OSAMA THE GUN--an ebook first English language edition

                         
       THE ULTIMATE EBOOK PUBLISHING EXPERIMENT
                    and the reason why

                                        by Norman Spinrad

  In the first week of July, I’m self-publishing the first English language edition of OSAMA THE GUN as an ebook original on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites. This after having had  more than a score of novels published in traditional ink-on-paper editions throughout the world.

BUG JACK BARRON got me denounced in the British Parliament as a degenerate, as a communist by fascists and a fascist by communists, and THE IRON DREAM was banned for eight years in Germany, but I knew OSAMA THE GUN would surely be my most politically controversial novel and very difficult to get published in the United States because of its politically incorrect sympathy for the devil de jour.

 But I couldn’t help myself.   Something like OSAMA THE GUN had to be written, but no one else had done it, so I felt compelled to write the novel by a kind of idealistic transnational patriotism and in-my-face personal experience.

I had returned from Florida to New York City late at night on September 10, went to sleep in Dona Sadock’s apartment on 9th Street only a few kilometers from Ground Zero, and woke up with the twin funereal clouds of the Twin Towers right in my face. Inside the restricted zone.  NATO fighters circling overhead and glad to have them.  Fury.  Anger. Patriot rage. Up close and personal.

I was commissioned to write about it soon thereafter by the national French newspaper Liberation, and again to reflect on it a year later, when the Hole was still smoking and there were American troops venting righteous tribal outrage against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan.  By then many writers were beginning to try to write fiction explorations of this historical discontinuity, and my reputation being what it was, I began to be asked why I wasn’t.

My response was always that what I was reading in that vein was far too small scale personal reaction, and I wasn’t interested in adding one more “how 9/11 changed my life” story even though it certainly had.  If I was going to try to deal with the results thereof, I would have to relate the geopolitical matrix and the clash of civilizations to the inner consciousness of the enemy, of a sincere, dedicated, likable jihahdi.

Monstrous acts by terrorists in its name had painted the religion of Islam itself demonically evil in the eyes of multicultural secular western civilization and bin Laden had successfully caused America to transform itself into the Great Satan in the eyes of the Umma, to much of the world-wide Islamic community.

It seemed to me that what was needed was a novel that did not deal primarily with the personal reactions of Americans to this transformed reality and not only the complexities of the geopolitics, but a work of fiction that put readers inside that alien alien jihadhist consciousness, that allowed its complexities and moral conundrums to be empathetically experienced from within and understood, if not applauded.  Sympathy for the devil, if not for his demonic deeds.

OSAMA THE GUN, set in a not-so-far future when the “Sons of Osama” have re-established a powerful Islamic Caliphate with Pakistani nuclear weapons and Arabian oil money, is the story  of  one of those sons of the martyr, a naive and sincere young man named after him, who becomes a Caliphate secret agent just to escape its closed confines to see the world, and stepwise finds himself becoming the reluctant hero of the title, as told to the reader by Osama the Gun himself.

Osama becomes a terrorist leader on a small scale by happenstance, a mercenary used by Islamic forces fighting an American proxy invasion in the oil lands of Nigeria, an iconic figure in the manner of “El Che,” and all the while charms the reader as a likable, sincere, idealistic and sympathetic human doing very unsympathetic things to the interests of the United States of America.

I wanted the  reader to experience the difference between odious terrorist deeds done in the name of Islam and Islam as religion, but also the moral ambiguities in the relationship between them, between the true transnational brotherhood of the Hadj and the snakepit of Arab political nationalisms, between the innocently idealistic naiveté of the young man and the Islamic terrorist icon Osama the Gun.

I wanted reader to hate the sin, but  love the sinner, or at least understand the monster’s human heart enough to acknowledge than he had one.

Which was why OSAMA THE GUN had to be written, and why, as one foaming at the mouth rejection letter predicted, no American publisher would touch this book, and no doubt why the editor who wrote it has thusfar been proven right.

So after I still couldn’t find an American publisher for OSAMA THE GUN after it was published in France, and after delving deeply into contemplation of the ebook revolution as detailed on this blogsite and experimenting with backlist titles and then an original short story, I screwed up my courage to take the experiment to perhaps the ultimate belief and self-publish OSAMA THE GUN as an ebook original.

I’m doing this not just as experiment in ebook publishing, which it is, not only to rescue a novel in which I passionately believe from undeserved oblivion, but also because I feel OSAMA THE GUN should be read for reasons that transcend the publishing business, that perhaps have extra-literary dimensions, that in some way are moral reasons.  And I can give it a try because advent of the ebook and the ebook reader is revolutionizing what publication means at warp speed.

OSAMA THE GUN the ebook will be priced at $7, as affordable as a mass market paperback book, at least until October 1.  And then we’ll see, it is, after all, an experiment.  No one has ever tried to launch a literarily and politically important novel as an ebook original before.

 I may fall on my face.  I may end up with an ebook best-seller.  Most likely something in between, which in the end may help define what a “successful ebook” might look like in the electronic marketplace.  A conventional ink-and-paper publisher might be emboldened to pick it up.  Or not.  Or the continuation of OSAMA THE GUN as an ebookn if successful enough might turn a conventional publishing contract into an offer I might then want to refuse.

And as part of the experiment, the first third of OSAMA THE GUN may be downloaded free of charge via the link to it on Scribd below and freely distributed, even while the complete novel is on sale.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/326098/OSAMA-THE-GUNnovel-portion

If that doesn’t grab you, don’t buy the book.

If it does, here's where to buy it on Amazon:

or on Barnes & Noble


And if you want to learn the full story and historical back story, here are the videos:

OSAMA THE GUN 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkVgVlz0TuY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbxxBgo0eY&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nT15yiY_PE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SaVnlJNQdc&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

OSAMA THE GUN 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVL6Qtvdb0&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Free electronic copies of the entire novel for critical or journalistic purposes available on an indiviudal basis upon individual request.