Review: Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Mon Aug 26 18:41:44 PDT 2019


Space Opera
by Catherynne M. Valente

Publisher: Saga
Copyright: 2018
ISBN:      1-4814-9751-0
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     304

Life is not, as humans had come to think, rare. The universe is packed
with it, bursting at the seams. The answer to the Fermi paradox is not
that life on Earth is a flukish chance. It's that, until recently,
everyone else was distracted by total galactic war.

Thankfully by the time the other intelligent inhabitants of the galaxy
stumble across Earth the Sentience Wars are over. They have found a
workable solution to the everlasting problem of who counts as people
and who counts as meat, who is sufficiently sentient and self-aware to
be allowed to join the galactic community and who needs to be quietly
annihilated and never spoken of again. That solution is the
Metagalactic Grand Prix, a musical extravaganza that is also the
highest-rated entertainment in the galaxy. All the newly-discovered
species has to do is not finish dead last.

An overwhelmingly adorable giant space flamingo appears simultaneously
to every person on Earth to explain this, and also to reassure everyone
that they don't need to agonize over which musical act to send to save
their species. As their sponsors and the last new species to survive
the Grand Prix, the Esca have made a list of Earth bands they think
would be suitable. Sadly though, due to some misunderstandings about
the tragically short lifespans of humans, every entry on the list is
dead but one: Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes. Or their surviving
two members, at least.

Space Opera is unapologetically and explicitly The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy meets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest[Eurovision].
Decibel Jones and his bandmate Oort are the Arthur Dent of this story,
whisked away in an impossible spaceship to an alien music festival
where they're expected to sing for the survival of their planet, minus
one band member and well past their prime. When they were at the height
of their career, they were the sort of sequin-covered glam rock act
that would fit right in to a Eurovision contest. Decibel Jones still
wants to be that person; Oort, on the other hand, has a wife and kids
and has cashed in the glitterpunk life for stability. Neither of them
have any idea what to sing, assuming they even survive to the final
round; sabotage is allowed in the rules (it's great for ratings).

I love the idea of Eurovision, one that it shares with the Olympics but
delivers with less seriousness and therefore possibly more
effectiveness. One way to avoid war is to build shared cultural ties
through friendly competition, to laugh with each other and applaud each
other, and to make a glorious show out of it. It's a great hook for a
book. But this book has serious problems.

The first is that emulating The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy rarely
ends well. Many people have tried, and I don't know of anyone who has
succeeded. It sits near the top of many people's lists of the best
humorous SF not because it's a foundational model for other people's
work, but because Douglas Adams had a singular voice that is almost
impossible to reproduce.

To be fair, Valente doesn't try that hard. She goes a different
direction: she tries to stuff into the text of the book the written
equivalent of the over-the-top, glitter-covered, hilariously excessive
stage shows of unapologetic pop rock spectacle. The result... well,
it's like an overstuffed coach upholstered in fuschia and spangles,
onto which have plopped the four members of a vaguely-remembered boy
band attired in the most eye-wrenching shade of violet satin and
sulking petulently because you have failed to provide usable cans of
silly string due to the unfortunate antics of your pet cat, Eunice
(it's a long story involving an ex and a book collection), in an
ocean-reef aquarium that was a birthday gift from your sister, thus
provoking a frustrated glare across an Escher knot of brilliant yellow
and now-empty hollow-sounding cans of propellant, when Joe, the cute
blonde one who was always your favorite, asks you why your couch and
its impossibly green rug is sitting in the middle of Grand Central
Station, and you have to admit that you do not remember because the
beginning of the sentence slipped into a simile singularity so long
ago.

Valente always loves her descriptions and metaphors, but in Space Opera
she takes this to a new level, one covered in garish, cheap plastic.
Also, if you can get through the Esca's explanation of what's going on
without wanting to strangle their entire civilization, you have a
higher tolerance for weaponized cutesy condescension than I do.

That leads me back to Hitchhiker's Guide and the difficulties of humor
based on bizarre aliens and ludicrous technology: it's not funny or
effective unless someone is taking it seriously.

