© Freshly Squeezed Pulp The Odyssey in Space Series Bible Developed by: Nicole Lindbergh Jonathan Sandohval Pranav Athimuthu Victoria Wang Shreya Hurli Lily el Naccash In association with Freshly Squeezed Pulp © Freshly Squeezed Pulp 2 Table of Contents General Series Concepts Introduction Major Motifs Surpassing, Heroism, and Greatness Success through Anonymity Techno-Anxiety Divine Vs. Human Nature Imperialism and Colonialism Fatherhood Sensitivity Warning Women and Sexism Writing Style and Structure Humor Guidelines Universe History Mechanics Technology Magic Major Settings NOT INTENDED FOR OUTSIDE CIRCULATION LAST UPDATED 09/09/2020 © Freshly Squeezed Pulp 3 The Ithacan Confederation The Greek Constellation Trojan Star System Nestor’s Palace The Planet Sparta The Chaos Dimension The Planet Gaea Character Biographies Main Characters Point of View (POV) Characters Odysseus Penelope Telemachus Oracle of Delphi Supporting Main Characters Athena Pisistratus Antagonists Antinous Poseidon Minor Characters Pantheon Zeus Ares Dionysius Hermes Non-Olympian Deities Gaea Episode By Episode Summaries NOT INTENDED FOR OUTSIDE CIRCULATION LAST UPDATED 09/09/2020 © Freshly Squeezed Pulp 4 General Series Concepts The adventures of Odysseus, space warrior, will incorporate the essential overarching plot of Homer’s iconic Odyssey in a far-future ​ ​ galactic science fiction setting to better explore its timeless themes. Our 10-episode series of half-hour radio plays will have a light and comedic feel with deep and occasionally dark themes involving generational trauma and healing. Introduction Homer’s Odyssey, initially told through the oral tradition, predates forms of media we now take for granted: the bound book, the radio drama, the movie, the television show. Even applying a historical lens to the epic is comparatively a new innovation; Homer predates Herodotus, the first historian, and Aristotle, the first true orator and father of rhetoric itself, by at least three centuries. All storytelling mechanisms we use today--sarcasm, irony, and even rhetoric itself--did not exist at the time of Homer’s writing. At the time of its inception, Homer relied on only two major storytelling mediums available to him: the spoken word and song. In that sense, our attempt to create an audio drama of Odyssey returns the Homeric epic to a medium that it is most familiar with, albeit with key distinctions. Homer’s Odyssey is meant to be heard ​ ​ aloud, and a podcast format liberates the story from both its ill-suited, difficult to understand medium--the book--and its antiquated diction for a new audience of casual listeners. What has changed, then, for the Odyssey Project as opposed to Homer’s iconic epic is the diction and the setting. We consider this project as a type of translation: Homer’s plot, story, and theme integrated into a contemporary American sci-fi. Homer’s Odyssey was written in a time of great anxiety and confusion for the Greek people. The so-called Age of Heroes occurred during a time of great social restructuring in between the four centuries between the collapse of the Mycenaean and Minoan empires NOT INTENDED FOR OUTSIDE CIRCULATION LAST UPDATED 09/09/2020 © Freshly Squeezed Pulp 5 and the beginning of the Greek Golden Age. Heroes were great because ​ ​ civilizations were not; with no knowledge of the next generations of ​ Greek greats--Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato among them--there was the overwhelming sense in Homer’s time that society would continue to decay. Athena articulates this dismay in her early assurance to Telemachus in Book Two: “Sons are rarely equal to their fathers. Most worse--few better.” Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad are preoccupied with what it means to be great, how greatness can be achieved, and how it is translated through fatherhood (fatherhood being the nexus of Greek society, patriarchal as that may be). Young men wanted to surpass ​ their fathers, and generally felt they couldn’t; this is exemplified in Telemachus’s storyline. In that sense, Homer’s anxiety painfully resembles our own societal turmoil today. Americans in the 21st century are uniquely pessimistic about their futures; the American Dream of surpassing our ​ ​ own parents (having a better livelihood than the ones who came before us), while certainly more unisex than the ancient Greek concept of surpassing, bears the stain of decay. What does it mean to be a great ​ ​ person in the 21st century? In a world where success can be measured in views and downloads but minimum wage stays the same, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and nothing is done about climate change, racial inequality, or the erosion of democracy itself, Americans and particularly our generation feel impotent, frustrated, and scared. It would be a mistake to call this an adaptation of the Odyssey. Our writer’s room instead is attempting a translation, not ​ ​ from Ancient Greek to contemporary American English, but from Antiquity to modern U.S.A. We