★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Space Opera
• Author: Catherynne M. Valente
• Year: 2018 (mine was library hardcover)
• Pages: 289*
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Saga Press (Simon & Schuster)
• ISBN 9781481497497 (TYPE)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* doesn’t include “liner notes”)

 

Summary

One of six nominees for the upcoming 2019 Hugo Award For Best Novel, Valente’s Space Opera is the result of a Twitter joke, according to Valente’s “liner notes” in this novel and her guest blog entry on John Scalzi’s “Whatever” blog. She was live-tweeting Eurovision, and Charles Tan responded “Ha-ha, you should write a science fiction Eurovision novel”. Then editor Navah Wolfe direct-messaged her, offering to buy the as-of-yet-unwritten novel on the spot.

The novel itself deals with a wide variety of sentient extraterrestrial species, all of whom have fought an interstellar war over who gets to be considered “sentient”. Just afterward, they decided a better way to handle such disagreements was to hold an occasional “Metagalactic Grand Prix”, basically Eurovision In Space. Then they came across humanity, and invited them to the next installment. Any species that comes in dead last, or doesn’t participate, can safely be regarded as not sentient. The ETs arrive on Earth with a list of musical acts they deem worthy of their competition, only to find that all of them are dead, except two-thirds of a washed up glam-rock trio called “Decibel Jones And The Absolute Zeroes”. Humanity’s future thus depends on them.

(Not to be confused with the 1996 anthology of the same name, which I reviewed in December.)

 

Commentary

Within a few pages of first opening this book, I told my wife: “It’s like Douglas Adams on speed, but with more words per sentence.” This impression only intensified as I continued. So I wasn’t surprised when Valente credits Adams in the liner notes:

“And thank you, however obliquely, to Douglas Adams, or at least his ghost, who looms somewhat benevolently over all science fiction comedy, like Jesus making dirty jokes at the Last Supper. Without Hitchhiker’s Guide, this book would simply disappear in a puff of logic. Good lord, without Hitchhiker’s Guide, I would disappear in a puff of logic.”

—page 293

Following is a sample of the kind of frantic Adams-esque prose to which both Valente and I refer above.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if biology and sentience and evolution were mearly endearing idiots, enthusiastic tinkerers with subpar tools and an aesthetic that could be called, at best, cluttered and, at worst, a hallucinogenic biohazard-filled circus-cannon to the face. But, like the slender, balding father of the atomic age, they’ve all gotten far too much positive feedback over the years. They really believe in themselves, no matter how much evidence against piles up rotting in the corners of the Universe. Life is the ultimate narcissist, and it loves nothing more than showing off. Give it the jankiest glob of fungus on the tiniest flake of dried comet-vomit wheeling drunkenly around the most underachieving star in the middle of the most depressing urban blight the cosmos has to offer, and in a few billion years, give or take, you’ll have a teeming society of telekinetic mushroom people worshipping the Great Chanterelle and zipping around the local points of interest in the tastiest of lightly browned rocket ships. Dredge up a hostile, sulfurous silicate lava sink slaloming between two phlegmy suns well into their shuffleboard years, a miserable wad of hell-spit, free-range acid clouds, and the gravitational equivalent of untreated diabetes, a steller expletive that should never be forced to cope with something as toxic and flammable as a civilization, and before you can say ‘no, stop, don’t, why?’ the place will be crawling with postcapitalist glass balloons filled with sentient gases all called Ursula.”

—page 3-4

A lot of the sentences are like that, which is fun at first but eventually begins to batter my brain with verbosity. Did she go overboard like the unwatched baby or drunk used car salesmen left unattended too near the broken railing of a budget cruise ship? Perhaps. Nevertheless, it was a fun romp, a happy diversion from the dreariness of the news of the day, and even from the last couple of books I read.

Unlike one sci-fi author I read often, of whom I regularly complain that he doesn’t describe his characters’ physical appearances, even the ETs, this book is the complete opposite of that. Valente will spend a page or more describing the physical appearance of a non-human species. Which is more than I really want, of course, but she does it with such pomp and eye-stinging hurricane velocity phrases that it’s worth it, like a roller coaster but just for your brain. Instead of just saying “black lump with large eyes and wiry hair”, she does this:

“In order to function in all this dimly red-rimmed darkness, the body of an Elakh is small, dense, nearly indestructible by anything that might by lying about, around, or in wait in the shadows, and mostly eyeballs. If a particularly melancholy child stacked a huge black ball of hard suet on top of a dainty black suet cone, gave it a lot of elegantly styled coaxial cable for hair, and stuck two enormous old-fashioned lighbulbs on it where eyes should generally go, they’d have a pretty solid apprroxmation of an Elakh with which to horrify their parents.”

—page 82

 

Social/Political Views

There IS social commentary here too, and for readers who don’t like that sort of thing, rest assured that it only comes in small chunks, and only in similarly humorous prose, and only in ways easily relevant to the storyline. And it stands to reason that this sort of thing must be included in a story like this, not because first-contact stories are expected to have the ETs comment on human societies, but because any sentient species arriving at Earth would have something to say about how we run things. I suppose it’s possible that an extraterrestrial species advanced enough to roam the stars might visit us and exlaim that our society is exactly like theirs, but I find it highly unlikely.

Like when the Speaker of the U.S. House (remember this was written in 2018, before the Democrats took back the House) claims to the ET emissary that the U.S. is just fine because we finally got rid of the “filthy, ungrateful protestors” and “everyone I know is happy” — and the ET responds: “Everyone you know is a monster, sweetie.”

“I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we’re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss. But lucky you — we’re better than that. We’re not monsters. We have our process. The process works.”

—page 40

Or when the U.S. President threatens the ETs with nuclear war, and the emissary responds: “Look at you! Who’s the cutest? YOU’RE THE CUTEST. And what a sense of humor!”

“Though I must say that leaping directly to declaring war on us does not make much of an argument for human sentience. That is the response of an ant colony. Do better. As for barbaric, there must be a test, mustn’t there? One must separate the sublime from the merely anatomical. Unless you think we should invite your koalas or subway rats to the galactic table? Because I don’t see you setting up diversity programs so that elephants can apply to university, and many of them are a far sight cleverer than your average President.”

—page 42

 

One More Thing

I appreciated Valente’s approach to religion, which isn’t mentioned often — barely at all. But when Decibel Jones tries to explain mythical creatures to an ET, he says: “Back when we thought we were alone in the universe, we made up a lot of other intelligent creatures so we could have someone to talk to at night” (page 255).

 

Points Off For...

My explanation for holding off on the fifth star is, perhaps oddly, one of the same reasons I liked this book so much: the style of prose. It got thick after a while, slowed the reading, required going back to restart sentences more than once to make sure I got the gist.

 

Conclusion

I will almost always enjoy a book that makes me think “this author must be very familiar with Douglas Adams’ work” as soon as I begin reading, though it doesn’t happen very often. Not everyone can pull it off. Certainly not everyone can do what Valente did and somehow make a “Eurovision In Space” Twitter joke into what Adams would have written if he was brought back to life by a pile of sentient amphetamines, became an American, and was introduced to Eurovision for the first time.

And I enjoyed this one. If you have a sense of humor and aren’t too put off by science fiction in general or tons of British references specifically, then I think you’ll enjoy this too.

 

 

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