Literary Las Vegas: Alan Geik

Local author Alan Geik, a London School of Economics and Political Science graduate who has worked as a radio host and music producer, takes readers through time to World War I-era Boston and New York in his novel “Glenfiddich Inn.” Through two fictional families, Geik explores a tumultuous war he says was the seminal event of the 20th century. During these years, America rose from emerging nation to major power. “Everything that followed had its roots in those few disastrous years,” he explains. “The Russian Revolution, radio and television, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and World War Two, the Atomic Age, and specifically in America, prohibition and the women’s right to vote movement.” Visit facebook.com/GlenfiddichInn.

Excerpt:

The lanky steel frames stacked around Helen prompted, for Margaret, a fleeting recollection of the Eiffel Tower’s beautiful lines and crisscrossing skeletal shapes. Margaret remembered the photograph on the front page of her father’s newspaper when the Tower had been inaugurated in 1889. She was eight years old then. The Tower had looked so odd — so functionless.

“What is is for?” she had asked her father.

“It’s a beacon for progress,” he had replied simply. “A new era of invention and technology is before us.”

It sounded so thrilling.

Power leaned over the desk and handed the bulb to Margaret.

Here, there was no use for an Eiffel Tower. They were erecting an antenna that would transmit sound waves as far as twenty miles, maybe further. Their mission was to send the human voice, through the antenna, into the air. Without wires.