Characters

Luka and Lana are the heroes of the book “Magical Sails — A Nikola Tesla Story”. They try to stop an evil force that wants to seize Tesla’s inventions and move into Tesla’s childhood in order to rule the world. Of course, they cannot do it alone: with them are the guardian fairy Anđelina and the peculiar Viloid — the fairy-robot.

In the book Lana is three years old. She is in the stage of picking up speech, is very curious and mischievous, and dreams of becoming a fairy. Her pranks often solve a great many problems in the fast-moving plot — though just as often they cause them.

Luka is seven and usually sounds like the voice of reason. Like Lana, he is very curious, but with a dose of caution.

In real life Luka and Lana genuinely exist; they inspired the author with the bond between brother and sister. As they are growing up together (their fathers are brothers), they are often near the writer Maja, who is then Auntie Maja and Mummy Maja. With their questions, their thoughts, their behaviour and their pranks, both of them constantly prompt the author to reflect and to create.

Anđelina is the guardian fairy of science; she protects scientific inventions, works of art, scientists and artists. She is a friend to children and to people with a pure heart; she is clumsy with magic, and so often relies on science instead. Although she is “a bit of a muddle”, as the author describes her, luck is always on her side.

She is one of the main characters and appears in the books: “Magical Sails — A Nikola Tesla Story”, “The French Adventure (A Story about Blaise Pascal)” and “The Boy and the Fairy”.

Gromlina is the wicked fairy — she grew up together with Anđelina. The two of them are the granddaughters of the famous Professor Nana. They grew up showered with love and were the best of sisters and friends, until one day Professor Nana unwittingly drew a distinction between her granddaughters and gave Anđelina the two most powerful things in the fairy world: the Diary of Magic and the flying machine Šklopocija — the fairy time machine. The other granddaughter she left with nothing. Why Nana did this only she knows, but with that act she caused a great deal of pain and created a new being of the fairy world: the wicked fairy Gromlina.

She is one of the main characters (sometimes a hero, sometimes an anti-hero) and appears in the books: “Magical Sails — A Nikola Tesla Story”, “The French Adventure (A Story about Blaise Pascal)” and “The Boy and the Fairy”.

In the book “Magical Sails — A Nikola Tesla Story” the inventor Tesla appears as a historical figure in adulthood, but also as a boy. Almost a hundred facts are woven into the plot, so that the reader learns about Tesla without being lectured.

About his birthplace, his dreams, his family, his studies, his career, Paris, Chicago, New York, alternating current, the transformer, the notion of the “Columbus egg”, the 1889 EXPO (Paris) and the 1893 EXPO (Chicago) — the reader learns all of it unobtrusively, through the adventure of the boy Luka and the girl Lana, whose task is to defend Tesla’s childhood from a great evil.

At the end of the book there are biographical details about the life and work of Nikola Tesla — they are there to round out the story and make it easier for readers to explore further.

Blaise Pascal — French mathematician, physicist and philosopher. He was born in the 17th century in Clermont-Ferrand. He built the first mechanical calculator (an adding machine, a mechanical abacus) to help his father with his work. The machine was named the Pascaline, and a model of it can be seen today in Clermont-Ferrand, in a section of the Lecoq museum whose first floor is devoted to the work of Blaise Pascal. In recognition of his enormous contribution to engineering and to science in general, many scientific terms bear his name, among them the unit of pressure (Pa).

In the book “The French Adventure” (A story about the scientist Blaise Pascal and the first calculating machine) Blaise Pascal appears as a historical figure in his boyhood, but also in the period when he had become a recognised and respected scientist.

Viloid is a new character in children’s literature; he “came to life” in the book “Magical Sails — A Nikola Tesla Story”. Viloid is a blend of science and fairy magic: a fairy-robot. His hardware (his appearance, his outfit) is a product of technology and science, while what drives him is fairy software. Viloid is brilliant with both science and magic; the only thing he lacks is acceptable behaviour among people — his emotional intelligence is “robotic”.

Through the way Viloid is “shaped” over the course of the plot, the writer Maja Cvetković Sotirov raises questions about the development of artificial intelligence and its influence in the modern world: can a fairy-robot be a friend, and what is friendship anyway? How does Viloid understand the progress of science, and who is the inventor Nikola Tesla in his eyes (that is, in his programming)? Will Luka and Lana come to love him, and why does the guardian fairy Anđelina sometimes keep him at a distance?

Šklopocija was built as a flying machine by the fairy-scientist Beskrila, who made it out of an old fairy submarine. The machine has a propeller, a life ring and a lantern (because long ago Anđelina did not know how to “switch the electricity on”), and also a winding key. That key is no ordinary one — it is special in every sense: borrowed from an ancient tin of fish.

Šklopocija is used for travelling through space and time. It starts up by itself when a great danger threatens the survival of the world.

Šklopocija has belonged to the family of the guardian fairy Anđelina for several generations now.

Long ago an old, wealthy family hired a quiet, withdrawn gentleman to look after their household library. That young librarian was no ordinary man: he had suppressed his ambition to become a scientist and settled for his new post, spending hours arranging books of every kind.

The job proved to be a splendid opportunity to meet a real scientist, who happened to be the son of the library’s owner. They soon became friends; the young scientist was delighted with his new employee and invited him into his laboratory. It never crossed his mind that he had beside him a man full of envy, a false friend who could hardly bear another’s success.

The librarian’s dark side came to light when the young scientist built a calculating machine. The old ambition awoke. He planned how to steal the real scientist’s success and become the most powerful of all — he would seize the calculating machine and turn it into a time machine, and then shape the world as he pleased. He intended one day to seize every invention of every scientist, and above all the genius of Nikola Tesla.