How it all began
Our main concept is based on the renaissance’s lesson to use ideas from the past to analyze our present, still considering our species a very young one that could be guided onto its next stage through an introspective emotionally intelligent path, keeping always in mind that the chain of sexiness – beauty – love that leads to wisdom can’t be overlooked and that the greatest achievement any artist could accomplish would be to captivate minds profoundly enough to make the transmission of a message seem effortless; it’s our most honest attempt of seducing the audience into more complex subjects, the book is focused on creating mental health awareness and encouraging the reader to draw their own conclusions regarding the world we currently live in.
There are seven main protagonists each one with its own chapter – from 2 to 8, which can be read in whichever order you prefer, – which they narrate themselves, two of them in present tense and the rest in past, it’s all part of the story. They all have mixed backgrounds such as a Japanese father Taiwanese mother, a survivor of the Rwanda massacre, a Colombian with Lebanese and Portuguese ancestry, a Danish whose mother is German, a Jewish lady married to a Muslim man she met in Jerusalem, an Anglo-Indian guy inspired in a way by Orwell (character name is Arthur such as Orwell’s real name), and last but definitely not least a Turkish Muslim bisexual woman for which a Lebanese friend for work is providing help; my friend is working on her Ph.D. on gender inequality in politics, especially in countries with religious civil wars that have moved from the streets to parliament. The prologue and the first chapter are narrated by an A.I, the idea is that this droid that starts being very critical of humanity ends up warming up to us.
The measure of the story’s Universe – 7 trillion light-years, approximately 78 times the size of our observable universe, and 252 times the size of a Hubble Sphere – provides more than enough civilizations to present dystopias that can serve as warnings for the future – ideally in the style of 1984, A Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451 – as well as utopias where A.E.I – Artificial Emotional Intelligence – along with futuristic ways of understanding childhood education and life provide scenarios that we as humanity could aspire to reach one day; highlighting the importance of having scenarios that can’t be reached such as Nietzsche’s superman or the pious morals of different religions that should keep us on a constant path of introspection and improvement, delivering us from self-righteousness and feelings of superiority, trying to consider Fortuna before judging others and welcoming with humor life greatest tragedies – as the Greeks tough us – as we hope you welcome our message.
The novel’s attempt to inspire people, pointing at the vacuum of principles in our transition from theological guidance to scientific, but we hope to do in it a way that shows the novel doesn’t take itself very seriously; for example, there is one illustration for each of the twelve chapters, the first one has great resemblance with what you would see in a graphic novel. As the chapters pass we change the approach trying to come up with designs that resemble some of our favorite paintings, the works of Dali, Panini, Hieronymus, Esher, etc; the last illustration – twelfth – will have all the different perspectives used by Da Vinci in The Last Supper, as a way to muck or bring humor to the attempt of the novel/author of conveying through beauty inspirational messages that can guide us into finding the same sense of purpose and virtue religion once offered so many.
The Research
You can find - mostly - every piece of research relevant to the story here:
For example, an excel file that contains literary structures and MBTI classifications of every character in the story, even with more detail for the main seven protagonists – for which you can also find the most important mental health issue they have faced during their lives, – one of which is himself a writer named Arthur who used to play the game “what story could this be” with his friends back on Earth, where they would determine the writer, plot, and structure that would have created the specific situation they are experiencing; during the chapter he narrates, as well as whenever he interacts with others characters, he serves as the novel’s self-critiquing voice, doubting the true intentions of someone writing such an extended story, their vanity, insecurities, Freudian psychosexual development, Jungian archetype, etc
The excel file also has time dilation calculators, as well as interpretations of the duration of a light-year on planets with days whose duration is not 24 hours, which years don’t have 365,25 days, and where even minutes don’t have sixty seconds, but any other value they found more logical to assign; these two factors, how time dilates and how it is quantified during the completion of a full orbital trajectory around a star, would make the concept of a year similar to ours in other planets, but the number of seconds passed and the speed at which they did when seen from another planet would be completely different between one place and the other.
Besides the Excel, in the Miro board, you’ll find links to animations, designs of cities based on the Venus project combined with the philosophy of the School of Life among other projects and additional content we would like to introduce in the story as made by the main seven characters themselves, available to the readers true an interactive platform.
Our main goal is to be able to introduce a mental health platform in the novel called Pandaaa’ – Peace and Awareness Assistant App, still in development – similar to what you would describe as A.E.I, we would like to create a system that not only provides you with mental health counseling but that also rates the mental health impact of different factors in the user, starting with other apps, from social network to news platforms; the app would also provide tests for the user that can determine if they have a psychiatric condition, and eventually provide financial aid so everyone can afford it. A consultation with a psychotherapist can cost on average 150€, 600 euros a month for a weekly visit is something hardly anyone living independently under the age of thirty can realistically afford nowadays; we are aware we’re still very young as a species, but we have this crazy idea that we can see mental health – or at least the awareness of it – being provided for everyone across the world before the end of our brief time on our living spaceship of a planet as the latest members of our team in this endless relay race we call humanity.