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Before Recreation
Coming soon
a story of entrepreneurial ambition and the end of time
Morris Giants is a struggling entrepreneur and children’s book writer. While attending WMA Tech Conference, he meets Max El, one of Forbes’s richest men and serial entrepreneur who is revered like a god. Max’s latest venture is an AI system that promises to predict the future. After the chance encounter, Max hands Morris a large envelope and takes his life.
The next day, everyone learns that the AI company is bankrupt and its source code has been destroyed, leaving Morris as the holder of the only key that could explain the mystery.
The enigmatic notes foretell the end of the world, focusing on a mysterious end-of-time sect that worships the Master of the Unknown and works on building a machine with the god-like power to recreate the world and retrigger the big bang.
Trying to untangle Max’s eerie prophecies of the apocalypse, Morris is left to determine if the writings are the ramblings of a madman or a chilling warning of what awaits humanity.
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Half Notes
Now Available!
Half Notes from Berlin
Berlin, 1933. Hans believes he and his family are safe from persecution. Then, he discovers his family’s secret: his maternal grandparents were Jews before they converted to Christianity. Driven by the desire to understand who he is and whether his mother’s blood is tainted, Hans falls in love with Rebecca, the only Jewish girl he knows.
Desperate to keep both his family’s true heritage and his love for Rebecca a secret, Hans attempts to navigate this terrifying new world.
He is disconsolate when his Jewish mother is kicked out of the Berlin Conservatory. He is disgusted by his Aryan father’s aims to acquire Jewish businesses on the cheap. Worse, he must watch helplessly as his classmates target Rebecca with increasing violence and malice.
But when his school announces it will expel Jewish students, Hans decides it is time to fight for Rebecca – and for the lives and souls of his family
A coming-of-age story set in 1933 Berlin
Praise For Half Notes
From Berlin
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About
The author
B. V. Glants
B.V. Glants was born in Soviet Ukraine and immigrated with his family to suburban New Jersey when he was ten years old. He was raised on family stories ranging from his grandparents’ fight for survival in WW2 to his parents’ confrontations with Soviet antisemitism. He now lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and daughter, where he is a lay leader at a Jewish day school and a member of the Wexner Heritage Program.
B.V. Glants dutifully followed the archetypical immigrant dream and became an entrepreneur, most recently having cofounded Tonic Health (sold to R1, NASDAQ:RCM) and Turnkey Labs. That hasn’t stopped him from earning an MFA at California College of the Arts and attending writers’ conferences at Squaw and Sewanee. He writes historical and science fiction from a Jewish perspective. Half Notes from Berlin is his first published novel. B.V. Glants is currently working on his second novel, Before Recreation—a blend of biblical sci-fi that explores entrepreneurial ambition and the end of time.
FAQ
(Frequently Amusing Queries & Some Serious Responses)
Historical fiction is a conceit that offer a unique lens through which to explore issues that give our society and its individuals great heartburn.
Let’s use death as an illustrative example. People have a fundamental desire to keep living (forever if possible), and today there are a number of companies exploring ways to prolong life and eventually conquer aging as a cause of death. Rather than writing about the founders of these current-day startups, wouldn’t it be more fun to look back to the conquistadors (the swashbuckling entrepreneurs of the 16th century) and follow one of them on their foolhardy quest to discover the fountain of youth?
I see limitless opportunities for historical fiction to provide insights about modern-day life, the results of which could be rich and enticing stories.
Historical and science fiction are conceits that offer a unique lens through which to explore issues that give our society great heartburn.
Let’s use death as an illustrative example. People have a fundamental desire to keep living (forever if possible), and today there are a number of companies exploring ways to prolong life and eventually conquer aging as a cause of death. Rather than writing about the founders of these current-day startups, wouldn’t it be more fun to look back to the conquistadors (the swashbuckling entrepreneurs of the 16th century) and follow one of them on their foolhardy quest to discover the fountain of youth?
Or if we believe that the technology to prevent aging isn’t a foolhardy dream, but an inevitable reality, let’s imagine a future where aging has been eradicated. With this anti-aging technology, will more time to explore the wonders of this universe help human beings live more meaningful lives? Will everyone have access to this technology or just a few people who are perceived to be worthy? Will these immortals still have children, or will they kill them off to prevent needless competition?
I see limitless opportunities for historical and science fiction to provide insights about modern-day life, the results of which could be rich and enticing stories.
One of my very first creative writing teachers told me that I was a Jewish writer. I didn’t believe him. Simply being Jewish and an aspiring writer, didn’t make me a Jewish writer. At that time, I was working on a collection of interrelated stories about a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, much like my own. But I whitewashed everything that explicitly conveyed my protagonist’s Jewish ancestry.
When I think about why I did that, an image pops up. A month or so after my family arrived to the US, I donned Tzitzit under my shirt and marched out into the street on my way to school. My grandmother ran after me, dragged me back inside the house (no small feat for a woman who was five foot tall), and demanded that I remove all visible marking that could identify me as Jewish. My protests that we were not in 1941 occupied Ukraine fell on deaf ears.
The real shame of that story is not that my grandmother prevented me from expressing my Jewishness. It was that, my grandmother, a daughter of a Rabbi, imparted no real knowledge of Jewish culture or religion besides its most basic reduction: a general concern for the welfare of the Jewish people and the world at large.
I couldn’t include any Jewish themes in my story, because I knew absolutely nothing about being Jewish. Over the years, I’ve set out on a path to remedy my ignorance. The more I learned, the more comfortable I’ve become at bringing some things Jewish into my writing.
So what is this Jewish lens that I speak of? The best answer I can come up with comes from the image proposed by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:
“Imagine that we are in a vast library. In every direction we look there are bookcases. Each has shelves stretching from the floor to the ceiling, and every shelf is full of books. We are surrounded by the recorded thoughts of many people, some great, some less so, and we can reach out and take any book we wish… We begin to read, and for a while we are immersed in the world, real or imaginary, of the writer… Once the book no longer interests us, we can put it back on the shelf, where it will wait for the next reader to pick it up…
Imagine that, while browsing in the library, you come across one book unlike the rest, which catches your eye because on its spine is written the name of your family. Intrigued, you open it and see many pages written by different hands in many languages. You start reading it, and gradually you begin to understand what it is. It is the story each generation of your ancestors has told for the sake of the next, so that everyone born into this family can learn where they came from, what happened to them, what they lived for and why. As you turn the pages, you reach the last, which carries no entry but a heading. It bears your name.”
That is my Jewish lens. My writing is but an attempt to fill that blank page.