Paradisi Chronicles: Kuttner Founding Family

Daily Diary: Thursday, October 5, 2023, Day 1130: Brief Check-in: It's already 78, and the temperature rose 4 degrees during my walk, so I think it is going to be a lot hotter today than yesterday. We didn't even have to close the windows, much less turn on the A/C. Yesterday, I did get both walks in, my exercises, and 366 words on the novel, and drafted most of my Friday recommendations post. All that plus a scheduled phone call. So, a good day's work. Today, with my noon zoom meeting, and a phone meeting afterwards, I don't expect to get as much done, but any progress is progress.

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This is the third post about the Paradisi Chronicles that I am providing as background for the updated version of the novella I am currently posting, chapter by chapter, of the updated edition of the novella I co-wrote with my daughter. Once I have put all ten chapters up, we will then republish The Stars are Red Tonight as an ebook. If you wish to read the first post, click HERE, or if you wish to start reading the novella, click HERE. Comments, likes, and shares are very welcome.

In this post, I focus on the Founding Family at the heart of the Stars are Red Tonight.

I modeled the Kuttner Founding Family on an US agribusiness that started in the mid-west and expanded globally. The paragraph below is what I initially sketched out for the Kuttner family.

Kuttner Founding Family (Agriculture): Responsible for providing necessary food supplies for the trip and the first years of during exploration and settlement (hydroponics, recycling, etc); doing the genetic modification to make native flora/fauna acceptable to humans, developing a sustainable and environmentally safe source of food and raw materials for industry. Ship name: SS Great Republic; rule Canistro.

What follows is the more extended biography of the early history of family that my daughter and I developed as we worked together on stories that featured the Kuttners.

The first story that featured the Kuttners was a short story my daughter wrote for the anthology, Chronicle Worlds, Paradisi, called, “Aderyn Tanllyd: A Tale of New Eden.” She wrote this in 2014, and the story was set in New Eden’s present, which was two hundred years after the Ten Founding Families arrived in New Eden.

That short story mentions a secret within the Kuttners’ past history, and it also mentioned a tension within the family over balancing the goal of creating an ideal society that would avoid making the mistakes of the past, with a desire for wealth and power.

Looking back, I can see that this theme became a common one for me when dealing with the Ten Founding Families, one that certainly plays out in the work I did on the Yu Founding Family.

The next project my daughter embarked on was to go back and tell the story of the Kuttners just as the ten Founding Families were ready to start their journey to New Eden. This resulted in the novella we ended up co-writing, The Stars are Red Tonight (the updated version that I am putting up on this newsletter).

Subsequently, we started working on a sequel to this story (which got derailed by covid) that I hope to finish and put up on the newsletter once we have republished the Stars are Red Tonight.

Not much of the detail from the backstory my daughter and I constructed while working on all three stories shows up in the Stars are Red Tonight. That is the nature of a back story, especially in a short story or novella. It informed our writing, but we didn’t want to slow down the plot with too much detail about the past. However, I do know that some of you find it interesting to get these additional insights to characters.

The Kuttner Family History:

From my own work on immigration history, I suggested that the Kuttners would have made their wealth in the 19^thcentury Germany as large land owners. A branch of the family emigrated to the United States in the mid 1840s, when migration to America started in earnest, with nearly a million Germans emigrating in the 1850s alone. This 19^th century migration concentrated in the Midwest, and Germans were one of the most successful groups of immigrants in America in achieving economic success (and where they were concentrated…political power.)

By the twentieth century the Kuttners would have diversified with investments in sectors of the economy that complemented their agricultural holdings (in transportation, storage facilities, farm machinery, food production.)

To accommodate a plot point in her short story, my daughter added that back in Germany, the Kuttners supported the rise of the Nazis, and subsequently, in the post WWII period, the US branch of the Kuttners took control, changed the name of the parent company from Kuttner to AgriWW in order to disassociate from that past. The company expand globally, dominating the production, storage, transportation, and processing of the food found on the tables of most households in the world. They gained this monopoly through the development of pesticides, mechanized farming and animal husbandry, and eventually genetic patents.

In 2025, Albert Kuttner, the head of the Kuttner empire lived in Chicago, Illinois, but owned a winter home in the Bavarian Alps). He was one of the ten wealthy men who came together to form the secret Paradisi Project.  He did so at the urging of his son, Charles Kuttner, who in the Stars are Red Tonight was the father of the main character, Sarah Kuttner (who was going under the name Saya Smith.)

