Year Zero cover art

Year Zero

A Novel

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Year Zero

By: Rob Reid
Narrated by: John Hodgman
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About this listen

 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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 Adventure Fantasy Fiction Literature & Fiction Science Fiction Interstellar Witty Comedy

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All stars
Most relevant
I took time to get into it but loved the concept. funny clever concept. recommend it

took time to get into but once there great

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a story and style that leans heavily on Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers "trilogy" for inspiration.
While it lack the sparkle and effortless wit of THGTTG, it is nonetheless an engaging, if forgettable, listen.
The narrator does a sterling job in bring the tile to life

an enjoyable listen

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Despite its light hearted nature this book is filled full with well thought alien races with just enough explanation to understand which is helped along by the main character often breaking the fourth wall to help our poor human minds.

With a good few twists and turns and solid narration throughout id highly recommend this to anyone who likes a less serious Sci-Fi story.

If i had to pick any faults it would only be that I felt some relationships were not given enough time to be explored to their potential so it was sometimes hard to be fully invested.

Surprisingly good light hearted Sci-fi

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So funny and interesting... you need nothing more to read it I promise! You won't regret it!

Just read it!!!!!

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This book was fairly humorous, an interesting tweak on the digital aspect of DNA and the so called 'junk genes'. In real life someone has taken the genome of a living cell and converted it into digital code, altered it using a computer to recreate a new bacteria that replicates, which has 'www url addresses' encoded in it too. The problem I had with the book is the story is too trite. The title is wrong, it should have at least have been Years Zero, but we never speak about month, day and year in the same terms as we speak of hours, minutes and seconds.

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