Re: "The Bonds of Eternity (Perry Rhodan #69)" by Clark Darlton

Lynn McGuire wrote:

"The Bonds of Eternity (Perry Rhodan #69)" by Clark Darlton
  https://www.amazon.com/Bonds-Eternity-Perry-Rhodan-69/dp/4416601530/
>
Book number sixty-nine of a series of one hundred and thirty-six space
opera books in English.  The original German books, actually pamphlets,
number in the thousands.  The English books started with two translated
German stories per book translated by Wendayne Ackerman and transitioned
to one story per book with the sixth book.  And then they transition
back to two stories in book #109/110.  The Ace publisher dropped out at
#118, so Forrest and Wendayne Ackerman published books #119 to #136 in
pamphlets before stopping in 1978.  The German books were written from
1961 to present time, having sold two billion copies and even recently
been rebooted again.  I read the well printed and well bound book
published by Ace in 1975 that I had to be very careful with due to age.
I bought an almost complete box of Perry Rhodans a decade or two ago on
ebay that I am finally getting to since I lost my original Perry Rhodans
in The Great Flood of 1989.  In fact, I now own book #1 to book #106,
plus the Atlan books, and some of the Lemuria books.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
>
BTW, this is actually book number 77 of the German pamphlets written in
1963.  There is a very good explanation of the plot in German on the
Perrypedia German website of all of the PR books.  There is automatic
Google translation available for English, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese,
French, and Portuguese.
   https://www.perrypedia.de/wiki/In_den_Fesseln_der_Ewigkeit
>
In this alternate universe, USSF Major Perry Rhodan and his three fellow
astronauts blasted off in a three stage rocket to the Moon in 1971.  The
first stage of the rocket was chemical, the second and third stages were
nuclear.  After crashing on the Moon due to a strange radio
interference, they discover a massive crashed alien spaceship with an
aged male scientist (Khrest), a female commander (Thora), and a crew of
500.  It has been over seventy years since then and the Solar Empire
has flourished with tens of millions of people and many spaceships
headquartered in the Gobi desert, the city of Terrania.  Perry Rhodan
has been elected by the people of Earth to be the World Administrator
and keep them from being taken over by the robot administrator of Arkon.
>
Atlan, Perry Rhodan, Reginald Bell, Pucky, and a crew take the Drusus, a
1,500 meter (one mile) diameter Titan spaceship, into the Druuf star
system again.  A fleet of thousands of robot space ships from Arkon is
there trying to keep the Druufs from leaving their planet.  And a long
lost mutant is trying to contact Perry Rhodan.  Perry Rhodan finally
answers the continuous contact from the Robot Regent of Arkon to discuss
strategy to defeat the Druufs.
>
BTW, there is a two part serial of the marriage of Perry Rhodan and
Thora of Arkon ended in this issue.  This short story was written by
Clark Darlton specifically for the English book series but, written in
German so it had to be translated also by Wendy Ackerman.  And Clark
Darlton wrote the short story in the Ackerman's house in Los Angeles on
a German typewriter.
>
Two observations:
1. Forrest Ackerman should have put two or three of the translated
stories in each book.  Having two stories in the first five books worked
out well.  Just having one story in the book is too short and would
never allow the translated books to catch up to the German originals.
2. Anyone liking Perry Rhodan and wanting a more up to date story should
read the totally awesome "Mutineer's Moon" Dahak series of three books
by David Weber.
   https://www.amazon.com/Mutineers-Moon-Dahak-David-Weber/dp/0671720856/

PR is epic MilSF. An unwritten _Mutineer's Moon_ corollary is how fans
of Mutineer may mine a MilSF motherload in PR.
    Personally speaking, the MilSF genre has very little appeal to me.
The antics of apex alpha males Perry Rhodan and Atlan are for others -
not for me.

My primary interest is PR's hyperspace element. It's easy for me to
identify with the IT collective communion of souls. My imagination
colors IT as a Catholic commune, in the style of Dorothy Day.
    "The Bonds of Eternity" features a couple of other, worthy, hyper-
characters: existential eternalists Ernst Ellert and Harno. But, before
eternity comes commonplace curvature of Einstein space-time.

A hot plate's thermal gradient, with consequent expansion and
contraction, can cause curves in the nominally linear, shortest distance
between a couple of points on the hot plate, as perceived by a 2-D
traveler. The traveler's path describes an arc of a great circle.

    Now we want to relate what we have just been talking about
    to the idea of curved space-time. We have already pointed out
    that if the time goes at different rates in different places,
    it is analogous to the curved space of the hot plate. But
    it is more than an analogy; it means space-time /is/ curved.

    _The Feynman Lectures on Physics_

Curvature of space-time is Ouspensky's fifth dimension. And the multi-
verse quantum phenomena is his sixth dimension. Ellert and Harno are
able to traverse multiverses via this sixth dimension.

There's another way to view hyperspace. Pilot wave theory places the
famous Schrödinger equation into a configuration space, where the
temporal development of the wave equation occurs in a deterministic
manner. In this case "hyperspace" acts as a synonym for "configuration
space."

Danke,

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