Osama the Gun

"THE NOVEL DEEMED TOO DANGEROUS TO BE PUBLISHED IN AMERICA--IS FINALLY PUBLISHED IN AMERICA! ""Spinrad is without a doubt one of the best contemporary American novelists."" -- Rolling Stone OSAMA THE GUN, set in a not-so-far future when the ""Sons of Osama"" have 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 who becomes a Caliphate secret agent to escape its closed confines and see the world -- and finds himself becoming the reluctant hero of the title. Osama the Gun 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."" All the while he 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 hate the sin, but love the sinner, because I felt it had to be done, and since no one else seemed to be willing to do it, I had to try to do it myself, come what may. Because Islam was being confused with its radical Middle Eastern jihadhis, and Arabs in general with terrorists, and it seemed to me that the alien jihadhist consciousness had to be experienced from within and empathetically understood. 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. -- Norman Spinrad"

Norman Spinrad is an American science fiction author, essayist, and critic. His fiction has won the Prix Apollo and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Hugo Award and multiple Nebula Awards. He was one of the most controversial and best-selling science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s with his novels "Bug Jack Barron" and "The Iron Dream," and he continued his successes with such novels as "Child of Fortune" and "The Druid King" throughout the decades that followed. "Osama the Gun" is one of his most remarkable books.