If you ask any Berliner, you'll probably be told that they rate the opening of the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport (originally planned for 2011...) about as likely to happen in their lifetime as the arrival in Berlin of an alien spacecraft. And that's the joke that gives Evers the starting-point for this book, a science-fiction novel in the general tradition of The Hitchhiker's Guide.

The undistinguished perpetual student and general layabout Goiko Schulz, who has improbably (and slightly dishonourably) won a place on the first aircraft to take off from the new airport, instead finds himself whisked on board a spaceship manned by a selection of alien misfits (and with a ship's computer that has adopted the voice and mannerisms of a BVG bus driver). He has been picked to plead the cause of humanity in a galactic court, after human life has been jeopardised by a bureaucratic decision of the aliens who have quietly taken over the Earth by exploiting various internet scams. Unfortunately, the spaceship has a door problem and can't actually leave the Earth until the crew can get hold of an exotic substance that takes 130 years to prepare.

Cue for a complex and intriguing plot, full of time-travel paradoxes, jokey references to science-fiction classics, and satirical allusions to the foibles of 21st century life on earth. And a walk-on part for Friedrich Nietzsche and his twenty ninja kittens...

Entertaining, fast-moving and often quite funny at a superficial level, but without any real character development to keep the reader interested in the outcome. Goiko is just as much of a zero at the end of the story as he was at the beginning, whilst most of the other characters display whatever intriguing attributes have been defined for that particular type of alien, but rapidly become dull as soon as we've worked out what that means. ( )