While Seth McFarlane and his team at “The Orville” await Hulu’s official decision about a potential fourth season, a new in-universe book offers both newbies and hardcore fans a comprehensive guide to the zany sci-fi series.
Here’s the official description of “The Guide to The Orville,” which was recently published by Portland-based Dark Horse Books:
“A full-color hardcover guide to the universe of Seth MacFarlane’s beloved sci-fi series — featuring page after page of technical detail, interstellar history, and character biographies!
“Explore exotic alien planets, adventure between innumerable stars, and get to know a diverse starship crew as they navigate their thrilling and mysterious universe. Captain Ed Mercer and his brave shipmates guide readers through the decks of the Orville, recounting their voyages through ship logs, and providing insightful commentary on the state of a changing galaxy.
“Dark Horse presents ‘The Guide to The Orville,’ a jam-packed lore book collecting everything a new crew member needs to know about the Planetary Union’s most remarkable ship!”
Written by seasoned “The Orville” writer and co-executive producer Andre Bormanis, it’s a beautifully bound 192-page volume immersing followers into every aspect of the show’s world. It features dozens of illustrations, diary entries, and detailed cutaways that serve as an exacting manual for newbie spacefarers familiarizing themselves with the huge vessel and the vast universe it explores.
Related: Big news! ‘The Orville’ is getting a 4th season, actor confirms
“I always knew Seth was very funny and a very good comedy writer,” Bormanis told Space.com. “But I didn’t realize until I started working with him on ‘The Orville’ what a great writer of one-hour drama he was. What a great science fiction mind he has, how engaged he is with social issues, and how he wants to look at those issues through that prism of science fiction and come up with that unique perspective that really draws attention to the absurdity of some of the things we fight over in our present-day world. It’s been a great pleasure, and being able to revisit it all after we wrapped the third season has just been the icing on the cake for me.
“This book was a couple years in the making in terms of my involvement, conceiving it and writing it. I think we had started filming season three when Dark Horse came to Seth and said that they’d love to do a big, coffee-table scale, lavishly illustrated book about ‘The Orville,’ and they wanted it to be an in-universe book, meaning that we treat the ship and the crew as if they’re real and these things really happened.”
Dark Horse’s deluxe edition includes a decorative slipcase, an exclusive alternate cover treatment, a folio including four departmental Planetary Union patches, and a fantastic 27-by-40-inch (69 by 102 centimeters) poster featuring the Orville ship in a hyper-detailed cutaway by illustrator Matthew Cushman.
Bormanis is a science and technology writer who scored the coveted gig as science consultant to the “Star Trek” TV and film franchise beginning in 1993 on “The Next Generation.” He then wrote episodes for “Star Trek: Voyager” before becoming a staff writer and co-producer on “Star Trek: Enterprise.”
“David Goodman, one of our executive producers and writers, came to me,” he added. “I thought about it for a week or two and I came up with this idea of, What if this was a manual for new officers who have just graduated from Union Point and this was their first deep-space assignment? What would they need to know and want to know about this particular ship, its history, its missions, the layout of the ship and some of the technical of it, and the senior officers? That was the germ of the idea.”
A collegiate physics major who did graduate work in astrophysics before migrating to computer software and space policy, Bormanis embraced the project with gusto.
“Then I wanted to do profiles of the senior officers and talk about the stories, and we’ve done 37 episodes in our three seasons on the air,” he explained. “I didn’t want to just do episode synopses, because they’re everywhere online and it’s kind of dry when you talk about them in the third person. So I looked at each episode from the point of view of the character most affected by that episode, and that became these short personal logs in the book.”
Dark Horse Books’ “The Guide to The Orville” is available now.
