WAYNE'S PERRY RHODAN PAGE: Information and links related to the longest running science fiction series of all time.
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The
book on the left is the first American release by Ace Books. The one
on the right is the first issue from Master Publications.
The Perry Rhodan science fiction series started in Germany in the early sixties. It's a space opera that's follows the life of Perry Rhodan and his small band of associates. It's heavy on space battles, super weapons, suspense, and personal drama... think Star Trek (the original series) with more action. The format is paperback novels averaging 75,000 words. The quality is as good, and in many instances better, than Star Trek novels.
The basic story line is that Perry Rhodan is the first earthman to reach the moon during the height of the cold war. He discovers a crashed alien ship and uses it's technology to prevent world war three, establish his own country, gain control of the world's financial and technological resources, and catapult mankind into space. From then on things really get exciting.
What makes the Perry Rhodan series unique is it's length: as of 2001, there are over 2100 novel-length episodes. Over 200,000,000 copies have been sold world-wide. The series exceeds 150,000,000 words in length. Regrettably, all of these are in German. In the seventies, Ace Books began publishing American translations but only released 122 of them before giving up; there just weren't enough people buying them to continue the effort. Master Publications tried to carry the torch in a soft-cover pulp fanzine format, but that ended after only nineteen additional stories. I've heard that a company named Vector Enterprises in Southern California published numbers 1800 to 1803 a few years ago but the links to their website lead to someone who's talking about releasing a series of four fanzines that complete the Posbi Invasion arc (numbers 138-141) but they don't say when or answer their email. I have feelers out trying to track down the 1800 and 1803 issues and get a lead on the Posbi stories. As soon as I find out anything I'll post it here.
I'm lucky in being one of the few people who have a complete set of all the American-language versions of Perry Rhodan, less Vector Enterprise numbers 1800 to 1803. There is a listing of them:
Numbers 1-118 by Ace
The 4
un-numbered novels by Ace:
The Wasp
Men Attack
Menace of Atomigedon
Robot
Threat: New York
In the
Center of the Galaxy
Atlan 1,2,3,4,5 by Ace
Numbers 119-136 by Master Publications
Number 137 (The Phantom Horde) by Master Publications (with volumes 1-5 of a new series titled Starman, that also failed.)
In October, 2002, I completed a search for Perry Rhodan on MSN, Google, Lycos, and Alta Vista. Only one out of every 100 sites were in English and many of those were no longer active. The following list is the most complete you'll find for English-language PR sites. I've heard that there is an English-language Perry Rhodan emailing list or newsgroup, but as of Novemebr, 2002, I've been unable to find it.
POSSIBLE
SOURCE FOR P.R. NUMBER 1800
On May 5, 2004, I received an email from Lee Evans stating that Perry Rhodan number 1800 from Vector Enterprizes was for sale at the following URL:
http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bx=off&sts=t&ds=30&bi=0&pn=vector&kn=rhodan&sortby=2
Thank's Lee!
Perry Rhodan, Peacelord of the Universe: Links (This site shows up several times in searches)
Teddy's Kniazewycz's Perry Rhodan Page: Links
This is Mister Ralph Foyt's site where the link for Vector Enterprises in the Cool Sci-Fi Stuff page goes. It has an ad for four Posbi Invasion stories. Comments in several other sites indicate that this was once a very large, active address but that it crashed and is just now struggling to get back on its feet. I checked the site in April, 2002, and noted that additional details had been added regarding four books that were being advertised as being close to release. I emailed the site owner but received no reply. I checked again in May, 2002, and discovered a notice had been added stating that the publishing company had killed the release of these books.
Perry Rhodan Series Summary: Excellent summaries of episodes numbers 1-499. Links.
Sci Fi Site - Return of Perry Rhodan:
2008 UPDATE!!!
After the dissapointment about the failure of the Vector Enterprises publications I gave up on searching for Perry Rhodan literature for many years. Then in April of 2008 I got into it again and discovered that in January of 2007 Amazon.com had released a P.R. titled Lemuria Vol. 1: Star Ark. This is supposed to be the first of a six episode series about Perry Rhodan's discovery of a generations ship that left Earth thousands of years in the past. Here's what the cover looks like:
As of 11 April, 2008, there were only five copies available and I ordered one of those. Unfortunately, the fact that over a year has passed since this volume 1 was released and volume 2 is not yet available suggests that sales of the first volume were so poor that the publisher decided to back out of the effort.
Both Google and Ebay searches turned up no sources for volumes 1800-1804 at one time advertised by Vector Publications.
As of January, 2008, the total number of Perry Rhodan stories had grown to 2422. Starting with the 2001 count of 2100 stories, that works out to an average of 40 new stories every year.
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