Space Opera (Space Opera, #1) by Catherynne M. Valente
Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Goodreads

A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented—something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding.

Once every cycle, the civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix—part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past. Instead of competing in orbital combat, the powerful species that survived face off in a competition of song, dance, or whatever can be physically performed in an intergalactic talent show. The stakes are high for this new game, and everyone is forced to compete.

This year, though, humankind has discovered the enormous universe. And while they expected to discover a grand drama of diplomacy, gunships, wormholes, and stoic councils of aliens, they have instead found glitter, lipstick, and electric guitars. Mankind will not get to fight for its destiny—they must sing.

Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, a washed-up glam-rock band, have been chosen to represent humanity on the greatest stage in the galaxy. And the fate of their species lies in their ability to rock.

Highlights

~everyone hates Clippy
~take me to your lead singer
~the best aliens
~brace for Feels and galaxy-brain
~EUROVISION IN SPACE

My brain revolts when I try to review anything of Catherynne Valente’s. I’m actually, genuinely, scared to try, because I don’t have a hope of doing justice to anything she’s written.

And Space Opera isn’t the Valente book I wanted to review first! I wanted to write inadequate hymns to Orphan Tales or Radiance or Palimpsest or Prester John, the weirdest of her books, which are my best-beloved and deserve to be everyone else’s too. Space Opera is possibly Valente’s most well-known work, definitely her most accessible and mass-appeal, and that is not any kind of bad thing, but it does make me feel a little guilty for harping on about this one when Radiance is right there.

But then something occurred to me: It is because it’s so accessible that we must start here, with Space Opera. If you’ve never read a book of hers before, you must ease into the Valexcellence. You must acclimatise. If you dove directly into Radiance, you might get the bends.

But Space Opera will convince you that the process – of acclimatising – is worth it. And wow you as it does so.

*

A teeny-tiny bit in the future, aliens show up. They want humanity to prove our sentience by competing in their Eurovision-in-space competition. If we come in last-place, they’ll destroy us and let Earth try again with a new species. If we come in second-last or better, we get to live.

This sounds bonkers, I know. Humanity, understandably, reacts with confusion and outrage. Especially when our ‘buddy’ species – the last one before us to be recognised as sentient – helpfully give us a list of those of our bands and musicians they think have a chance. Because most people cannot BELIEVE their taste. They don’t want Mozart or the Beatles or whoever else the critics might pick as the Best Human Musicians Ever.

They want, you know. Eurovision music. Bold and bright and camp. Catchy like an STI. The kind of music few people would be happy sending out to represent THE WHOLE ENTIRE SPECIES!

They want…Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes.

Decibel Jones is what I imagine you’d get if you took Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, made them disasters, and mixed them together with a metric ton of edible glitter. He is flamboyant and over-the-top and not interested in being conventional or respectable. He’s a bit of a prat, sometimes. He is fiercely, desperately earnest – and also just desperate, since the band broke up and the spotlight moved on.

He is utterly convinced the aliens are taking the piss.

But they’re not, so the aliens scoop up Decibel and the only other surviving member of the Absolute Zeroes, and off they go across the galaxy.

*

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? And it IS. It’s supposed to be. Before it is anything else, Space Opera is fundamentally FUN. It is giggles and glitter. It promises – and delivers! – one HELL of a good time. As a piece of entertainment, it sparkles like a disco ball, absolutely dazzling.

But – though it is unashamedly ridiculous in many bonkers ways – Space Opera is not a joke. It’s not a suger pastry shell with no filling, all shallow style and zero substance. It has PLENTY of substance under the glitter – glittery substance, because it is in fact glitter all the way down, folx, but that in no way diminishes it. You might think it does diminish it, at first, but you’d be wrong, and Space Opera is here to show you why.

In-between picture-books that zap you (gently) with venom to help you memorise them, and spaceships like jewelled coral reefs, and time-travelling red pandas, Space Opera is less an exploration of and more a manifesto on the value of ‘ridiculous’ art. All art, really, but ridiculous art in particular. In fact, ridiculous art is not ridiculous. Ridiculous art is the most important art of all.

Valente makes a most excellent case for this.

Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than it rocks?

The explanation, when it comes, of why the galactic community uses Eurovision of all things to determine sentience…actually makes a whole lot of sense, when we get it.

In order to create a pop band, the whole apparatus of civilization must be up and running and tapping its toe to the beat. Electricity, poetry, mathematics, sound amplification, textiles, arena architecture, efficient mimetic exchange, dramaturgy, industry, marketing, the bureaucratic classes, cultural critics, audiovisual transmission, special effects, music theory, symbology, metaphor, transportation, banking, enough leisure and excess calories to do anything beyond hunt, all of it, everything.

But that doesn’t have to be a pop band, does it? All of that previous quote applies equally well to any time of music, you would think! Right?

Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play?

…OH.

Oh.

oh.

When I tell you I had an entirely thematically appropriate galaxy-brain moment after reading that passage… I really am not kidding even a little bit.

