best Obama-era joke so far

Thanks to pal Greg Uchrin of Intravenous Caffeine for this:

And heard from Crawford, "Thank God, now we can stop planting all that brush . . ."

'doom, 'doom, all is 'doom!

Many a year and oft ago, Dave Langford and I wrote a parody of the disaster novel genre, to which we gave the subtle title Earthdoom. Our editor at Grafton Books, the estimable Nick Austin, went one subtler, retitling the book Earthdoom! -- it's because of their use of exclamation marks that editors get paid the big bucks, you know.

Subtlest of all was the Grafton Books marketing dept., which -- in a prime example of life imitating art -- managed to commit a computer error that remaindered the book a mere four or five weeks after publication, at a time when it was selling very healthily. ("Can't they unremainder it?" we said to Nick. He replied, "No. That never works" -- leading us to wonder how often the Grafton Books marketing dept. had done this before.)

With customary dynamic despondency, Dave and I did nothing much to get the book back into print (and, anyway, mighty bookselling chains have these computers that retain such useful info as whether books were so uncommercial they had to be remaindered within weeks) until, a few years ago, vibrantly throbbing POD publisher BeWrite picked up the rights and reissued it.

They have sold, well, several copies.

But just in the past few days there's been a sudden upsurge in sales, with perhaps as many as two or three extra orders flooding in to BeWrite Central. The elves at Lightning Source are having to work their fingers to the bone. And why? Because skiffy megastar Charlie Stross has just given the book a very friendly plug on his blog.

(I hadn't realized Charlie had ever read it. I know he read a comic novel I wrote solo a few years later, The Hundredfold Problem [also re-released more recently by BeWrite, now I think of it], in which a budding writer called Chuck Strozza played a major role. I know Charlie read it because the next time I saw him after the book's initial publication he backed me into a corner and told me so.)

Funny the way things work out. I hadn't thought about Earthdoom! in a while before the news came in about Charlie's plug and the uptick in sales, yet just hours later one of my Google Alerts led me inadvertently to a page that proved to be about a recent entry in the Littlenose series of books by wildly successful children's author John "The Other" Grant. Why I'd been dragged there by Google was because, lower down the page, there was a "Here are some further books you might enjoy by the same author" section . . . and there, sure nuff, featured Earthdoom!

Perhaps there'll be a few kids getting a bit of a surprise if they follow the site's advice and buy a copy -- a pleasant surprise, natch, since Earthdoom! has some, er, rudish bits in it.

Obviously, I was waiting yesterday for the third news item about Earthdoom! to turn up (preferably involving Martin Scorcese), but no such luck.

Now, if only Barack Obama had been seen on telly today clutching a copy of the book to read during the boringer bits of the inauguration . . .