are Gen Z writers trying to explore what ​ it is like to be alive in a tumultuous 21st century through these established and well-loved characters. While on the surface the ​ stories of Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope may seem irrelevant, they are actually more timely than ever: Odysseus is a soldier who after a decade of fighting a superfluous war returns to a largely civilian world he does not recognize; Telemachus is a fatherless young man in a society where the newly rich ignore and redefine the rules of success; Penelope struggles with her own identity, her family, and her femininity. NOT INTENDED FOR OUTSIDE CIRCULATION LAST UPDATED 09/09/2020 © Freshly Squeezed Pulp 6 Major Motifs Surpassing, Heroism, and Greatness Our most important ongoing motif is centered around the idea of what it means to be great, good, and proper, qualifications all set by a society that is always changing. Each of the main characters struggle with these qualifications in different ways. In less formal terms, Odysseus and Penelope are both boomers; they grew up in a fundamentally different society pre-Trojan War than Telemachus’s generation, which includes the suitors. As such, they have extremely rigid, extremely conservative, and dated ideas of what is morally right, even if both sacrifice these views from time to time in order to achieve their own goals. The great arc of our first season is for Telemachus to shed this conservatism while adopting a new cynicism as he explores the Greek constellations looking for his father, eventually discovering the Crystal Conspiracy that started the Trojan War. For Telemachus, “surpassing his father” actually means rejecting him ideologically altogether. Odysseus likewise undergoes a change in that he is forced to accept his own shortcomings as a hero. See: The Suitors, Pisistratus ​ ​ ​ For additional insight into this theme of heroism and greatness. Success through Anonymity In keeping with the question of greatness, Odysseus’s dual identities of king and beggar frequently come up throughout Homer’s Odyssey. While Odysseus is known as a hero, he is often most successful disguised as a beggar. His identity as “Nobody”, most famously associated with Polyphemus, facilitates his return to his identity as Odysseus. Odysseus disguises as a beggar in Troy, in front of the suitors, to Polyphemus, to Arete, and throughout his travels; Athena makes a point to disguise him as often as possible. Greek heroes, however, are immortalized as such only when they put their name on it; it is Odysseus’s desire to boast (“Tell them it was Odysseus that blinded your eye!”) that frequently impedes his journey home. NOT INTENDED FOR OUTSIDE CIRCULATION LAST UPDATED 09/09/2020 © Freshly Squeezed Pulp 7 Other scholars have written better about this subject; for our purposes, it is important to know that we continue Homer’s juxtaposition of the seen and celebrated versus the unseen and effective to further explore the nature of heroism and the concept of surpassing. Techno-Anxiety As a society that has developed space travel, the Odysseus of our story has a wealth of technologies available to him than the original, technologies that continue to develop at an advanced pace, resulting in generational clashes. In some ways, the effects are benign, like when Queen Arete, who hosts her own Dr. Phil-style TV show, doesn’t understand her daughter Nausicaa’s ClikClok live streams; in other ways, the misunderstandings between generations are more severe. In our story, the techno-anxiety currently experienced in the 21st century is especially reflected through the gods, particularly in Athena, who is an Artificial Intelligence unit among flesh-and-blood gods. See: Athena for more on the conflict between AI and divinity. ​ ​ See: Primordial History for more context on the gods ​ ​ themselves. Divine Vs. Human Nature In continuing our question of what makes a good versus a great person, we compare divine versus human nature to explore the consequences of ambition. See: Supporting Characters ​ See: Antagonists ​ Imperialism and Colonialism Bluntly, the Trojan War for our purposes is an allegory for the Iraq War; as a postbellum story, the Odyssey allows us to explore the consequences of this conflict on families. We’ve added features to NOT INTENDED FOR OUTSIDE CIRCULATION LAST UPDATED 09/09/2020 © Freshly Squeezed Pulp 8 our Iliad that go beyond the scope of Homer’s, including a bid for natural resources of Troy to strengthen this comparison. See: Trojan War for more detail. ​ ​ Fatherhood See: Penelope, Telemachus ​ ​ ​ Writing Style and Structure A radio drama has no visuals to rely on. Any and all information has to be carried through actors delivering lines, and the usual maxim “Show, Don’t Tell” presents a unique challenge to radio playwrights. As it stands, The Odyssey Project aims to center its exposition with relatable, witty characters and snappy, exploratory dialogue that can showcase a complex, and diverse universe in a natural and organic way.