HOMER IN SPACE

In 1994, in England, a Czech psychologist and writer sat down and crafted a science fiction epic of some 6,500 lines in Homeric Greek, setting his hero wandering among planets, aliens, robots, computers and strange civilisations. The work was Jan Křesadlo’s Astronautilia, whose full Greek title, Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου Ἀστροναυτιλία ἢ ἡ Μικροοδύσσεια ἡ κοσμική, describes it as a “Cosmic Micro Odyssey”. It was published shortly after his death.

Jan Křesadlo was the pseudonym of Václav Pinkava, born in Prague in 1926, classically educated, a psychologist by profession and an exile in Britain after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Astronautilia, one of his last works, belongs to a long and now almost forgotten tradition of writing new literary works in Ancient Greek. Křesadlo, however, took that tradition in an extraordinary direction, choosing Homeric Greek for a work of science fiction.

The connection with the Odyssey is apparent from the opening lines. Like the ancient epic poet, Křesadlo begins by invoking the Muses and Apollo, except that the subject he asks them to sing has been transferred from the sea to the cosmos:

“As I begin, I pray first to the choir of Muses from Helicon, and fervently to lord Apollo … that they may tell of my journey through the vast universe.”

The Homeric imitation extends even to the architecture of the poem. Its twenty four books follow the letters of the Greek alphabet, reproducing the familiar twenty four book division through which both the Iliad and the Odyssey have come down to us. Křesadlo is therefore imitating Homer at several levels at once: language, metre, narrative and even the external shape of the epic.

He immediately explains the purpose of the mission. The captain and his companions are travelling in search of “Mandys and the sheep that observes the cosmos.” The solemnity of the epic invocation collides delightfully with its subject, yet the epic form remains perfectly intact. Indeed, the absurdity acquires, through Homer, a peculiar grandeur of its own.

Even the hero’s name is a philological joke. The captain is called Οὐδείς, “Nobody”. Odysseus used Οὖτις, another form of “Nobody”, to deceive Polyphemus, while Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo bears precisely the same name in Latin. Οὐδείς himself explains that he chose his name after the mysterious «Νήμω καπιτᾶνον». In a single name, Křesadlo brings together Odysseus, Verne and science fiction.

At the centre of the story is a rescue mission on a cosmic scale. Mandys has stolen the sheep which, according to the poem’s satirical cosmology, observes the universe and thereby ensures its existence. The joke draws upon the observer problem associated with quantum mechanics: Křesadlo takes the idea that observation is implicated in physical reality and gives the universe a single indispensable observer, which turns out, magnificently, to be a sheep. The fate of the cosmos therefore depends upon the continued gaze of an animal that would have been entirely at home in the pastoral world of ancient epic. Οὐδείς and his crew set out to recover it, travelling from planet to planet through strange civilisations, conflicts and digressions, until the search eventually leads even into time itself.

There is an ancient Greek precedent for this journey beyond the earth as well. In Lucian’s True History, written in the second century AD, travellers are swept into the heavens, reach the Moon and encounter extraterrestrial peoples and a war between the inhabitants of the Moon and the Sun. Lucian is frequently claimed as an ancestor of science fiction, although his purpose was satirical rather than scientific prediction. The resemblance makes Astronautilia still more curious: Křesadlo combines the cosmic absurdity of Lucian with the language, metre and wandering structure of Homer.

This gives Křesadlo the means to reproduce the basic narrative structure of the Odyssey on a cosmic scale. The sea becomes interstellar space, the islands become planets and the strange peoples encountered by Odysseus are replaced by extraterrestrial societies. Οὐδείς is captured, fights monsters, faces mutinies, encounters societies with unusual sexual and political customs, attends feasts, escapes from danger and loses companions as he continues his journey. Křesadlo has therefore transferred something more important than Odysseus himself into space: he has transferred the way the Odyssey tells a story.

There is another, rather unexpected, connection with Homer in the technology of Astronautilia. Robots and artificial intelligence initially seem completely foreign to archaic epic, yet Homer had already imagined machines and artificial beings possessing qualities which, with the necessary historical qualification, bear a remarkable resemblance to automation and artificial intelligence.

The first examples occur in the Iliad. In Book 18, the workshop of Hephaestus contains self moving tripods that go by themselves to the assembly of the gods and return, as well as the famous golden attendants, artificial women who possess intelligence, voice and strength and have been taught their skills by the gods. Homer thus imagines manufactured beings capable of moving, knowing and acting. The Odyssey goes further still. The ships of the Phaeacians require neither helmsmen nor steering oars. Alcinous tells Odysseus that the ships themselves understand the thoughts of men and know the cities and countries to which they are required to travel.

