Dr dear Dr: I was reading through my astronomy magazine and it featured some interesting articles about the Perry Rhodan series, that is Perry Rhodan the American astronaut and explorer and not Perry Rodham of the Clinton Chelsea Dynasty, and they were explaining that so popular is this Series that it is being described as the new bible for astronauts since it is read with a certain strange reverence. Any further thoughts?

At the tender age of 11, I was recruited to my local Astronomy Club in the evenings, at my local boys school, by the young gifted science teacher Mr M, and he was able to take the boys up to the school roof where he would assemble his 12-inch telescope on winter nights when the sky was very clear in those days, and it was here that I caught sight of my first alien planet, and was able to view the phases of Jupiter and its storms with my own eyes. From such encounters and the enlightened and able teaching of science at my little Ex-Grammar School of an Anglican kind, the germ of a seed grew, and by the time I was 17 I was well well well into the Adventures of Perry Rhodan, who stars as an American astronaut that goes to the moon and finds the first evidence of alien life on that satellite, and not on Mars, and then away he goes to Pluto to encounter the Arkonides, to find a real alien empire that commits to helping him power the earthling homeworld into a new future of more modern technology, a little like Apple products and devices in the present time. But as for the use of these little booklets as a sort of bible, clearly, they were not intended explicitly as such by the authors, though science fiction is now described since the launch of that wonder telling Series as “religion by any other name.” Bibles are inspired collections of inspired literature, consisting of various genres such as poetry and chronicles and histories but recorded as angelic interventions, so some quasi-alien paradigms here, but it is very much religious literature that is unapologetic about the fact that these documents chronicle the religious mystical experiences of the Israelis inter alia, so it is not easy to see how the two collections compare. But it might lie in the fact that many astronauts go to the stars precisely because they have had experiences of alien life forms and alien empires impinging on this solar system in its remote regions, albeit through the pages of these gems of little books, now running to 97 volumes; certainly, there is at least one astronaut who has been on the ISS who has claimed that it was Perry Rhodan that led him to the stars, per ardua ad astra as we say in the RAF, and this may explain how the PR Series is read with devotion and reverence, as many astronauts are convinced they will have such experiences in the outer limits of the solar system one day - it is a reverential feel sort of thing.