The Paradisi Chronicles: The Ten Founding Families

Daily Diary, Tuesday, October 3, 2023. Day 1128:

This is the second of the posts I will be doing about the Paradisi Chronicles, the open source, multi-author science fiction universe I helped create in 2014 and in which he Stars are Red Tonight and my Caelestis series (Between Mountain and Sea, Under Two Moons, Through Ddaera’s Touch, Tides of Acerba and the forthcoming In Ddaera’s Embrace) are set.

As I described in my first post, I was part of a small group of authors who started throwing ideas around about this new universe we were creating. Then several of us started plotting out a narrative about how and why humans from Earth would come to the Paradisi solar system in the Andromeda Galaxy, where they would settle on a planet they called New Eden.

As we worked out the main timeline and plot, we would run it by the other authors for input, then go back and do additional work filling in details. Then as people began to construct their own stories, new details they came up with would be added to the “World Bible,” To be frank, given this was nearly 10 years ago, I am not always sure where an idea came from, which if you think about it is actually a good thing in a collaborative process because the result is everyone could feel ownership of the final product.

What I do remember is that pretty quickly we decided to have the Paradisi Chronicles set in the “near future,” with the story beginning on Earth in the year 2025 and ending after 200 years of settlement on New Eden. At the time, 2025 seemed far enough in the future not to intersect with current events, which seems rather short-sighted now!

We also quickly came to the conclusion that what would be known as the Paradisi Project would be the work of ten very wealthy men and women, who having decided that there was no hope in saving Earth from the ravages of climate change, nuclear war, devastating disease, etc. would pool their wealth to discover and build the technology needed for space exploration to find a new home.

We also started referring to these ten individuals as the Founders and their families as the ten Founding Families. These Founders would keep this “Paradisi Project” secret, because their plan from the beginning was not to save humanity but to save themselves, their families, and the people they needed to build a comfortable new society on New Eden for them when they arrived. Eventually we determined that each of the ten ships taking this journey would hold 10,000 people. I remember having a discussion where we concluded that settling a planet with 100,000 people would be a viable. Of course, that didn’t count the fact that we also determined that they would discover there were already people on the planet, the Ddaerans, but that is for another post in the future!

I volunteered for the task of sketching out who these ten wealthy individuals would be, and I remember that I consciously set out to use as models people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Both of these men had started investing in the development of space ships around 2000, and by 2014 (when we were creating the Paradisi Chronicles) they had begun to have some successes with Blue Horizon and Space X.

Consequently, I decided to do an internet search for the wealthiest men and women in the world in 2014. From this list I started to pick and choose people to become models for my ten Founders, not strictly going by wealth, but looking for some diversity in both ethnicity and the economic basis for their wealth and power. Then I gave them new family names and created entirely fictional mini-biographies for each of them.

For example, I modeled the Abramov Founding Family after a Russian billionaire who made money in metals, and telecommunications, and we gave this family the country Rasia to control and made them responsible for communications and security. The Chandler Founding Family was modeled on US Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the Gates family’s involvement in education, technological advancement, and humanitarian activities, so this family would be responsible for education and culture on New Eden. Then there was the Gunther Family, who is briefly mentioned in the Stars are Red Tonight. This family was modeled on a German woman who ran a pharmaceutical company, and would be in charge of health. This family would be responsible for the cryostasis technology, determining what medical/scientific technology would be needed when the ten Families got to New Eden, disease control (human and possible native organisms), the genetic modifications that would be needed to adapt to new environment, and continued scientific innovation to promote health and long life.

You can see all of the ten families listed below, with the specific responsibilities each family had, the ship they came over on, and the country on New Eden they would rule.

While I was creating these mini-biographies of the ten Founding Families, another author in the group, Cheri Lasota, was creating a map for New Eden, with major geographic details-like continents, bodies of water, mountains, etc, and she also carved out ten nations on the map, and together we started assigning each of the ten Founding Families to a different nation. The two of us then worked to figure out where each Founding Family would live and rule.