Charles Kuttner, born 2007, was raised to be Albert’s successor as the head of AgriWW, and the next head of the Kuttner Founding Family. He married in 2037 to a woman who was a physician and came from a branch of the Gunther family who were environmental activists. This meant she urged her husband to support the idea of sustainable farms, no GMO, no use of steroids or anti-biotics. When she discovered the Kuttners’ involvement with the Paradisi Project, she urged her husband to fight for the idea that whatever society was set up in New Eden should avoid making the mistakes that had resulted in environmental disasters, world-wide food insecurity, and the rise of unforeseen medical problems on Earth. She died in 2050 working as a doctor during one of the periodic pandemics.

With her death, Charles devoted himself full time to the Paradisi Project, trying to ensure that his first wife’s ideals were not abandoned. In 2068 he marries again. He is 61, his second wife, Caroline, is 33, and they have two children, a girl, Sarah, born in 2070, and a boy, born 2077.

This son dies in 2082, and Charles dies soon after (in his 70s), which leaves his second wife, Caroline, with the majority of shares in AgriWW. this makes her the new head of the Kuttner Founding Family in the ten years leading up to the launch of the ten ships to New Eden. Charles Kuttner’s siblings are not at all happy with the fact that she has been made head of the Kuttner empire, and her relationship with her daughter will be one of conflict.

Caroline Kuttner was born in 2035 in the Midwest, very bright, but she grew up poor, attended school on scholarships, and saw little of her parents, who worked on a small farm holding. She got a masters in business in 2053 and started working for AgriWW. By her early thirties, she had made her way up to a management position, which is how she met Charles Kuttner. He married her and also made her the chief financial officer of the company, much to the disgust of his siblings. What they didn’t know was that he needed her in the position of CFO so she could help him to funnel profits from the company into the Paradisi Project, which was really taking off in the 2070s, without alerting rest of family or people within the company.

The Founders had formed something they called the Council of Ten, which would subsequently be the planet-wide government, and the decision had been made to limit who would know about the long-term project to the direct heirs of the Founders. This was done to maintain the fiction that the investments that these men and women were making were for exploration within the solar system and the eventual colonization of Mars, not to leave the solar system and leave Earth behind for good. The family and workers who were going to be brought on board the ten ships for the journey would only learn of the ultimate goal close to the launch date.

When Caroline’s son died in 2082, followed quickly by her husband’s death, Caroline was devastated and threw herself into work—sending Saya to boarding school. When Sarah returns home there are constant fights and finally Sarah “runs” away.

Caroline had really loved her husband, and she saw making his altruistic vision for the Paradisi Project successful. It was also, in her mind, the best future for her daughter.

Physical Characteristics: Medium height, light grey eyes, and she had work done on her face, so no wrinkles. But this also made it difficult for others, like her daughter, to read her emotional reactions. She works hard to maintain her trim figure. Coming from poverty, and feeling that her in-laws looked down on her, she always feels she has to look perfect. This is going to be hard to maintain on the Space station or on the trip.

Personality: She is a perfectionist, competitive, driven, suspicious, insecure. She had little to do with her family because of their poverty, but this left her feeling very isolated and lonely. She always felt looked down on, because she came from a poor family, had gone to school on scholarships, and had to work hard for her grades. Then she felt she had to be twice as good to achieve success as woman in an industry that was still very male dominated.

In turn, she very high standards for those under her, and she despised employees she saw as weak or disloyal. In her mind, they undermined her position in society and the company, a position she had worked so hard to achieve. It made her angry that people assumed her success was because she married the boss, and it didn’t help that the Kuttners in general look down on her, often mentioning how much they had adored Charles first wife.

Week after next I will do a post providing a mini-biography for Trevor and Sarah.

Below is the map of Canistro, the country that the Kuttners will occupy and rule when they make it to New Eden. For those who have read my Caelestis series, one of the main characters, Mei Lin’s great-grandmother, Hen Nain, was born Betsy Kuttner. She was the daughter of a prominent member of the Kuttner Founding Family and his Ddaeran mistress. His wife accepted Betsy as her own and raised her. But that is a whole different story!