Customer Reviews

The Day the Gods Died

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I read this book within a year or two of its publication, when I was about 12 years old. Regardless of this book's mix of research and fantasy, I found it incredibly engaging. It has remained in my memory as an all-time favorite. If you are intrigued by extraterrestrial and UFO research, it is a really enjoyable read.

It is a quite hard to approach this science fiction novel written by German science fiction author Walter Ernsting, who, as "Clarke Darlton" and with K. H. Scheer, has created the popular Perry Rhodan series. Ernsting is known to be a personal friend of Erich von Dänkien, the Austrian hotel manager who became a world bestselling author with the publication of "Chariot of the Gods," a book of speculative science that proposed that many of humankind's ancient monuments were clues to the presence of alien races in Earth's past.

In "The Day the Gods Died" Ernsting has himself talking to von Däniken and getting in touch with the manuscript of "Chariot of the Gods," a book that Ernsting-the-character evaluates as being revolutionary. Ernsting recalls a great deal of his own biography, including the time he served with the German army in Scandinavia during II World War, when he would have witnessed some UFO occurrence.

In the novel he gets from von Däniken the mission of going to Latin America (a preeminent place in "Chariots of the God") to check a cavern in which a supposed alien artifact had been found. In the cave a matter transmitter (a device commonly mentioned in Perry Rhodan) takes him back to the past. There he meets alien beings coming from a highly regulated galactic organization. They are illegally on Earth and are subjected to violent reprisal from the authorities of that galactic community.

Ernsting mentions technologies frequently seen in Perry Rhodan and other SF works, and a space opera-like kind of approach to what his aliens are doing on Earth. Perry Rhodan itself is mentioned in the book, as Ernsting-the-character takes a leave from its writing to embark in von Däniken's assignment.

One can see this book translated to English by Forrest J. Ackerman's wife as a exploitation book that goes after the huge success of "Chariots of the God," but nevertheless it is impossible not to acknowledge that, when he blurs the limits of fiction and reality, Ensting has--perhaps unwillingly--produced one of the weirdest examples of metafiction within the science fiction field.