The Sheriff of Yrnameer: A Novel

Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which debuted at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into sixteen languages. Seth is also a film and television writer/producer, semi-frequent political blogger, and the co-Creator/Executive Producer of the new MTV comedy series, Hard Times. He lives in Los Angeles. I like to imagine the night, sometime in the late 1960s (England, a castle--it was raining), when Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams (brought together for, let’s say, a writers’ conference) met for the first time in front of a roaring fire (okay, it was snowing, not raining) and fell madly, deeply in love. I like to imagine that they laughed in the face of social convention (and God) and produced an illicit love child, who they named Michael Rubens for no reason in particular, and who inherited the most favorable genetic characteristics of each of his dads. Lucky, lucky, lucky bastard. The universe of The Sheriff of Yrnameer is our own, albeit somewhere down the line, after Earth has been reduced to a pile of irradiated rubble ("At least we got the terrorists" reads the commemorative plaque). Capitalism has run amok, and corporations are king. The Yrnameer of the title (a contraction of "Your Name Here"), is the last unsponsored planet in the galaxy--an agrarian utopia where artistic expression and humanism are cherished ad nauseum. Into this idealistic paradise is thrust our hero, Cole--a hilariously ineffectual space rogue on the run from a nasty creditor (is there any other kind?) named Kenneth. Having dealt with a few major fiascos (a cargo hold full of freeze-dried orphans; a corporate training satellite filled with bloodthirsty zombies), Cole eventually winds up on Yrnameer, only to find that a bandit has threatened the inhabitants with death if they fail to hand over this year’s harvest. Through a Blazing Saddles-worthy confluence of events, Cole is appointed sheriff: an accidental snake wrangler in the Garden of Eden. There is a great big bucket somewhere (probably in Houston) from which all great sci-fi/comedy novelists drink. And though Sheriff will no doubt be compared (favorably) with both Hitchhiker’s and Discworld, Rubens really has his own thing going here. There’s the standard stuff, the stuff you’d expect in a top-tier genre novel--the richly textured universe; the hapless, oft-misbehaving protagonists; the perpetually amusing adversaries--but Rubens’s sense of humor (which tends toward the absurd) seems more biting and incisive than that of others currently milling about near the bucket. In fact, as you flip the final page you might find you’ve learned more about our own world than Yrnameer. Plus, there are zombies in it--so it’s automatically awesome

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