Tesla

Genius. Visionary. Madman.

Nikola Tesla (1856--1943) was the pioneering genius who invented the AC electrical system that powers our world to this day, as well as radio, remote control, the automobile speedometer, X-ray photography, the AND logic gate that drives all our computer systems, and countless other devices and precursors to devices such as cell phones, television, and the Internet that we so effortlessly use today.

Strikingly handsome and charismatic, fluent in half a dozen languages, mathematics savant and master machinist, a reed-thin perfectionist who quoted poetry like a Victorian rapper, Tesla became one of the most famous men of his day. Friend of tycoons like John Jacob Astor and Stanford White and celebrities like Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt.

Yet Tesla was an intensely driven and lonely man, beset by inner demons, and cursed with a protean inventive imagination a century ahead of his time. He died in obscurity and poverty and, to this day, his name is not widely known. How did that happen?

Blending historical fact with speculative imagination, Lisa Mason explores the secrets of the Inventor’s inner life and his obsession with Goethe’s Faust set against the backdrop of sweeping technological changes at the turn of the twentieth century that have forever changed the world.

A list of Sources follows the Screenplay, which was read by the producer of “Aliens” and “The Abyss.”

Lisa Mason has published ten novels, including Summer of Love (a Philip K. Dick Award Finalist and San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book), The Gilded Age (a New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book), The Garden of Abracadabra (“Fun and enjoyable urban fantasy”), Arachne and Cyberweb (Locus Hardcover Bestsellers), Celestial Girl, A Lily Modjeska Mystery (“Five stars”), a collection of previously published short fiction, Strange Ladies: 7 Stories (“A must-read collection” The San Francisco Review of Books), and thirty-one stories and novellas in magazines and anthologies worldwide. Her Omni story, “Tomorrow’s Child,” sold outright as a feature film to Universal Studios and is in active development.

Her latest novel is One Day in the Life of Alexa (“An appealing narrator and subtly powerful emotional rhythms” Goodreads)

“Fabulous screenplay.” Lewis Shiner, the award-winning author of Glimpses, Frontera, Slam, and Collected Stories.