves of Chikako, Freddy, Ida, her husband Gregory (an Ellis Island immigration inspector), Isoroku, Millie and their descendants. ONU will appeal to a literate collegiate audience, the science-fiction lover who doesn't require space wars, steampunkers galore, antique car fans, world history students, and anyone with a background in basic biology. In an experimental Vlog the first few chapters scored 1,329 hits in two weeks with readers asking for more.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
Continental Drift is a collection of 20 science fiction and alternate reality stories envisioning worlds plausible for life as we know it...and as we may find it difficult to imagine. In Continental Drift the reader meets:
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A prescient Black construction worker renovating a Harlem bowfront encounters a musty steamer trunk full of sad and ancient secrets trunk tying him by blood to an arch-Conservative White Harvard professor (Elinore).
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A successful Japanese businesswoman, daughter of a noted geneticist father, is tortured by strange dreams of gold, ivory and royalty until finally learning why she is held in mystic awe by representatives of the 3rd Arabic Republic (Ka)
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A celebrated photojournalist visits an eccentric uncle in Virginia who intimates that a recently found diary may suggest that their 18th Century ancestor obtained a heretofore unknown photographic portrait of George Washington (Photograph of a President)
Further on, the reader is challenged to meet:
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A passion-smitten aquatic female who "sees" radio waves in a galaxy 2000 light years from earth and falls in love with the star performer of a 1938 radio broadcast (Static)
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An archeologist who uncovers the mortal remains of a young woman of Han Dynasty China who traveled the Silk Road carrying the first invention of the phonograph, only to meet her doom in August 79 AD in the Italian seaside city of Pompeii (Qing Jianwei in the Time of Fire)
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Two friends, intelligent theropod dinosaurs, (who rather than humans, have become the dominant life-form on earth), as they drill for oil in an evolutionary alternate New Jersey (Catcall Morning)
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A crew of lost and storm-blown Roman legionaries who join forces with the local Pequot Indians in second Century AD Connecticut to defeat a deadly attack by the bloodthirsty Iroquois (Maxentius Rufus, Procurator of New Jersey)
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H.G. Wells' Time Traveler upon his return to the late 19th Century from the United States of 2021 (The Curious Report of a Trip to the Day After Tomorrow)
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An aged and very unusual box turtle with vivid memories; the only survivor of one of the most momentous and bloody battles of the Civil War (Old Antietam)
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Clyde Tombaugh, (the astronomer who discovered Pluto and whose mortal remains were were sent past that world in the robotic spacecraft New Horizons), has been reconstructed by the Ythrm and sent back to an earth now devoid of humanity (The Delphine, the Pithoi and the Parroti)
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And there's more...!
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A suburban homeowner with a badly leaking basement comes to terms with the fact that physical reality just doesn’t work properly around his house (Miss Physics)
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The imprintable neural connectome has become a marketable reality, enabling the wealthy to gain another conscious lifetime; but how will donors be harvested? (Wu is You)
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In barbarian-dominated early 7th Century Rome, one of the last surviving members of the Senatorial class discovers that the invention of a colleague, a hot air balloon, can reverse the death of the Roman Empire (The Last Senator)
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In an increasingly fascist society dominated by climate change deniers and racists, a scientist struggles to publish a report documenting severe global environmental damage and wonders whether there is intelligent life on the yet-unstudied third planet: Earth (The Second Planet)
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In a whimsical children's tale a young Chinese boy learns that love and kindness are the most important attributes of life when his famyard animals acquire the voices of the intolerant villagers who have ostracized him (Leach)
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Earth is invaded by a seemingly bloodthirsty race of aliens who find that their ritualized and entirely harmless games of war are not well-received by 21st Century Americans (Dremth The Conqueror)
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Are insects the tiny and insignificant creatures we believe them to be, or actually the myriad drones of an ancient and powerful organism called Conewa? (Dreams of Pupae)
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Multi-trillionaire CEO Sanford Byrd's great-great-grandfather has noticed that the quarters he seems to be finding everywhere are imparting a message that will shape his destiny and that of his descendants. (Quarters)
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Life has completely lost its novelty for a 180 year old chemist who discovered long ago that the 8-9 hours we spend in body-renewing sleep each day are simply not enough (Dreamless)
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And in Smolinsky’s Planet the reader comes to first consciousness with an elderly stroke patient in a defunct two millennia-old medical facility orbiting Mars.
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Continental Drift is certain to challenge and delight, and most importantly, get the reader thinking in transformative new ways. Each story stands alone or can be adapted into a larger unifying theme of the tales of Gaia. Like Twilight Zone, Dust, or Love, Death and Robots episodes, they are also easily adaptable as short films.
PAINT, PASTE, PAPER & PUSH!
A Photographic History of the Frescos of Old New York
Between two and twenty stories above eye level, the walls of New York City bear paintings; signs, warnings and admonitions. Moving further along the road toward illegibility and oblivion each year, the business concerns of a once-young Manhattan still inform an unheeding public of their long-defunct services. On 8th avenue and 36th street, Meyerowitz and Schrecker offer ladies’ shirtwaists for sale; on 47th and Broadway, a brilliant red masthead invites hungry New Yorkers into a Horn and Hardart Automat gone for three decades; on 18th street and 7th avenue, florid Art-Nouveau lettering informs the great-great grandchildren of the intended audience that Hansoms, Victorias and other carriages can be had for nominal rental. Horses can be stabled on Great Jones street, and on the corner of Duane and Hudson, eager New York entrepreneurs of the newborn 20th Century are exhorted to “Brush Up Business with Paint, Paste, Paper and Push!”
