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Out Of Time
Joe Kopeksky consults with physicists, psychics, and priests in his desperate attempt to discover why time has gone awry all over New York City. By the author of The Proteus Operation.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
117 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published November 1, 1993
44 people want to read
About the author
James P. Hogan
115 books271 followersJames Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 15, 2024
This is an amusing and engaging novella about time running amok... literally. I remember reading it one cold winter evening in a single sitting and enjoying it immensely. It has some social conventions and conceits that haven't aged well (stereotyped priests, physicists, psychics, and a plucky sidekick, for example) but it was all in fun and made for a nice wacky mystery. It was later included in a collection of his fact and fiction from Baen Books called Rockets, Redheads & Revolution.
April 8, 2018
not much to say about this - nothing special, and too short to go faar. Light and fun with little substance.
December 31, 2011
A short book about a missing-time crime case.
At only 117 pages, the first third seemed rather dull and slow. As a whole, the book lacks in character development and ends somewhat unsatisfactorily. An interesting concept that the author apparently felt compelled to do something with, but ultimately failed to do more than document the idea.
James Hogan is one of my favorite authors, and this book being so short doesn't much change my mind about that. I appreciate the interesting idea, just not so much what was done with it.
At this length, reading it and not reading it amounts to much the same thing, so you may as well if you like the author or conundrums of time.
At only 117 pages, the first third seemed rather dull and slow. As a whole, the book lacks in character development and ends somewhat unsatisfactorily. An interesting concept that the author apparently felt compelled to do something with, but ultimately failed to do more than document the idea.
James Hogan is one of my favorite authors, and this book being so short doesn't much change my mind about that. I appreciate the interesting idea, just not so much what was done with it.
At this length, reading it and not reading it amounts to much the same thing, so you may as well if you like the author or conundrums of time.
December 1, 2015
I fail to read it!
science fiction's experimental thought
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boring
science fiction's experimental thought
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boring
October 11, 2025
This is a short book with many hard to pronounce names and not a lot of character growth. But if the story isn’t about characters and about a problem to be solved then character development isn’t all that important.
I enjoyed the idea of this story even if I guessed pretty quickly what the problem was. Bugs who eat time and produce space would be an interesting piece of a larger story but as a stand alone ends up being dry. I also much prefer science fiction with some sort of philosophical question to wrestle with. Out of time didn’t have that.
I enjoyed the idea of this story even if I guessed pretty quickly what the problem was. Bugs who eat time and produce space would be an interesting piece of a larger story but as a stand alone ends up being dry. I also much prefer science fiction with some sort of philosophical question to wrestle with. Out of time didn’t have that.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 11, 2018
Short novella from one of my favorite science fiction authors, but this one was not up to his usual level. Read it if you are a Hogan completist, but if you are looking for something more representative of his work, I would say you would better spend your time with the Giants series, or Thrice Upon a Time or The Two Faces of Tomorrow.
June 12, 2016
Time gets termites.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews