The Perry Rhodan series is the longest sci-fi series ever written. It started back in 1961, in a German pulp booklet format, and has been going ever since. The story centres around the titular character, among others, who began as an astronaut that landed on the moon and discovered a crashed alien spaceship.

The astronauts use the technology from that craft to set themselves up as a third World Power opposed to the Americans and the Soviets, and eventually manage to bring world peace about, but it doesn't stop there. No, it expands farther and father into the classic space opera mould of discovering newer and more powerful races with each arc (named 'cycle' in the story). As well as that, the time period covered is from the 1960s to the year 4900! Which Perry and his mates have witnessed due to some form of deux ex machina to make them immortal (probably alien tech).

As I said, I have a new reason for learning German because only the first 140 or so issues were ever translated into English and I've been meaning to find a new series that would last me a while.

 

Sounds like a fun series to read. Learning german just to read it does sound o-k to me, but others may find it a bit extreme.

 

True, but I forgot to mention that the major appeal of the series (for me at least) is that the authors and styles of it change over time to such an extent to cover the major stylistic trends of each successive real world period. So it basically starts with a standard action-adventure military tone, goes through the flower power era, and ends up in the modern standard of cynicism towards everything viewpoint. It sounds very interesting and I really would like to read it, thus the whole learning German thing.

 

As someone who has read over 70 books (a book has ten or so booklets in it) I can only say it is worth reading. The thing is, it started rather exceptionally, and this lasted for quite a time but the later books just weren't as good as the previous. The story started to repeat in a way, only replacing the new races.

That being said, The first few cycles are great, especially The Posbis cycle, the Andromeda cycle and the Crystal agents cycle. It blends paranormal humans, high technology, epic space battles, small solo adventures, a wide, wide cast (it has quite a few character deaths so the cast changes, not everyone stays relatively immortal) and exciting conflicts with new races and the way humans deal with them.

Unfortunately I think the writing style isn't that good, but since the story itself is so exiting, for parts, it is worth to read.

I didn't know so few of them were translated into English, if you can read French, maybe should try that, I believe they have more books translated, not so sure though.

 

Yeah, I read about 1000 booklets up to about No.2000.

I especially remember 1-300, 400ff, 700ff. Booklets originally written during the 1980ies I didn't like that much. 1000ff had some interesting parts, but most of the latter plotlines weren't that great.

One interesting point is that quite a lot of ideas later found in Star Trek had been written earlier by Perry Rhodan authors. The setting of a "bad" parallel universe as used in TOS looks like it was copypasted. The setting was much more detailed in Perry Rhodan but even details of the story line were astonishing similar.

 

Yeah, the later books were kind of similar, I for one can't remember whether I stopped reading at book 80 or book 70 ^^

which was you favorite cycle? As a whole, I loved the Andromeda cycle but the later appearances of Roi Danton and Tatcher A Hainu and Daleimoc were also rather amusing. But from there it kind of blurs together.

 

I used to know German, lack of practice (2 years) has made me forget it. I will try to relearn it by reading this and if that doesn't work out I will try the frenc translations.