In this way, Homer draws no firm boundary of the kind a modern reader might instinctively place between technology and the marvellous. Hephaestus makes objects that move and act for themselves, and their extraordinary powers belong to his τέχνη, his craft. The Phaeacian ships can think their way to a destination, yet they remain ships. Homeric poetry can therefore accommodate intelligent artefacts without having to explain away their wonder. This helps to account for the curious ease with which Křesadlo can introduce robots, computers and autonomous machines into an Homeric universe: the conceptual space for marvellous technology was already there.

Astronautilia goes one step further by bringing its machines within the conventions of heroic poetry itself. The robotic Ivo and Tonda are more than technological assistants to the crew. The exploits of these robots can even assume the form of an aristeia, the epic display of excellence that in Homer belongs to the great warriors. Technology thus becomes capable of Homeric heroic action, while computers and artificial beings occupy places in the story that ancient epic reserved for heroes, companions and the marvellous creations of the gods.

The language itself is subjected to a similar test. How does one write “computer”, “robot”, “spaceship”, or describe a technological process, in a form of Greek that supposedly belongs to the world of Homer? Křesadlo invents words, transfers modern concepts into ancient morphological forms and uses Homeric vocabulary to express things that lay beyond the horizon of its age. The systematic nature of the exercise can also be seen in the scholarly apparatus of the work, which includes a Greek English glossary of unusual words and a Greek index. The comic effect therefore coexists with a serious linguistic experiment: an ancient language is being asked to invent the future.

The author’s game extends even to the authorship of the poem. Křesadlo presents himself, fictitiously, as the translator of a Greek original by an «ἄδηλος ποιητής», an “unknown poet”. Οὐδείς is supposed to have dictated his adventures to Franta, his universal translator, who recorded them in Homeric Greek, after which the manuscript eventually reached Křesadlo for translation. This chain of narration, transcription and translation adds another level to the Homeric imitation. A work that plays with the antiquity of its language also plays with the question of who is speaking, who is recording the story and who, ultimately, is entitled to call himself the poet.

There is, however, a deeper reason why the Odyssey lends itself so naturally to science fiction. The Odyssey and science fiction share the same basic curiosity about unfamiliar worlds. Whenever Odysseus arrives somewhere unknown, he must discover who lives there, whether they are just or violent, how they treat strangers, what they eat, which gods they recognise and what rules govern their society. Alcinous himself asks Odysseus to tell him about the peoples among whom he has wandered, distinguishing between those who are «χαλεποί τε καὶ ἄγριοι οὐδὲ δίκαιοι», “harsh and savage and unjust”, and those who are «φιλόξεινοι» and possess a «νόος … θεουδής», a mind that reveres the gods.

This is also one of the fundamental possibilities of science fiction. Landing on an unknown planet allows a writer to imagine different ways of organising power, family, religion, technology or sexuality and, through them, to examine our own society from a distance. This is why Astronautilia can remind us simultaneously of Star Trek and the Odyssey. In both, the journey becomes a means of comparison: every new place raises again the question of what it means to be human among beings who live differently.

Perhaps the deepest Odyssean connection lies in nostos, the return home. The wandering acquires its particular significance because there is a place and a time from which the traveller has become separated and against which he continues to measure his distance. Even when Křesadlo extends the search across the universe and eventually into time itself, the possibility of return remains. The companions begin their journey back to Earth, while Οὐδείς follows Mandys backwards through time, again towards Earth. The wandering may be cosmic, yet at its heart it remains Odyssean.

Possibly, this is why the greatest joke in Astronautilia is ultimately directed at the reader. Křesadlo begins with the apparently absurd proposition that Homer can be made to describe a world of robots, computers, spaceships and time travel, and then spends thousands of lines demonstrating how naturally Homeric poetry can accommodate all of them. What at first appears to be an elaborate philological joke gradually becomes something more interesting. Homer had already imagined autonomous machines and intelligent artificial beings, while the wanderings of Odysseus already contain the structure required for journeys through unknown worlds. The supposed anachronism begins to look less like an anachronism at all. The technology may change, the geography may expand from the Mediterranean to the universe and the monsters assume different forms, yet the traveller always remains, trying to understand what he encounters, survive it and eventually return home. Almost three thousand years after Homer, Křesadlo sends another Οὐδείς into the unknown. His journey reaches the stars, yet it remains recognisably, an Odyssey.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

 

First published in NKEE on Saturday 12 September 2026