Valente includes, in an early chapter, the rules of the Metagalactic
Grand Prix. Here's the first one:

  The Grand Prix shall occur once per Standard Alumizar Year, which is
  hereby defined by how long it takes Aluno Secundus to drag its
  business around its morbidly obese star, get tired, have a nap, wake
  up cranky, yell at everyone for existing, turn around, go back
  around the other way, get lost, start crying, feel sorry for itself
  and give up on the whole business, and finally try to finish the
  rest of its orbit all in one go the night before it's due, which is
  to say, far longer than a year by almost anyone else's annoyed
  wristwatch.

This is, in isolation, perhaps moderately amusing, but it's the formal
text of the rules of the foundational event of galactic politics.
Eurovision does not take itself that seriously, but it does have rules,
which you can read, and they don't sound like that, because this isn't
how bureaucracies work. Even bureaucracies that put on ridiculous stage
shows. This shouldn't have been the actual rules. It should have been
the Hitchhiker's Guide entry for the rules, but this book doesn't seem
to know the difference.

One of the things that makes Hitchhiker's Guide work is that much of
what happens is impossible for Arthur Dent or the reader to take
seriously, but to everyone else in the book it's just normal. The humor
lies in the contrast.

In Space Opera, no one takes anything seriously, even when they should.
The rules are a joke, the Esca think the whole thing is a lark, the
representatives of galactic powers are annoying contestants on a
cut-rate reality show, and the relentless drumbeat of more outrageous
descriptions never stops. Even the angst is covered in glitter. Without
that contrast, without the pause for Arthur to suddenly realize what it
means for the planet to be destroyed, without Ford Prefect dryly
explaining things in a way that almost makes sense, the attempted humor
just piles on itself until it collapses under its own confusing weight.
Valente has no characters capable of creating enough emotional space to
breathe. Decibel Jones only does introspection by moping, Oort is
single-note grumbling, and each alien species is more wildly fantastic
than the last.

This book works best when Valente puts the plot aside and tells the
stories of the previous Grands Prix. By that point in the book, I was
somewhat acclimated to the over-enthusiastic descriptions and was able
to read past them to appreciate some entertainingly creative alien
designs. Those sections of the book felt like a group of friends read a
dozen books on designing alien species, dropped acid, and then tried to
write a Traveler supplement. A book with those sections and some better
characters and less strained writing could have been a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, there is a plot, if a paper-thin one, and it involves
tedious and unlikable characters. There were three people I truly liked
in this book: Decibel's Nani (I'm going to remember Mr. Elmer of the
Fudd) who appears only in quotes, Oort's cat, and Mira. Valente,
beneath the overblown writing, does some lovely characterization of the
band as a trio, but Mira is the anchor and the only character of the
three who is interesting in her own right. If this book had been about
her... well, there are still a lot of problems, but I would have
enjoyed it more. Sadly, she appears mostly around the edges of other
people's manic despair.

That brings me to a final complaint. The core of this book is musical
performance, which means that Valente has set herself the challenging
task of describing music and performance sufficiently well to give the
reader some vague hint of what's good, what isn't, and why. This does
not work even a little bit. Most of the alien music is described in
terms of hyperspecific genres that the characters are assumed to have
heard of and haven't, which was a nice bit of parody of musical writing
but which doesn't do much to create a mental soundtrack. The rest is
nonspecific superlatives. Even when a performance is successful, I had
no idea why, or what would make the audience like one performance and
not another. This would have been the one useful purpose of all that
overwrought description.

Clearly some people liked this book well enough to nominate it for
awards. Humor is unpredictable; I'm sure there are readers who thought
Space Opera was hilarious. But I wanted to salvage about 10% of this
book, three of the supporting characters, and a couple of the alien
ideas, and transport them into a better book far away from the tedious
deluge of words.

I am now inspired to re-read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
though, so there is that.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-08-26

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-4814-9751-0.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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