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Perry Rhodan is the serie my step father is addicted to. For almost thirty years I enjoyed reading the summary of what's going on in that epic opera pulp serialized piece of .. writings ? Or something. In the men's reading room of course.

I tried getting on the bandwagon when I was a teen, I read the first one and the ?th one (where we learn about Atlan) but there are way too many books to catch up with so I gave up.

I later discovered the germans where hundreds of books ahead of the french traduction so I googled it and found the whole cycle which is like 6 times the 150 books already translated. I am a bit sad my stepfather could die without reading the end.

I read the stories is a little bit shaped by real world social events (fall of the wall, cold war, hippies rise and fall, etc.) but I couldn't see it because reading a '73 book in 1999 makes it hard for a teen to see what is actually transposed in the book.

I can't comment on the S-F part though. From what I read it's really more like a low-key SF soap opera that is character driven (without much character development).

Nothing like `modern´ SF (Baxter, etc.). And not much science.

> I am a bit sad my stepfather could die without reading the end.

There is no end yet, the series is still ongoing.

I know, what I meant is: "The series is likely to go on after his death." :).
German here. I got addicted to it when, as a teenager, I saw them in our local library. The 3D covers of the "silver books" really got my attention! Inside they had, in addition to the story, extremely detailed cross sections of the space ships that occurred in the series. The dimensions and ideas the authors are really (in a positive way) crazy/gigantic. I also liked that the series was more or less one connected story. The authors regularly keep unsolved puzzles, just to explain them years later!

One day I found out that the newsstand on our train station sold current copies of the series and I was amazed by the fact that they already sold more than 2000 issues (Current edition is at ~ 2800)! The silver books I read before were actually just a streamlined version of ten or so issues. So I starting reading the "first edition", and also bought reprints ... in the end I think I read maybe half the the whole series, but two or so years ago I finally hadn't the time keep up.