A novel, presented as an archive.
The Wardenclyffe Dossier is a work of historical fiction. At its center is a novel — the story of Nikola Tesla reimagined as a man who spent his whole life trying to build a door back to his dead brother, and who, at sixty-four, burned that door down on a hill in Shoreham, Long Island, so that the thing on the other side of it would not come through.
Around the novel, the Dossier presents the surviving record — letters, ledgers, notebooks, photographs, the FBI seizure log of January 1943 — as though the novel itself were the narrative reconstruction of a real archive that had been locked in a federal warehouse for seventy-five years. Most of the record is invented. A great deal of it is not.
The seventy percent that is true.
Nikola Tesla did have a brother named Dane who died when Nikola was five. Tesla did build a tower on Long Island with J. P. Morgan's money. Morgan did cut him off in July of 1903 and the tower was never fully fired. On 9 January 1943 the Office of Alien Property did seize Tesla's papers from Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker, two days after his death, and the lead agent's report has never been found.
Tesla did report receiving signals in Colorado Springs in 1899 which he attributed, publicly, to Mars. Katharine Johnson did live at 327 Lexington Avenue and did keep his letters. He did feed pigeons from the window of his hotel room for forty years.
Every specific address, date, and name of a historical person in the Dossier can be cross-checked against the historical record. If you do not believe a detail, please check it. You will find it is there.
The door, and everything on the other side of it.
The door is a fiction. The Aperture Notebook is a fiction. The seventeen Polish laborers are a fiction, though the men who worked at Wardenclyffe were largely recruited through the labor agencies of the Lower East Side and most of their names were, in fact, never recorded. Marguerite Kelley of the New York World is a fiction, though investigative reporters of her type existed in abundance at the turn of the century.
Dr. Sangeeta Iyer is a fiction. The sealed envelope at Butler Library is a fiction. Agent Walter Gorsuch is a fiction; the agent who actually led the OAP seizure, a man named Irving Jurist, was a tax attorney who filed a seven-page inventory and went home to Brooklyn.
What is true is that the weapon Tesla described in his final years — what he called, variously, "a peace ray" or "the mechanism of non-communicative disassembly" — was never reconstructed, and its plans were never found among the seized papers. The Dossier offers a reading of why.
Every specific claim in the book — the addresses, the dates, the names — can be cross-checked. Only the door itself is a fiction. And then again, is it?
How to read the Dossier.
There is no right order. The novel runs from the prologue to the epilogue in twenty-two chapters and can be read straight through in about ten hours. Alongside the novel, one hundred and twelve artifacts sit in the archive — letters, ledgers, audio reconstructions, the seizure log, the Iyer Papers. Many of them are cross-referenced from the prose: when a chapter mentions "the Scherff column" or "Morgan's letter of July 6," you can click the reference and read the object itself.
Some readers prefer to read the novel first and the artifacts second. Some prefer to browse the holdings freely. Both paths work. The archive is designed to reward both.
Several of the artifacts contain hidden layers — marginalia, watermarks, redacted passages that reveal themselves to the careful eye. These are marked with a small ✦ in the catalog. They are not required to understand the book, but they are, the writer believes, the parts of the book he most wants you to find.