Recently I began reading the English editions of Perry Rhodan Neo. In some ways, this a trip down memory lane, other ways, a bloody fun delight to read.
It was when I was a teenager, way back in the day of 7th Grade, that I first encountered Perry Rhodan in the local bookstore. These were the Ace Books English editions that were brought to America courtesy of Forrest J. Ackerman (great man, friendly as heck, and greatly missed in SF Fandom). After about a year of juggling my reading between Perry Rhodan, Doc Savage, and a large variety of comic books and magazines, I eventually succumbed to peer pressure and gave up both Perry Rhodan and Doc savage for more “serious” science fiction. Although that choice led me down the path of discovering the Big Three of SF (Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein), along with many others (Tolkien, Herbert, Howard, Zelazny, Delany as starters), I still had Perry Rhodan crossing my mind from time to time.
Around about 2010, I took my family to a con in Oregon, and a book dealer there had several Perry Rhodan books, and I bought four them, numbered in the low 20s, and gave them a good read. Yep, a chunk of it was still rather juvenile in nature, but when these were written back in 1961/62, the target audience was young, teenage boys.
A little research revealed that by around 1980, the series changed to a more mature writing style for the stories, and had been in continuous publication on a weekly basis since 1961 with well over 2000 volumes, not including spin-off series. I was shocked. But then here in the States we don’t get a lot of SF that was not originally written in English. Some, yes, like Solaris, but generally speaking…nope. (Same is true with foreign language films – we lose out on a lot of great films if they are not dubbed in English, and even then…)
Around this same time the publishers announced that a reboot series was planned on launching in 2011, on the 50th anniversary of the launch of the original series. One hoped that it wold be released in English as well. Wishful thinking.
Meanwhile I had acquired and read the first two full cycles of the original run in English and found them to be pretty darn good, although they got a lot of the science wrong, especially in regards to Venus, but then those adventures were written before the first probes penetrated the atmosphere of Venus revealing what a Hell hole Venus turned out to be.
Turns out, a couple of years ago, a publisher took on the task of translating Perry Rhodan Neo. My hat’s off to J-Novel Club for taking on this task and bringing Perry Rhodan Neo to English readers.
I’ve read the first 8 books of the J-Novel editions, each volume continues to Rhodan books (booklets? Short novels? Adventures!), and these Neo editions are very different, yet still similar to the original run. In general, they follow, very loosely, the original story line so far as Perry Rhodon discovers the crashed Arkonide ship on the Moon and befriends Crest and brings Arkonide tech to Earth, setting up operations in the Gobi, similar to the original run. However, things go far less smoothly for Perry and Reg Bull (no longer called Bell, or using nickname of “Bully” as in the German original for the obvious reason), and there are a great deal of plot differences and character motivations.
There are a lot of differences in how the story continues to unfold in that there are two other Arkonides who are not onboard the Aetron when Earth governments manage to destroy it. This leads to additional story threads weaving in and out of the main story line, and adds some new twists and turns. The presence of Arkonides having been on Earth appears earlier, with Atlan being alluded to, but not named. Vega calls for help, and that battle takes on a more realistic turn than in the original run as well as providing additional mysteries as we learn that ancient Arkonides had established a base there as well. All in all, it is a very different telling of the events inspired from the original stories.
Overall I find the Neo series better written, with a more mature target audience, as opposed to the early original run, and no where near as juvenile. The creative team does take some liberties with U. S. government agencies that I find weird, both in choice of agencies and their operations/motivations. They also make some odd though-away notes about a few characters that have no follow-up; Anne Sloane being described as a “Fundamentalist Christian” being one example as there has been no explanation in her character as to why she would be, or is, such. Strange.
The paranormal abilities that many characters posses in the series now has a fairly high price to pay, and each character with a given ability has limits to what they can do before they burn out and are exhausted. This is good way of balancing out these types of powers as it makes characters with these psi powers very powerful.
To sum up, I continue to enjoy reading the English translations of Perry Rhodan Neo, and by golly, I wish J-Novel Club would speed up their publication/release schedule before I run out of volumes. After all PR Neo German editions is numbering around 300 volumes now. If, like me, you read the original series from Ace, this is a darn good way to rediscover the series. It is probably the most massive literary soap opera around!
First Look at Perry Rhodan Neo English Editions
