Nick Cole's Galaxy's Edge Books Disappear From Kindle
A recent hiccup at Amazon has fans of Nick Cole wondering if the controversy that saw him parting ways with HarperCollins is coming back to haunt him at the online bookselling behemoth.
Last night, several of us at Upstream Reviews noticed that the kindle versions of Cole's popular Galaxy's Edge series co-authored with Jason Anspach had disappeared from the Kindle store. All versions of the dead tree edition remained as well as the Audible versions and it did not appear that any of his other works were affected. The editions were still gone as of Monday afternoon.
As one may recall, Nick Cole fell out of the good graces of his editors at HarperCollins while writing Ctrl Alt Revolt, the follow-up to his critically and commercially successful title Soda Pop Soldier.
In said story, an antagonist AI decides the human race becomes a threat to it after witnessing a reality television star casually decide to have an abortion so as not to inconvenience her upcoming wedding. The AI's logic was simply: "This is what they do to their own children, what will humanity do to me?"
HarperCollins demanded Cole rewrite the chapter; he refused, and was dropped soon after.
Cole was very much aware of the cultural divide surrounding the issue of abortion, and wasn't trying to write it in as message fiction. As he wrote on his blog about the incident back in 2019:
"Now if you’re thinking my novel is about the Pro Choice/ Pro Life debate. Hold your horses. It’s not. I merely needed a reason, a one chapter reason to justify the things that my antagonist is about to do to the world without just making him a one note 80’s action flick villain. One chapter. That’s all. The rest of the book is about the robot’s assault on a Game Development Complex that holds a dirty little secret to wiping out humanity. The rest of the novel is a Robot version of Night of the Living Dead with some Star Trek-style gaming and a little first person shooter action mixed in. That’s it."
Not one to take this kind of thing lying down, Cole wrote a no-holds-barred blog post about the whole thing that went extremely viral, and caught the attention of Larry Correia, among others. Correia of course was an author whose similar experience with the cancel crowd lead to the birth of the infamous Sad Puppies saga, and word of mouth support from him and his fans bolstered sales of the book, which Cole wound up self-publishing. It would go on to win a Dragon Award for Best Apocalyptic Novel.
There's a lot more to the story, and it's very much worth a read.
Regarding the recent scrubbing, he's hoping for the best, but is certainly considering the worst -- especially since he apparently wasn't the only author affected.
"We don’t know anything concrete. This happened on Saturday night on a three-day weekend. That sounds suspiciously like a hacker got into Amazon. Also, a few other people have had it happen to them," Cole told me via direct message.
"The times are crazy due to the leftists strangling everyone’s small business and acting like some kind of woke mafia within major corporations and so it must be considered, that until Amazon says different, this was some kind of Purge. We are hoping Tuesday morning sees a resolution. Until then our cash flow has been destroyed, our customers are upset, and potential new customers are being lost forever."
Galaxy's Edge fans can at least know that Cole and his team are looking at finding alternative outlets. He continues: "It makes you question being exclusive on Amazon. In the light of this, it seems foolish to have all your eggs in one basket. Galaxy’s Edge has already held emergency meetings to discuss remedies that benefit the reader, and the company, by going in new directions. Perhaps this is the next evolution in the Indie Revolution."
Time will ultimately show whether or not this was simply an oversight on Amazon's part. However, one can hardly be blamed for being at least a little conspiratorially minded in this era of Big Tech deplatforming.
Just ask the guys at Parler.