October 30, 2003
No later than when we put our new preview online, some readers might be rubbing their eyes: an upcoming Perry Rhodan double issue is coming from an author who so far has not made an appearance in the booklet novella series itself:
Frank Borsch . With respect to other areas of the “Perryverse," however, he is everything but a newcomer - both in his role as editor as well as writer.But the road up to this point has been long. It all started in December 1996, when Wolfgang Jeschke, then the editor-in-chief for Heyne’s SF series, and I were jointly running a seminar on writing science fiction at the German Federal Academy for Cultural Education in Wolfenbuettel. One of the authors who particularly came to our attention was a certain
Frank Borsch from Freiburg. He presented good ideas of his own and surprised us with a very professional style.Wolfgang Jeschke was faster than I: He hired Frank on the spot as a translator. Consequently, Frank - who, among other things, was writing for the Freiburg paper “Zeitung zum Sonntag" - was working for Heyne, translating science fiction and fantasy for the Munich-based publishing house’s paperback edition. Later on, he also began to translate comic books for Marvel Germany - which, incidentally, he still does occaisionally to this day.
Frank and I would subsequently run into each other every now and then. For instance, we met at the Frankfurt book fair in October 1997 - hence, almost a year later - where we talked about the market potential for e-books, among other things. And when the Atlan mini-series was launched in 1998 - the
Traversan campaign -, Frank was “on board" as a writer for the first time. His first booklet novella, which definitely required overcoming certain initial difficulties, was pleasing - and a short story for the fourth Traversan hardcover was to follow.Later on, Frank wrote a self-contained Atlan book: Fluchtpunkt Schemmenstern »Vanishing Point Schemmen Star« was released under the “
Moewig fantastic " imprint. And with Fleisch der Erinnerung , »Flesh of Remembrance« a PERRY RHODAN-Autorenbibliothek release, he has already successfully published a character study of our eponymous hero.He has been working for the publishing company since 2001: We urgently needed additional help with the many special projects that we were tackling, and Frank was an obvious choice. He is convincing as a writer, he knows the series very well, and for years he has been working on all kinds of editorial projects. He spends two days a week at the publishing company, having become indispensable to the editor’s office over time.
In the
Andromeda book series, he jumped in for Andreas Findig , who had become unavailable on short notice, and wrote the fifth volume, Der Schattenspiegel »The Shadow Mirror«. He is also contributing to “Odyssey ," and as chance would have it, he is again writing the fifth volume.Hence, it was almost the logical outcome of an excellent collaboration over several years to let Frank also contribute to the weekly series. When his double issue is released as volumes
2206 and 2207 , you can then form your own opinion. Personally, I liked the double issue very much - that much I’ll say I advance.Klaus N. Frick
