I would like to recommend the “Perry Rhodan” universe to the GWC community.
I’m doing this for two reasons:
a) I myself am quite USA-loving European being and half my family lives in the US, but I think that almost every book or show discussed in the podcast and on the forums is by written or produced by an American author or an American production company. Now, the most obvious reason for this is, of course, that 90% of the best scifi books/movies/shows simply were written/produced by Americans. But still, there are some gems out there that account for the other 10% - British SciFi, for example, which is of course easy for y’all to embrace because there’s no language barrier. But there’s also some (I’m not saying a lot, but some) SciFi out there that wasn’t created in English-speaking countries, which is still very very good, though, and deserves to mentioned and given credit. Now, I’m gonna open two or three threads for this kind of SciFi and I’m only going to bring up stuff that has been translated into English, because I know that the language barrier is really hard to overcome - English is not my native language and I’m struggling to get every post done right so that it’s intelligible to the folks around here.
b) Perry Rhodan deserves to be right up there with the big two, Star Wars and Star Trek. It’s been around since 1961 (!!), it reached 2400 issues in 2007, it’s the BIGGEST scifi 'verse out there, it’s bigger even than Star Trek - and, of course, not all of it is great, just like Star Trek, too, had its weak moments (I’m thinking of Final Frontier here). Perry Rhodan is pretty much THE scifi space opera, if you like Star Trek, you’re gonna just LOVE Perry Rhodan. Plus, Perry Rhodan had transporters and a lot of other equipment/plot ideas that later showed up in Star Trek WAY BEFORE Star Trek was produced. When my Dad introduced me to Perry Rhodan, he said that oftentimes he wondered whether the Star Trek writers/producers just ripped off Perry Rhodan. (I’m not going to comment on that, it should be up to everybody to figure that out for themselves).
Now, as it would seem, only a fraction of the series has ever been translated into English, but one of the most recent story arcs is being translated, the Lemuria arc:
And maybe someone out there on the forums owns older translations?
For further information, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
So, yeah, if anyone has read PR or seen one of the movies or even only heard about, let me know what you think.
