3/02/2016

Time Out by Andreas Eschbach

I have to be honest here I never read any Andreas Eschbach title before. Yep, that´s right. He is one of Germany´s high-class Sci-Fi writers and I didn´t know him at all. I came to this series because I was kind of bored and went to my local library and there it was that I saw the first book of this series Black Out. This is a series I´ve read within no time. After the haunting story of the first two books, I simply had to know how everything would turn out. After meeting Christopher for the first time in Black Out I was hooked by his dry charm, how he sees the world and his way of thinking and dealing with situations.

Time Out*

by Andreas Eschbach
Out Trilogy #3
Publisher Arena on July 1, 2012
Genre Thriller
Pages 520
Format Hardcover
Source Library
Goodreads
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It is the biggest network that ever existed. A mere thought is enough to reach thousands. Everyone has it. Everyone is inside. Only you do not. That means: You are alone. Very alone. “We call him the Lifehook.” Christopher can´t believe it, when he hears for the first time of the gigantic advertising campaign, the famous FriendWeb-founder John Salzman has started. A chip people can communicate mentally with almost no effort? Behind this is certainly the coherence. As more and more young people pick up the Lifehook and soon for those, who do not possess it, social exclusion begins, Christopher recognizes that he can no longer hide passively in Hide-Out. But when he has the crucial idea, where the weak point of the global network could be, he and Serenity have to make the perhaps most momentous decision of their life …

Story

Only days before that, Christopher had to learn, that Jeremiah Jones isn´t listening to him anymore. That Serenity´s father isn´t called “The Prophet” for nothing. And so he is, once again, on his own to get things straight and to solve a problem. A problem he once was part of the creating process. But that´s easier said than done. It turns out, that the Lifehook is something, people want more than anything else. They even pay for it! Christopher is shocked and more than ever convinced, that this insanity has to stop. A few days after they arrived in France a weird contingency happens and all of a sudden he knows what to do and how.

Style

In this third and last book of his Out trilogy, Andreas Eschbach does not only answer all the questions, but the reader might also have had after the first two books. He also goes back to what Christopher and Serenity have done during the story of the first book: traveling under strange circumstances during the endeavor to stop the coherence once and for all. Again the reader is thrown into a wonderful story where it is once more proven, that technical progress is good, but not everything. From the personal point of view by Christopher and Serenity, "Time Out" comes to an unexpected and great end – which surprises the reader more than once. The story is set in the desert and France, with great scenes, wonderful dialogues, and some beautiful landscape descriptions. Okay, this third book isn´t as fantastic as the second was, but for me, it was still a pleasant read.

Andreas Eschbach keeps his language clear, simple to a certain point, and knows how to bring in some technical stuff without boring the reader.

Characters

Christopher goes again through a remarkable change. Not only that he discovers what being in love means he also learns that he can always trust his own instincts. That his brain isn´t working like other brains do, but that is absolutely positive, and that he only needs to listen to what it tries to tell him in his dreams, even when they´re strange like hell.

Conclusion

This final book of the Out trilogy is the perfect closure to it. The end is kind of open, yes, but in a way that matches quite right into the story. Yes, this is a must-read for any Andreas Eschbach fan, but also a really good read for any fan of thrillers with sci-fi elements.

Happy reading

*This book was at the time of review only available in the German language.

Andreas Eschbach

Andreas Eschbach, born in Ulm, Germany, studied Aerodynamics at the Technical University of Stuttgart. With his books he climbed definitive into squad of the German Top-Thriller authors. His books for young readers are published at Arena Verlag. In 1996 he won one of the highest awards of German science fiction, the SFCD-Literature Award. And he is prize winner of the great German science fiction award, the Kurd Laßwitz Award, too. Today he is considered to be one of the most successful German SF writers ever. He lives as a freelance writer with his family at the French Atlantic coast.

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