Date Of Review: February 25, 2025
Review Left On GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7347796157
Review Left On StoryGraph: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews/2e44d84a-f97c-4e00-9105-5ce5c2d578d4

Year Zero

Author: Rob Reid
Narrator: John Hodgman
Started: February 23, 2025
Finished: February 24, 2025
Genre: science fiction
Length: 9 hours 55 minutes
Part Of A Series: no
Type Of Book: audio
Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12953520-year-zero
Storygraph Link: https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7fe90e8d-7eb7-481b-926e-43448909ca19

Review:

I found this book by accident while looking at the science fiction section of my libraries website. After reading the blurb on GoodReads, I thought I would give it a try. I was hoping it would cause me to laugh. With current events (2025) I really needed a laugh. Did I laugh!

I wasn't exactly sold on finishing this book until chapter 7 (or 8?) when World of Warcraft was brought into it. I too have called blood elves all sorts of names, but the one in here manga street walker, is one of my favorites. The most hilarious thing to me about it is that my 'main' is a blood elf, a dead blood elf. Hacking WoW to talk to others & all - especially with gold sellers back then, etc - it's a perfect choice for that part!

Now, on to the rest of the book. This seems like it was a story the author came up with when he couldn't sleep. Unlike most of us, he made it into an actual book. Is the book great? No. Is it good? Yes - but only because I was 32 when this came out & I remember back then I was still a little upset with Lars & Napster. As well as all the World of Warcraft stuff. Also, it let me wear my tin foil hat for a bit.

Goodreads Description:

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. With Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick now has forty-eight hours to save humanity, while hopefully wowing the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.

“Hilarious, provocative, and supersmart, Year Zero is a brilliant novel to be enjoyed in perpetuity in the known universe and in all unknown universes yet to be discovered.”—John Hodgman, resident expert, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

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