In Which Sia Gets Personal

See, Space Opera is a revelation. Was one for me, when I first read it and every time I’ve reread it since. Because I used to think Eurovision and pop and camp and everything else big and glittery was stupid. I loved those things, but I was embarrassed about it. I felt like I wasn’t Doing Life Right, because I loved unicorns and rainbow hair colours and dressing up in top hats, and those things weren’t Correct. I had absorbed the idiocy that is the belief that art must be serious to be Real Art.

And Valente showed me, convinced me, how unutterably wrong I was.

It’s one thing to understand how fucking important it is to allow others to be silly. That’s what that last quote is talking about – do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? – and that hit me so hard. But it is another thing to viscerally get how not-silly silliness/camp/glitter is. And that is one of the major triumphs of Space Opera.

But just as this book will prove to you that glitter is punk, it will also show you how being ridiculous is – something powerful. Something to respect, actually. Instead of rolling your eyes at the singer draped in a flock of feather boas, Space Opera points out how fucking BRAVE you have to be to get up on a stage, in front of other people, and sing and dance while decked in neon-bright feathers. It’s a shift in perspective, an all-too-needed change in gears. The people who are able to embrace what the rest of us call silly are among the bravest of us, not (just) because they’ve conquered stage-fright, but because they overcome, every day, the fear-of-being-judged that holds almost everyone alive prisoner, in one way or another.

The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.

Which is to say: although other Valente books helped make me weird, Space Opera is the book that taught me to embrace it and flaunt it and be proud of it. That insisted I be weird – silly, ridiculous, over-the-top, myself – on the outside too. That convinced me that I wasn’t a strange little loser, but a freaking glitterpunk, actually. That there was so much power and courage in joy. That empathy is a superpower, and also mandatory.

And that life is beautiful and life is stupid, as the great Goguenar Gorecannon said.

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.

So I’ve explained, rather long-windedly, that this book changed my life. How about I get back to telling you about the book itself?

In Which Sia Belatedly Returns to The Point

I don’t think I can possibly introduce you to the Absolute Zeroes better than Valente does here;

Decibel Jones always lived in the moment; Omar Calisșkan always lived in an uncertain future. Mira, he supposed, had always lived in her own head and allowed others to visit once in a while. With advance notice. And extensive decontamination protocols.

Decibel is, as you know, our lead. Oort St. Ultraviolet, otherwise known as Omar, is Englishblokeman, so completely and purposefully average that it becomes a superpower. Mira is…Mira. You’re going to love all three of them.

But we also have ‘the roadrunner’, aka Altonaut Who Runs Faster Than Wisdom Along the Milk Road – a representative of the last species to be verified sentient via the Grand Prix (the Eurovision-in-space competition), come to help guide humanity through the process. And Öö, the time-travelling red panda mentioned earlier. In fact, ALL the aliens are indescribably epic – you can feel the sheer FUN Valente must have had inventing all the species (and their homeworlds and histories!) just beaming off the page! Really, the aliens are the most obvious example of the sheer – the sheer EXUBERANCE of this book; Space Opera reads like it was a blast to write, and that helps make it a blast to read.

The universe is a very large and very complicated demonstration of having one’s cake and eating it too.

If you’re familiar with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you’ll probably see something of it in Space Opera; the flavour of humour, for one, and Valente’s prose is somewhat reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ here, especially when introducing us to the aliens or some foundational precept of galactic culture.

The life cycle of a Quantum-Tufted Domesticated Wormhole (Lacuna vermis familiaris) takes place on a scale that beggars the imagination, kicks it while it’s down, and lights it on fire.

But having read both, I find Space Opera infinitely funnier, more hopeful, and more heartfelt than Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s more wryly critical of British racism and colonialism; it’s extravagantly queer; it does not let humanity off the hook for our various failures and evils, but it is passionately, profoundly hopepunk. It is effervescently glorious, raw, aching; it is a scream into the void in four-part harmony, pure emotion and connection and vulnerability. It is starlight shaken till it fizzes, a rhinestone that is secretly a real gem, the distillation of every song that sends goosebumps racing down your arms and over the back of your neck.

It’s about how unbelievably awe-inspiring it is that we have a sense of beauty. About how beautiful beauty is. It’s about inventing beauty and joy and meaning when the world won’t give them to you, and the inspiring hope of that. The point-blank rejection of cynicism and pessimism. The refusal to give up on life, and people, and the future.

It’s about Eurovision in space, where the stakes are the highest they can possibly be and a whole lot of aliens are VERY invested in the possible outcomes. It’s about getting the literal band back together. It’s about Unkillable Facts.

It’s about how glitter is punk, actually.

And it will convince you.

This review doesn’t come close to expressing how unfathomably FLAWLESS Space Opera is. So I hope you read it. I really, REALLY do. It’s one of the best books of its decade and I will love it FOREVER.

If you still need convincing, you can read an excerpt of Space Opera here!

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