Year Zero

With the same zany humor of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Year Zero satirizes the online music industry and Internet culture with the story of a young lawyer who may be our only hope against aliens who realize they owe such enormous fines on their vast collections of pirated music that it would be a lot cheaper just to destroy the Earth.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since "Year Zero" (1977 to us), resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and bankrupting the whole universe. Nick has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly. Thankfully, this unlikely galaxy-hopping hero does know a thing or two about copyright law. Now, with Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick has forty-eight hours to save humanity-while hoping to wow the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.