I must admit this was enormous fun. I only briefly sketched out a description of each family, because the whole idea was for the multiple authors to start to fill in the details as they wrote their own stories, both in terms of when in the timeline they were going to write, and where their action would take place.

However, most of the authors who have written stories set in the Paradisi Chronicles have concentrated on either the first manned probes that discovered New Eden, the actual journey taken by the Founding Families in their ten ships took, or the story of the 11th ship, the SS Challenge. In addition, most of these stories are either short stories or novellas, which means they haven’t gone into a lot of detail on the individual Founders or their families.

I took a different approach, deciding in my first book to cover as much ground as possible. For Between Mountain and Sea, each chapter started with a short diary entry from Mabel Yu, who at the beginning is a young girl, living on the Nautilus space station above Earth. The diary takes her through the launch of her family’s ship, arrival in New Eden, first years of settlement, and then continued on through her life (which was the first 100 years of settlement.) The rest of the book was a deep dive into the experience of Mabel Yu’s great, great-granddaughter, Mei Lin Yu, who lived in New Eden 165 years after her ancestor arrived in New Eden. As a result, this meant that as I wrote this book, I took the initial short description of one of these families, in my case, the Yu Founding Family, and developed a rather detailed history of the family.

At some point I will certainly write about this process, but in my next post I am going to look at the Kuttner Founding Family because this is the family that The Stars are Red Tonight features.

Ten Founding Families

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.

Gunther Founding Family (Health Sciences): Responsible for developing the cryostasis technology, testing the New Eden environment, and doing the research and development of new methods to wipe out disease, mental illness, etc. in order to prolong life. Ship name: SS Lightning, rule Caprinet.

Yu Founding Family (Energy and Environment): Responsible for developing plans to make inter-steller travel energy efficient, constructing a green sustainable world after arrival, and preserving the New Eden environment (native flora, fauna) through the development of environmental laws. Ship name: SS Nightingale, rule Caelestis.

Quinn Founding Family (Finance): Responsible for raising and managing the financial resources needed to fund the Paradisi Project, and then setting up a financial (banking, investments) system for the New Eden. Ship name: SS Queen of Nations, rule Vida

Abramov Founding Family (Communications/Security): Responsible for developing the communications system within the interstellar fleet of ships, and setting up and maintaining the communications system on New Eden and with the mining planet on Tenebra. Also works with the Thorndike Family to monitor communications on behalf of the World Government to maintain security. Ship name: SS Northern Light, rule Rasia.

Chandler Founding Family (Education and Culture): Responsible for training all the personnel they are going to need for the project in building the space stations, elevators, interstellar ships, then providing an on-going system of education for the world that will keep the high level of scientific and medical expertise, preservation of culture (arts, literature, music) and 100 percent employment. Ship Name, SS Syren, rule Athenia

Ganesh Founding Family (Industrial): Responsible for both heavy and light industry (including the mining on the moon and later on Tenebra) needed throughout the Paradisi project (manufacturing of space elevators, stations, and ships), and on New Eden responsible for establishing green industry, with a heavy use of 3-D printing, etc. Ship name: SS Serica, rule Deropa.

Huntley Founding Family (Commerce): Responsible for working with agriculture and industry in the buying and allocating the materials needed for Paradisi project, then developing a world-wide on-line commercial system for buying and selling goods. Ship name: SS Young America, rule Cosiral.

Nakata Founding Family (Transportation): Responsible for working with the military and industrial families to build the space ships and shuttle, and once on New Eden they will be in charge of developing different forms of transportation that are based on renewable energy, etc, including long distance, short haul, and private and public forms of transportation. Ship name: SS Surprise, rule Levana

Thorndike Founding Family (Military): Partially responsible for security on ship-board, maintaining order on New Eden, (police arm of central government), and governing the mining planets. Ship name: SS Flying Cloud, ruled Tassoni.

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This is the second 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. And of course, I would love it if you subscribed to my daily newsletter, nothing is behind a paywall, but if you decide to support me by doing a paid subscription so I can continue to offer these sorts of post, I would much appreciate it.