Rob Reid - Year Zero
Fran Recommends:
This review is for people who loved Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series. If those sorts of books aren’t your thing, this one won’t be either.
Okay, just us? Year Zero by Rob Reid. It’s a hoot! You’ll have music you think you’ve forgotten rumbling through your head for days!
Nick Carter is a music copyright attorney in New York, on the verge of being promoted (if he can do something brilliant and unexpected to impress his boss, Judy) or canned (substantially more likely), when a couple of aliens come to his office hoping to recruit him into helping them save our planet. You see, on October 13, 1977, all the various beings in the Refined League (as it’s known by all the civilized members, of whom we’re nowhere close to being one) discovered that our planet has the one thing that can be found only here on Earth: Music.
And from that point on, they’ve been downloading all our music and spreading it around the Universe. The catch is that our laws say that royalties must be paid, and no one in the Refined League has paid anything, which means they owe us for back royalties. They owe us a lot. More than the Universe has available to pay us.
So there are some who figure that they’ll encourage us to blow ourselves up (they’d never kill us, that would be uncivilized !), and that’ll wipe out the back debt AND they can keep the music they’ve already got.
From that point on, things take off. Year Zero is a non-stop, rollicking roller coaster. It’s a quick read, and it’s tons of fun, and it even comes with playlists for the aliens! I’ve spent a lot of time listening to artists I’ve never heard of, and lots that I have, if only to wipe out the fact that the first song the aliens ever heard was the theme from “Welcome Back, Kotter”, which is still stuck in my head.
This just rocketed onto my Top Ten list, it’s that good!
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