Limit is a 2009 novel by German author Frank Schätzing (who also wrote Der Schwarm).
The year is 2025. Man has returned to the moon and started mining helium-3, an isotope needed for running fusion reactors. As you can imagine, shipping stuff to and from the moon is quite expensive, meaning that mankind is nevertheless still far away from not having to rely on fossil fuels anymore. Julian Orley, visionary and founder of Orley Industries, wants to change this by means of a Space Elevator. Also, he wants to establish moon tourism. To this end he gives a grand tour through his space and moon facilities for a hand-picked group of potential investors, super-rich people from all around the world. At first, everything goes as planned, with everyone having a splendid time. But soon, trouble starts to crop up...
Meanwhile in China, Private Detective Owen Jericho gets hired to find his client's daughter, Chen "Yoyo" Yuyun, a cyber-dissident. Owen soon discovers that Yoyo had to go into hiding because she accidentally stumbled over something she was not meant to see. Now the highly dangerous, psychopathic hitman Kenny Xin is close on her and Owen's heels...
Contains examples of:
- Asian and Nerdy: Granted, Yoyo may not have many nerdy traits, but she is a computer expert.
- Black Dude Dies First: The first to be killed by The Mole is not only black by ethnicity but his name is Black.
- Boom, Headshot!: Happens several times during the story. Both Your Head A-Splode and Pretty Little Headshots occur.
- Bumbling Dad: Julian Orley and Chen Hongbing.
- The Cameo: David Bowie! (This got
Harsher in Hindsight with his Real Life death in 2016.) - China Takes Over the World: China of the year 2025 is much like today, only more Cyberpunk-ish and competing with the USA over helium-3 mining sides on the moon.
- Cool Car: Owen's one can change colours.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Averted in the beginning near the magma chamber, when characters do notice the searing heat.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: While most corporate executives in this story seem to be decent people, some are not.
- Door Stopper: Over 1000 pages, this book certainly qualifies.
- Everything is Big in Texas: Chuck Donoghue fits the rich Texan stereotype to a T, except that he isn't in the oil business.
- Failed Future Forecast: At one point, an Info Dump is given regarding the oil industry and its slow decline from The Present Day to 2025. The disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
would neatly have fitted in there, but alas, it happened one year after the book's publishing. - Flying Car: Most notably airbikes.
- Inscrutable Oriental: Kenny Xin, though occasionally his stoic facade gets some cracks.
- Karma Houdini: Kenny Xin, the Psycho for Hire and Professional Killer. The last time he appears in a scene, he isn't even there in person, just to be heard via phone. In his last line of dialogue, he says that all the recent events have quite exhausted him, and he considers taking a holiday...
- Magical Native American: Loreena Keowa, Intrepid Reporter for a magazine called Greenwatch, which covers environmental themes. Her appearance can be described as Pocahontas in a business suit.
- Mexican Standoff After one of the participants loses her nerves, it ends very bloody.
- Monumental Battle: On the top levels of the Shanghai World Financial Center, in the halls of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and in Orley's gigantic moon hotel. The latter gets completely destroyed in the process.
- Mooks: Kenny has some as his posse. Most of them die.
- Neo-Africa: Equatorial Guinea is the first African country to launch a rocket into space.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The character of Julian Orley is quite obviously based on Richard Branson.
- Only Sane Man: Tim Orley considers himself this.
- Private Military Contractors: Kenny Xin and some other characters have been this in the past.
- Punch-Clock Villain: When Kenny Xin realizes that his client's cover has been blown and his cause is lost, what does he do? He simply declares their contract to be expired and announces that he will take a holiday.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Averted. Although Julian Orley's plans for revolutionizing the energy industry via the worthwhile mining of helium-3 are portrayed as a generally good thing, the issue of thousands of employees of the oil industry losing their jobs as a result is part of the story.
- Shout-Out: Julian Orley is an avid Science Fiction fan, resulting in numerous in-universe shout outs to famous Sci-Fi works like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek within the facilities he built in space and on the moon.
- The novel has another obvious Shout-Out in Finn O'Keefe being an actor who got famous by playing Perry Rhodan.
- Space Elevator: The whole premise of the novel is building one of these so the mining will be more economically feasible.
- Title Drop:You went beyond all limits, Gerald.
- 20 Minutes into the Future: It takes place in 2025. Schätzing explained in an interview that although 2050 would be more realistic for the technologies portrayed, he considered it more important to immerse the reader in a time in which he or she might still be alive.
