Doctor Victor Tesla

I’ve received some great feedback about my blog discussing my ‘Ghost Town’ series of novels. Many of you have written in questions about different aspects of the books and while I try to answer as many as I can, I won’t be able to get to all of them. From the beginning of the ‘Ghost Town’ series I’ve planned on having nine novels total, releasing three per year over the course of three years, and currently, I’m on track to have that goal completed.

The next couple of blogs are going to be looking at some of the characters from Whiterock, their inspirations and where they are headed. The first one I want to discuss, the character who didn’t get a lot of book time in the first two books, but who will be a major player in the third, is one of the most important characters in the book series, the man who gets the whole thing going, Doctor Victor Tesla.

Coming from an unnamed eastern European country, Dr. Tesla was a military researcher who was betrayed by his country and had to flee to the United States seeking asylum. He took all of his research with him, offering it to the U.S. government in exchange for continuing his work. His former bosses thought they had killed his family but Dr. Tesla was able to get his young daughter out of the country with him, a daughter who now works with him. At this point, all Doctor Tesla cares about is revenge. He was betrayed by one country and was positive that the United States was going to betray him once he had his weapon created.

Doctor Victor Tesla is the classic scientist who has no moral qualms about pushing the envelope of science, no matter what the cost. He doesn’t see the damage being done to humanity, only the promise of what his experiments could produce in the future. When he started, everything was pure for him, it was science and pushing every limit that the human race knew. After the death of his wife and eldest daughter, something happened, Doctor Tesla no longer saw the promise of humans, only the bad, only the side that takes without giving.

In America, Doctor Tesla began his work with unlimited resources thanks to members of the military who didn’t much care for the doctor but more than anything wanted the technologies that he was working on. They would do anything to keep him happy and in trying to give him what they thought he wanted, they pushed him away further and exposed their hand to what they were doing. Once Doctor Tesla knew, he began plotting total revenge, not against one country or members of the government, but against the entire human race.

Doctor Tesla is a composition of many different scientists over the years. The name, Tesla, comes from Nikola Tesla, the Serbian American inventor who had some ideas and theories that were straight out of science fiction. The concept of a scientist coming to America under asylum follows some of the scientists that were brought over from German after WWII under Operation Paperclip. Doctor Tesla shares much in common with some of the scientists that were brought over in that program.

Doctor Tesla does have a deep concern for his living daughter. Although all he sees is revenge, he tries to figure out ways to make sure that she’s taken care of if anything were to happen to him. He wants her to have a good life, a normal life, but at the time he’s using her to help with the revenge project. Doctor Tesla is always mindful of the family that he lost and who was responsible for that loss.

Revenge can take many strange turns. Often when we talk about revenge we can look into our own lives and the world around us and think that justice should be done but the people who are causing problems are operating in such a gray area that often times the law is being bent but not broken or that it’s so ambiguous that police and the legal system don’t want to touch it.

We see it around us all the time; the politician who promises great things but spends money on personal projects, the lawyer who sues for a laughable reason and shuts a popular business down, a school board president who forces a popular sports coach to leave so he can put his friend in as coach who will play both of their incompetent daughters over better, more deserving players, a cheating husband, a bullying kid, or a crooked manager. Little things like that that go on every day that most people are upset over but let slide are the things that, with the wrong person, a person who won’t let it go, can cause them to seek out revenge in the worst way.

When creating Doctor Tesla I looked at many revenge cases, how they started, who did what, and who wouldn’t let what go. There was a similar pattern of a person constantly trying to resolve the situation in a proper way but no one else working with them and the person getting slighted further. Revenge doesn’t grow in the rational, reasonable part of the brain. Revenge is what’s there when there is no justice, no resolve.

Doctor Tesla, like most people who seek revenge, cannot see the forest for the trees, he can’t see how much damage he will do to the world, how many people will feel slighted and hurt because of his actions. He doesn’t care how many people die, as long as those that hurt him learn a lesson. Doctor Tesla, scientific genius aside, lost his rational mind when his wife and daughter were killed, now all that’s left is the burning desire to teach someone a lesson, to show the world that he cannot be pushed around, to make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else.

We all have a little Doctor Tesla in us but most of us can control the desire to harm others. We all see things around us every day that we know shouldn’t be allowed but we let it slide, knowing that the cost of righting the wrong would be too great. It’s that one person, the person who can’t let it go, that doesn’t care what it takes or what it costs, that is the person who will stop at nothing for revenge. That is the person you don’t want to upset.

To see more of Doctor Tesla and to find out if he gets his revenge, head on over to my website, Leifericksonwriting.com and check out the ‘Ghost Town’ series. Currently two books are available and a third will be published before the end of the year. Grab my other titles as well and stay tuned as my next blog will deal with some of the other main characters in the ‘Ghost Town’ Series.’