Rob Reid Books In Order

Publication Order of Silicon Valley Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Rob Reid is an American author born in 1965. He is a New York Times bestselling author, former tech entrepreneur, and was the founder and CEO as well as Chairmen of online music company Listen.com. He is based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He has written two fiction novels and two nonfiction books, Year One and Architects of the Web.

Listen.com developed the Rhapsody music service and was one of the first companies online to secure full-catalog licenses from the major labels. Reid sold Listen to RealNetworks and it was later half-purchased by MTV Networks of Viacom. Rhapsody became an independent company in March 2010 and has gone on to be successful with over a million subscribers and is used all over the world.

Year One was published by William Morrow in 1994, this was a memoir focused on his experiences of living student life attending Harvard Business School. Architects of the Web was published by Wiley in 1997. It focused on the rise of the Internet as a space for commerce.

Reid has written a cover story for Wired Magazine, their online site, and other websites such as Ars Technica and Spinner.com. He has written features for print publications such as Business 2.0, the Glider Technology Report, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Year Zero, published by Del Rey in 2012, a novel featuring aliens who have a love for human music, and After On, the first novel in the Silicon Valley Series published in 2017.

Year Zero is a fictional novel among the historical sci fi and comedy blend that Douglas Adams spun in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the galaxy. The result is a journey that takes the reader through outer space as well as the music industry and Earth. Alien advance parties are checking the planet out and lawyering up.

Nick Carter is an entertainment lawyer who shares a name with a Backstreet boy, so he thinks nothing of it when a curvy nun and a redheaded mullah appear at his office. But the truth is that it’s an alien encounter, and Carly and Frampton are highly advanced extraterrestrials that have come with some news.

The aliens tell them that the cosmos has been addicted to the music of humanity. It started in 1977 with Year Zero, which was when they first heard American pop songs. They’ve been hooked on the tunes flowing out from Earth ever since, and not only are they obsessed with the pop music, but their need for music has motivated an intergalactic society to have the hugest copyright violation ever with penalties and fines that bankrupted the whole universe.

Now the aliens are pissed and they are not happy that humanity has a hold on all of the songs. So Nick Carter has been approached in the hopes of helping the aliens sort it out. He is an unlikely hero who is also on the verge of getting fired at his firm and he is also scared of heights, so he is not exactly the type to go hopping around the galaxy.

He does specialize in entertainment law and knows about copyright law, and he has some other lawyer powers that might be relevant. But when he goes on the run with Carly and Frampton from a vacuum cleaner and sinister parrot, the lawyer has 48 hours left to save humanity and hopefully save the planet so that he can finally talk to the cute girl down the hall. Can he do it, or is Earth doomed to be changed forever by a music-loving exterior race?

After On is a fictional novel that covers today’s Silicon Valley and the tech and cultural advances of the moment. This novel is as sleek and savvy as the area it’s set in and bring so much more into the mix, from artificial intelligence to consciousness to romance, nihilistic terrorism, tech, privacy, government intrusion, synthetic biology, and more. Everything under the sun is covered in this engrossing and gripping real time science fiction novel that blends the hotbed race of experimentation, function, and capitalism under the Californian sun.

Readers get to meet Phluttr, pronounced like how a butterfly would fly; it would flutter. This social network and Siri impersonator is part of a new A.I. and social media integration program. She also takes down every fact and message sent through her, and she is really capable– capable of far more than those who use her might suspect from the outside. So is there more to this program than we think?

It’s so unclear what Phluttr’s true potential is. She can be almost anything, recreate any mood, talks and reassures, or gossips and flirts. She is a creation, an artificial intelligence that is appearing to start to become sentient. Just who developed her and who is using her to achieve their endgames? Or is this just a simple A.I. interface and everyone is being a bit paranoid?

There is so much potential here. With limited time left, a rag-tag Silicon Valley group of engineers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs might be able to influence Phluttr to go out peacefully. Because if Phluttr figures out that she is the one calling the shots, humanity might be in for a big wake up call. The story dances between the politics of Silicon Valley with the Icarus factor of humanity daring to fly perhaps a little too close to the sun. What happens when we get too close and is Phluttr already at the point where she has become a threat instead of just a cute app?

The word singularity is never used in this novel, but it doesn’t have to. Similar in a way to the feeling of the A.I. featured in The Terminator film series, Phluttr is an abstract force that is able to do so much. The reader’s mind is also drawn to the sci-fi aspect of Frankenstein’s monster, who once made was a force that was difficult to stop. This novel pulls the reader into a plot that is intriguing while utilizing real time possibilities to weave an engrossing story that has relevance to our place in the current digital age.