Year Zero
An alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet. Worse, they were lawyering up.... In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe--and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry. Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it's a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. And boy, do they have news. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on humanity's music ever since "Year Zero" (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang. The resulting fines and penalties have bankrupted the whole universe. We humans suddenly own everything--and the aliens are not amused. Nick Carter has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly, and he's an unlikely galaxy-hopping hero: He's scared of heights. He's also about to be fired. And he happens to have the same name as a Backstreet Boy. But he does know a thing or two about copyright law. And he's packing a couple of other pencil-pushing superpowers that could come in handy. Soon he's on the run from a sinister parrot and a highly combustible vacuum cleaner.
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5mentions
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2014–2022years
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Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you like Hitchhiker's, try "Year Zero" by Rob Reid. Very similar style IMO. Also "After On" by the same author is also fantastic.
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- Year Zero: A Novel by Rob Reid is one where the entire galaxy got hooked on listening to our pop music that's been transmitting this whole time and how Earth is now owed insane amounts of money due to copyright.
- There's a book called Year Zero, by Rob Reid about our first contact with aliens.
It turns out that humans are the only species in the universe capable of creating good music and as soon as other races detected our radio waves, they started listening to and reproducing our music.
Eventually, the radio waves with our licensing information reach them and every alien race realizes they've been committing copyright infringement on an absolutely massive scale.
Chaos and hijinks ensue.
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Year Zero: A Novel - Rob Reid
