Year Zero
Robert Reid
Del Rey
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: First contact. It is often imagined as a light appearing in the sky, or a cryptic signal detected by determined scientists in the dead of night. Instead, it started with a broadcast of the 70's sitcom "Welcome Back, Kotter"... or, more specifically, the theme song. The Refined League of alien species - those evolved and mature enough to set aside aggression, interact with one another, and pursue the many forms of pure arts, from sculpture to macrame - had never heard such angelic tones as those produced by humans. Many actually died of ecstasy upon hearing it. Some quirk of our evolution apparently left us with this one, savant-like skill... and, while our species was considered far too primitive (and with too abysmal a fashion sense) to merit open contact, our music rendered every other recording artist obsolete overnight, copies spreading to every nook and cranny of every inhabited world - and the universe would never be the same.
If only they'd read the fine print...
Nick Carter may share a name with a member of the pop band Backstreet Boys and a surname with one of the founders of his law firm, but he's anything but famous or powerful himself. He's just a middling-to-lowly entertainment lawyer, and if office rumors are true his head's going to be on the chopping block soon. So when the bizarre duo - a busty nun and red-haired man dressed as a mullah - come to his office, he figures he has nothing to lose by hearing them out; for all he knows, it's a test by his boss to see how he handles the unexpected. But the tale they spin is all too real. Aliens, apparently, are hooked on human music. They're so hooked, in fact, that most every sentient being has millions of illegal copies of Earth songs on their person at any given moment... and they've just realized that that makes them liable for major fines. As in, bankrupt reality several times over and leave Earth - a primitive planet, not even formally contacted by our neighbors yet - with all the money of everyone, everywhere, everywhen major. Some people haven't taken that news too kindly, and are in fact willing to "encourage" our self-destruction just to absolve the debt. Nick started the day worried that he'd soon be out of a job. Now, if he can't do some fancy legal acrobatics in a hurry, his entire planet will be losing its future existence.
REVIEW: Year Zero feels like a throwback comic sci-fi... not always in a good way. The premise is both clever and silly, dealing with the labyrinthine laws governing music sharing and copyright and the utter futility of expecting any of it to make anything but the most nihilistic of sense. Nick (and a handful of other humans who get sucked into the plot, including his indie musician neighbor, his self-serving greedy cousin, and his courtroom shark boss) thankfully spends little time on the obligatory "is it a prank?" dithering before jumping in with both feet, pitting his middling legal experience and skills against a seemingly impossible intergalactic legal knot. Helping, and often hindering, him are the alien siblings "Frampton" and "Carly" (ever since the Kotter Moment, around which alien society literally rearranged their calendar, taking Earth musician names has been a universal fad). He and the other characters - especially the aliens - are little deeper than the paper they're written on, skewing into old-school cliches that are more than a little stale and dusty (especially the women, who were, to be mild, clearly written by a man). The humor often skews silly and a bit slapstick, with some sharp digs at laws, the music industry, and other topics... humor thick enough to stop the plot at more than one point and wallow in what it thought was funniest. The narrator of the audiobook version did not necessarily help with this, often choosing silly voices and sometimes dropping into near-inaudible ranges for choked whispers. For all that, it did move decently and took some unpredictable, wild turns on its way to a reasonably clever and satisfactory conclusion... and then it lingered way, way too long on an epilogue that may or may not have been trying to test the waters for sequel potential, but which certainly overstayed its welcome once the joke was clear. While I've read worse, this one just wasn't quite up my alley, and I got tired of the flat characters (and not just the literally two-dimensional alien ones).
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