The Third Power – Perry Rhodan

An interesting way of looking through the eyes of adolescent ex-nazi germany, eyes gaze on future. The upcoming Mondlandung and it’s SciFi scenario with the ship found on the “far side” of the moon. Leitmotifs everywhere some lame, some not so lame: devices generating rays of energy which can manipulate human thoughts, alien invasion, the avenger team (the teleporter- man, the invisible man and so on), the great hero saving the world from its imminent destruction, the warp-core engine that power a ship able to travel over thousands of light-years, the high-evolved species able to give their knowledge to human-monkeys (aka Stargate the last Series where Thor gives the Asgard Technology to humans).. everything was already there in 1961. The Rhodan series themselves are the seeds of the Wikipedia concept (the series have been written for about 50 years now by many authors collaborating in producing what seems like Aldebaran compared to our Sun when it comes to size)

Now after 50 years of real history, I wonder how much did the “Zeitgeist” in SciFi changed?

I didn’t quite liked the main character.. I wonder why.. He seems from the first moment, even before the moon landing pages to be such an asshole, an all-knowing self-conscious bastard who under circumstances of keeping peace and unite humanity for a great future among the stars, steals technology, manipulates everyone, forces all his enemies to bow to his will by means of technology and not by means of reason, takes the lead among the international top three powers (united nations, Russia and China) and calls himself shamelessly the third power. To cap it all, when the appearance of some guy or women gets mentioned, they always have blond hair and fascinating glowing eyes, except when they are enemies then they have dirty slick black hair. It couldn’t have been other way, 16 years after the fall of the third Reich.

But beside the unpleasant feeling that permeates throughout the pages like the background radiation of the universe, hard to detect but still there, I was really fascinated by this thirst for exploration that characterizes those years. I also understand now much better the bitterness of some astrophysicists and other scientists who feel their dreams have not come true. In 50 years we’ve made it to the moon, we’ve sent the Voyager who just exit our solar system, we’ve built dozen of telescopes and we’ve landed on Mars. All of this has been done with machines, not with humans – except when it comes to hang around our own planet. We’re still down here fighting over an acre of earth, human liberties are still being fought on, religious fanatics still go on missionary crusades blowing up themselves and thousands of others, and wars on resources of others are still waging. So maybe we did kind of become meanwhile lame vegetables watching TV, eating pizza, drinking beer, playing the last PlayStation game, showing off our iPhone and sheeplessly follow up on twitter on our god Jobs and his saints. Maybe we did become self- sufficient monkeys in our cozy place of earth, maybe we have become the likes of Arkon themselves. But who cares anymore.