Perry Rhodan: The Planet of the Dying Sun.

Despite my best intentions, time gets away from me. We’ve got two job searches going on in Psychology this semester and I’m on both sub committees. Reviewing applicants, meeting about them, doing phone interviews, etc, has filled up every spare moment I might have had to blog, or write. But, finally, here is a blog post.

I mentioned previously that I was going to make this year, at least in part, of reading series books. In this regard, I just finished “The Planet of the Dying Sun, #11 in the Perry Rhodan space opera series. This is a German series, which started in 1961 in Germany’s equivalent of a pulp magazine. There is something like 3000 books in this series, and more in a Spinoff series called “Atlan.”  In the USA, Ace books published the first 126 books, between 1969- and 1978, as well as a few Atlans. They’ve been phenomenally popular in Germany. Wikipedia indicates they reached 1 billion in sales by 1986.

I've only read half a dozen of the series. Most I’ve enjoyed, but I found “The Planet of the Dying Sun” to be extremely weak. It didn't engage me at all. After looking through my records I see that the ones I've liked were written by K. H. Scheer. My favorite so far has been Fortress of the Six Moons, not coincidentally, the first in the series that I read.

“The Planet of the Dying Sun" was written by Kurt Mahr, although from what I understand an original draft of the work might have been done by Scheer. Mahr was the pen name for Klaus Otto Mahn. Mahr/Mahn apparently wrote a bunch of the Rhodan titles and I have a couple more of his around here. However, at the moment, I’m thinking that I'll probably give those a miss and stick with the Scheer ones.

The most memorable thing about this book was the opening "letter" from Forry Rhodan. Forry was Forrest J. Ackerman, who contributed imaginary “fan letters/editorials” to some of the early books in the series. I'll quote a brief passage that made me arch an eyebrow and laugh. In speaking of Perry Rhodan, the letter reads: "He is a true super-Homo Sapiens, the representative of the Man of the Future, to show our present day Hippies, long haired defeatists, and their friends that the future of Earth is in the stars, not in drugs or in plain sex and pleasure!"

As a long-haired scientist myself, I thought this was laying it on a little thick. I guess Forry wasn’t a fan of the hippie movement.