Perry Rhodan 6: The Longest Night
The Longest Night is the sixth and last novel in the Perry Rhodan Lemuria mini-series. In this story, the immortal Perry Rhodan finds himself confronted with a mystery while on the Terran ship Palenque.
In Book One, Perry found a generational ship, moving at a high fraction of the speed of light, that dated back to Lemuria. Within this story’s setting, Lemuria was a human civilization that arose on Earth over 50,000 years ago, spread across the galaxy, and fell when a horde of aliens they called the Beasts attacked and destroyed everything, killing everyone they could. Modern humans, whether they are Terrians like us or the alien-born Akonians, are all descended from Lemuria. So finding a generational ship filled with people who trace their ancestry to before Lemuria achieved faster-than-light travel is a discovery of deep scientific and political significance.
In the first book, a number of questions are raised, like why the space arks were sent out, why the inhabitants are terrified of an enemy from beyond the stars, and how this ties into current events? It took another four books, but we got answers; I will refer you to the videos I made on each prior book to go over them. (I should warn you, there are spoilers ahead for the sixth book.) In this last book, almost all the mysteries have been answered, and Perry has to deal with a new danger: the Beasts are back, or rather, they never left.
Because at the end of the war, the Lemurians developed a weapon that rid the Beasts of their genocidal impulses and left them able to consider their actions in a calmer light. These Beasts developed into the Haluters, a race of beings that are firm allies with Terra. One of them, Icho Tolot, is not only Perry’s best friend but is widely regarded as something of a superhero by Terrians across the galaxy.
However, when faced with the thought that genocide was actually bad, not everyone reconsidered. Some instead doubled down. This hard-core group of militants fled into the depths of the galaxy and built secret bases, with automated factories and vast cloning facilities. These facilities would churn out Beast clonetroopers on command. They then put themselves into stasis to wait. They discovered the Arks during this, and, instead of destroying them, they fitted the Arks with faster-than-light communications that would signal the Beasts if ever the Arks stopped or were opened from the outside. With that signal, the Beast would awaken to unleash war and chaos once more.
That wasn’t enough for the Beasts, however. Their original excuse was that the Lemurians had experimented with time travel, and so they all needed to die for their time crimes. Rather than run the risk that these new Lemurians wouldn’t play with time, they engineered a time loop, which actually sent Icho Tolot to the past. This, in turn, let Icho send the Lemurian Immortal Levian Perron even further back in time, where he would build the arks and send them out into the galaxy. In other words, they are basically creating their whole reason to restart the war in the first place by entrapping the people of the galaxy.
Book six starts off right where book four left off (since book five took place in the dim past following Icho Tolot), with the Lemurian Immortal Levian Perron fleeing as he was thwarted in his own time travel scheme to use that same time machine to travel back to the beginning of the Lemurian-Beast War with advanced technology and defeat the beasts, winning the war for Lemuria and potentially wiping our timeline from existence. He had been living under the false identity of an Akonian naval officer and once he escaped from Perry Rhodan, he attempted to use his authority as an officer to try and complete his plan. However, the Akonian government, having figured out who he is, puts a stop to that. So he is left with the choice of fighting the Beasts here and now or rotting in a prison cell.
Meanwhile, Perry and Icho are trapped on one of the secret bases built by the Beasts, on a planet whose ecosystem had been tampered with to make it incredibly dangerous. Perry’s focus is on finding out where all the planets with secret Beast bases are located. So he can direct Terran and allied fleets to destroy or capture the Beasts before they start their war. Meanwhile, the Palenque and the Las-toor are trying to fight their way through to Perry, fighting Beast-piloted warships, and it’s here that we see something interesting.
The Palenque and the Las-toor are considered lightly armed civilian ships, but they can destroy entire squadrons of the Beast’s warships simply because weapons technology has advanced beyond what either the Lemurians or the Beasts had. This doesn’t mean the Beasts aren’t dangerous, though: their weapons can still destroy enemy ships, their factories have made hundreds of thousands of ships, and there are more than enough Beast clonetroopers to fly them. So the Beasts could still overwhelm humanity through sheer numbers. On top of that, the Beasts are intelligent enough that, if they seize enough examples of modern technology, they could reverse-engineer it and start using it themselves. So Perry plans to smash them before they have the time to do that.
What follows is a tense, action-packed plot as Perry and his friends race through the Beast's bases to get the intelligence they need, while various fleets start moving to fight the Beast's war machine head-on. It is a fun read as we get to see battles on the ground and in space. There is even intrigue as a newly awakened Clonetrooper begins to compare the things his elders are telling him to the evidence of his eyes and ears, and realizes he’s being lied to.
However, I am left frustrated. While we do get a somewhat satisfying close to Levian Perron’s character arc, other characters are left dangling. De-nee-tree, the young Lemurian lady who was found on the first generation ship, and Boryk, the Lemurian dwarf psychic whose storyline in book four would have fit into an outrageous fantasy novel, are left without any closure. Boryk, in fact, spends the whole book slipping in and out of consciousness, and is mostly used as a plot device here. De-nee-tree is barely even an afterthought.
A lot of the characters and storylines that were introduced and advanced throughout the first part of the series are just left dangling, which doesn’t make for a satisfying end to the series. It had been repeatedly suggested that Palenque’s communication officer, Alemaheyu Kossa, may have been starting a relationship with the network specialist of the Las Toor, Eniva Ta Drorar, but there’s no mention of it here. Part of the problem is that the series introduced so many characters spread across time and space that it simply didn’t have time to focus on but a bare handful. This creates a less-than-satisfying ending as many characters and their subplots are just left hanging.
There’s also a bit of retcon that I didn’t appreciate. In books one through four, we’re told Perry got on the Palenque hoping to use it to create informal backroom contacts with the Akonians, a group of human aliens descended from a Lemurian colony that hid from the Beasts. They have a complicated relationship with Terra and Terran humans, and Perry would like to find ways to keep it from turning into a hostile relationship. Perry even says this to himself in an earlier book! At the end of this book, however, it’s declared that that’s just silly, and Perry was always on a mission to find the hidden Beast worlds after an allied government found one before the series started. This creates some plot holes and raises questions as to why Perry dropped everything for the space arks.
So The Longest Night, while a fun read with a lot of action, is the weakest book in the series, and doesn’t really give me a satisfying ending to the mini-series. That said, the series itself was well done and worth the read. I was able to follow the story and the motivations of the characters without really needing any outside knowledge, so I don’t think you need to be a Perry Rhodan fan to enjoy this story. But I’m willing to bet that it would help, as there are references to other events and characters that, while not important to the main storyline, flew completely over my head. I’m giving the series itself a B-, but I’m afraid the last book is going to come in a C- for me. Still, if you enjoy space opera that is willing to tackle vast timescales and sweeping narratives, this may be the story for you.