Painted a century ago in brilliant colors several stories high on virtually any available expanse of plaster or brickwork, the frescoes of old New York once made now dreary vistas of glass and masonry into a riot of colors and images. At this far shore of the 21st Century, at a time when our favorite realities have become virtual, there is a certain poignancy in beholding the time-ravaged remnants of an age of unique visual immediacy.
Looking at these signs one is invited into a vanished world. They are a portal into a less antiseptic New York at a time when pushcarts still rolled over the cobbles and wholesale butchers operated on the streets of the West Side. It was a technologically primitive metropolis which existed for only an historical eyeblink, filled with both animals and humans; megawatt power dynamos and blacksmith shops, international stock exchanges and gypsy camps. A discordant jangling assault on the senses, the New York City of these paintings pulsed with organic sights, sounds and smells.
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Paint, Paste Paper and Push! is a lavishly illustrated photographic history of these paintings and the businesses that commissioned them. Each story is told on a page or two via observations, both sad and funny, that bring the world in which these images appeared to vibrant life. Several cartoons by Ben Katchor, featuring Julius Knipl Real-Estate Photographer accompany the text. As billionaire moguls destroy these last tattered remnants of the visual landscape of the 19th Century in place of the next soulless glass-and-plaster box we must hurry before this door closes forever. This is a coffee-table photo-book that will be treasured by both New Yorkers and those intrigued by the history of the great metropolis
CELLIST ON THE FIRE-ESCAPE
The Continuing Story of Tevye and his Family After their Emigration to America
The Scene:
It is 1929, in the midst of Prohibition, and 25 years since Tevye and his family moved from Anatevka to a new life in America, and not everything has turned out exactly as planned. Our scene opens on the fire-escape of a 3rd-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. We find Leizor, Tevya's 17-year old grandson diligently practicing Tchaikovsky on his cello. He dreams of a future with the New York Philharmonic, of Carnegie Hall, perhaps of...
"Leizor?" (It is Ruchl, his mother, from another room)
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"Leizor will you please stop that meshuggah scraping? I have such a headache!" (The music stops)
"Ma, can you please call me call me Larry? And it isn't scraping, its Tchaikovsky"
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(Ruchl speaks again hearing indistinctly) "What are you talking? Chernevsky, the Druggist? What have you got to do with him, (...he should sink into the earth...). And those pills he sold me? Good for nothing! Oy, my headache!"
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"Ma, please let me practice, the audition is next week"
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"Audition you say? Alright Mr. Such-a-Big-Shot mit de Coney Island dreams! When are you going to get a real job like your father? Huh?"
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(she softens a bit) "So maybe you don't want to be a tailor? What about your Uncle Max? You know he needs help in his beautiful Bowtie Factory in the Bronx, You don't like that? Maybe you should be like Mr. Korstein and become a kosher butcher, a shoichet? There's good money in that too!"
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(She falls silent and Leizor sighs, he's heard all this before. He looks into the distance and mornfully sings while playing a familiar tune (Sunrise, Sunset) on his cello):
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Why must learn to be a tai-lor,
Why should I work up in the Bronx?
I hate the music of the traffic...beeps and honks; (aougah car horn at this point)
My un-cle's a maven with his bow-ties
Korstein's a shoichet with a mask
I want to be a famous cellist; Is it too much to ask?
Bow-ties, Shoi-chet,
Bow-ties, Shoi-chet,
That's all, I ever hear...
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Good for a few belly-laughts either as a recording or short film, Cellist on the Fire Escape translates the stresses of Jewish life in Poland in the early 20th Century to the stresses of making it in New York during the 1920's, an age of gangsters and bootleg booze. All tunes are out-of-copyright and available for parody. A few of the the others are: "I Could Have Wed a Rich Man" (If I Were a Rich Man), "Prohibition!" (Anatevka!) and "They'll Buy 'Em" (L'Chaim).
SHADOWS OF THE WHITE CITY
Screenplay and Treatment for a Full Documentary
The Beginning of the Future
In the last decade of the turbulent 19th Century, something astonishing happened in Chicago. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition became a showcase for the future that was to be. Automobiles, telephones, flying machines, the beginnings of radio; it was all there. The world before 1893 was, in many ways, indistinguishable from the rural reality of the 17th or 18th Century. What was shown at the fair heralded how all of that was soon to change. Amazingly, some of it was both filmed and recorded using the primitive equipment of the time and is available today. Shadows of the White City places these media in the context of a drama of love and danger among 19th Century Americans attending the fair
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“Well, it took all the burial money, but it was worth it”
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“A gilded showcase of…technologies
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"A kaleidoscope of cultural emissaries from all over the globe"
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"…the world that was, and the world that was to come”
Over 100 on-site wax cylinder sound recordings were made at the exposition, as well as a few dozen early movies. These amazing documents offer a rare and weirdly immediate way for us to see and hear the Exposition along with those who attended. Integrated with these original media is an intriguing story.
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