[Chris Oakley's home page] [Greek mythology on banned substances] [The next installment - Dionysus] [Latvian translation by Evelína Koprziwová]

The Legend of Perseus

Our part of the galaxy - like the other spiral arms - remains relatively unexplored by most of the hyper-advanced races that dwell near the centre, or hub cap, of the galaxy, and in the last few thousand years the only use they have made of our sector (which consists of little more than two million life-supporting planets) has been as a penal colony.

It was then purely by chance that Gaea, a woman from one of the old crime families on the ultra-chic planet Chaos, and a neurotic with violent tendencies, was dropped off in Northern Greece to serve a two thousand year sentence for cannibalism. The gaolers, one of whom had managed to get her pregnant in the long trip over, did not stay long enough to consider the fact that dropping a violent psychotic on a planet whose native life forms had vastly inferior powers was not really cricket.

The rest is history, or, at least, mythology, and is chronicled by Homer and Euripides, amongst others. She bred incestuously with her son Uranus (no jokes, please) to produce - no big surprise - a series of genetic freaks, some of which were giants with a hundred hands and some of which had only one eye: only the youngest seven were remotely normal. Of all the murderous family squabbles that followed, culminating in her grandson Zeus emerging as the ruler, you would not want to know - at least not until our book on the subject comes out - but suffice it to say that if the Greeks thought they had problems before the gods came on the scene, well, they hadn't seen nuthin' yet.

Our book, and the books that will follow are, to the best of my knowledge, the first completely accurate documentation on this bizarre part of human history.

The first installment, concerning the hero Perseus, has been available since May 1989, and is still in print, price £3.50 inc. p. & p. if you write to one of the authors at "Mouette", Old Road, Oxford OX3 8TA, U.K.. There is also a Kindle edition.

Perseus Cover 

The Prologue and Start of Chapter 4

Reviews and Articles

The poster we did in September 1989. A lot of stupid visual jokes, but we enjoyed doing it.

Also, here are some early attempts at the cover. Two further books, concerning the exploits of Dionysus and Oedipus are in progress.