Buck Rogers in the 25th Century  :  2 Novels based on the television series created by Glen A Larson.Science fiction. Adapted from the 1st Season of Universal's 1979 tv show starring Gil Gerard as Captain William 'Buck' Rogers, an American astronaut launched into space from the year 1987, who finds himself unexpectedly returned to Earth in the 25th Century. Co-starring Erin Gray as Colonel Wilma Deering, and Tim O'Connor as Dr Huer.Loosely based on the 1930s Republic film serial Buck Rogers starring Larry 'Buster' Crabbe, who, still in showbusiness in 1979, actually guest starred on the tv show! Originally this was a serialised picture strip running in the 'funnies' section of American daily newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, from which the Republic serial was derived.When NASA launches Captain Rogers in deep space probe Ranger 3, in 1987, a freak mishap puts him into an orbit which freezes his life support system and returns Buck Rogers to Earth five hundred years later...   Far beyond this world I know...    far beyond my time...   what kind of world am I going to find...?The first novel is an adaptation of the 1978 tv movie, on which the subsequent television series was based. The movie was quite a bit more adult than the series.The novel is quite faithful to the script for the movie, which had a few differences from the subsequent series: for instance, the Inner City in the movie became New Chicago in the series; the defence shield protecting Earth in the movie was not present in the series; the concept of a future Earth devastated by nuclear war was dropped from the series; the hostile mutant survivors populating the anarchic zones of Earth in the movie were also dropped; and the adult themes present in the movie were removed from the series.The second novel is a sequel (of sorts) to the first, so is also set in the world of the tv movie. It, too, is an adaptation of a script written for television, but in this case for an episode which was never filmed. As mentioned, the format of the show as seen in the 1978 tv movie was significantly altered in many ways before the 1979 series was commissioned, and the various changes that were made are not reflected in this teleplay.What does v3.0 in the name of an ePub file stand for ?This is an informal indication of the quality of the ebook. The ultimate accolade is the notation "(v5.0)", which means the ebook is of retail quality:   v1.x:  The publication has been scanned and OCR-ed, but not spell checked.   v2.x:  The publication has been scanned, OCR-ed and spell checked, but not proofread.   v3.x:  The publication has been scanned, OCR-ed, spell checked and proofread.   v4.x:  The publication has been proofread by multiple persons and is near retail quality.   v5.x:  The publication is of retail quality.I have not come across any official website defining these indications. A colleague collated these, from notes he made while doing book scans himself. I think they came from a Usenet post.Some v5 material can nonetheless include errors, especially for older publications where the fonts are not easily recognised by the OCR software.In each case, the text presented here is the result of my scanning a printed volume from my own collection and donating it to the Internet Archive. Accordingly, any errors in the text are the result of deficiencies in my own OCR software, so must not be attributed to the Archive (which can afford much better software than I have access to).