Long time since I chose to update this site rather than work on the book — sorry about that.
Odysseus Wept is still in the writing stage — but before you complain, it’s probably going to be a five-hundred page book — for those of you familiar with my prior works, that’s like getting two or three books in one. I worry that the paperback spine won’t do particularly well with a book of this length, but determined to keep it in one volume.
An interview on the Powys site (www.powysmedia.com) will likely be coming relatively soon so I don’t want to steal anybody’s thunder by giving too much away here. But what I can tell you is that where Omega and Alpha sought to demystify Space:1999, Odysseus Wept seeks to remystify it. While this is the end of the chronological line for the Powys series, the overriding mythology is deep and broad should anyone else out there decide to pick it up (or even just grab a couple of elements and run with them).
This has been a very organic book for me in that I tried very hard not to plan it out as much as we’ve planned out other books in this series — what that means is that sometimes even I don’t know how things are going to ultimately turn out. Well, let me clarify that a little. I know the ending. I know the beginning. It’s the pieces in the middle that sometimes characters are deciding for me.
Some readers complained with Omega and Alpha that we were trying very hard to tie everything in the Space:1999 universe together — in our defense, that’s not something we listened to much — we basically used four episodes from the show to build a mythology — that fact that we could get things to connect from four episodes, while leaving out forty-four other episodes, tells me we weren’t as ambitious as people think.
Odysseus Wept is also going to connect some things together — some of which may surprise you. The Final Revolution taught a little bit of physics in the Space: 1999 universe, Omega and Alpha taught a little bit more, but Johnny Byrne’s Children of the Gods also seeded a little bit of what makes Odysseus Wept work. It’s not so much attempting to answer every question — we’ve tried very, very hard to build a consistent universe for a show that was often inconsistent. We’re going to leave questions unanswered — we’re even raising some more. This time around, in Odysseus Wept, we’re not “meddling” with anything from the original episodes for the most part — but perhaps we’re playing a bit with what you’ve seen in our stories and novels.
Paul Morrow is the primary character of a third of this book. So (spoiler-alert) where The Final Revolution dovetails with this book is a good portion of the way in — Odysseus Wept’s first act is tying The Forsaken into a bigger picture — and I’ll stop there.
I can’t tell you what genre Odysseus Wept is — aspects of it are science fiction, other aspects seem at least tinged by fantasy, but much of it reads like historical fiction, maybe even something Clive Cussler-esque, where historical elements suddenly start becoming important in the present.
The key thing is we’re trying to wrap up all the loose ends, while also establishing the foundations for what happens AFTER Space:1999. And as I’ve said earlier, I’m determined to not have a Star Trek: Generations kind of ending — it’s closer to The Undiscovered Country, but it’s the Space:1999 version of it (sorry to go Star Trek on you but aren’t you used to me doing that by now?).
I’m in the home stretch — still more to go. I’ve never spent this long working on one book before — and I’m just imagining what the editing process will be like — but it’s definitely nearing the end.
Thought you’d like to know…