Perry Rhodan - The greatest adventure

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novel
title Perry Rhodan - The greatest adventure
country Germany
author Andreas Eschbach
illustrator Cover: Nele Schütz Design, Munich
publishing company Fischer Tor
Argon Verlag
First publication February 27, 2019

Perry Rhodan - The Greatest Adventure is a pseudobiographical science fiction novel by the author Andreas Eschbach from 2019.

The novel is a prequel to the Perry Rhodan series , which has been running since 1961, under the motto "How it all began" . The life of the serial hero Perry Rhodan is described from his birth to his first interstellar flight .

action

It tells the story of the young US Air Force pilot Perry Rhodan, who, born in 1936, grew up in a world that until 1968 seemed to be identical to ours. Then, at Christmas 1968, the flight of Apollo 8 failed , which no longer returned from its flight to Earth's moon . As a result, world events change rapidly due to processes that previously took place underground and quickly develop into an alternative story of our world. The NASA is ousted from the lunar program and the military project Starfire , is employed by the Perry Rhodan 1961, with interruptions, the planning assumes a first manned space flight to the moon, which takes place then the 1,971th As a result, Perry Rhodan meets an alien spaceship of the Arkonides on the moon, prevents a world war with the technology of the Arkonides and starts at the end of the novel on his first interstellar space flight .

The story of Perry Rhodan and his career is told by his long-time companion Homer G. Adams , a person with a photographic memory who also takes on the role of the omniscient first-person narrator in the novel and explains to the reader again and again how he can access the information about Perry Rhodan arrived. In his references, Homer G. Adams also repeatedly takes up events of the distant future (the Perry Rhodan series) in key words and places them in the context of the biographical story about the young Perry Rhodan. At the same time we learn the story of the narrator and how he became aware of Perry Rhodan in separate short overlays.

Until the alternative course in 1968 with the Apollo 8 accident, the novel resembles in many ways a historical novel with the participation of Perry Rhodan. Locations are until 1968 a. a. the US Military Academy at West Point and the Paris student riots . The novel also describes Perry Rhodan and his role as a US Air Force pilot in some of the major scenes of the 20th century, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Vietnam War . Until 1968 Perry meets Rhodan u. a. the US President Johnson and Nixon , as well as the young Martin Luther King .

After the alternative course of the Apollo 8 accident, NASA no longer focuses on a manned space flight to the moon, but on a manned space station in Earth orbit. Unlike the historic Skylab station , it is called Freedom 1 and was in space as early as 1970, three years earlier than Skylab. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin play important roles in the flights to the space station. The latter becomes the first administrator of the first Martian colony at the end of the novel . Perry Rhodan, on the other hand, flies to the moon on June 19, 1971 and that is when the real events of the Perry Rhodan series begin.

reception

The novel closes a gap in the Perry Rhodan universe:

"Andreas Eschbach's ultra-fat - and yet extremely enjoyable to read - tome" Perry Rhodan. The Greatest Adventure "is out of the ordinary. It is not the result of any story cycle in the series, but rather the history of everything. Eschbach, who has already written several guest contributions for the series, provides us with the biography of Rhodan before he became the "heir of the universe" - and thus closes an astonishing gap. "

- The standard

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ derstandard.at , Rundschau: Vom Heftroman zum gute Buch, published on March 16, 2019, accessed on March 20, 2019