Catherynne M. Valente has penned a range of works and won numerous awards and accolades. Her 2018 novel, Space Opera, channels some version of Douglas Adams in a twisted tale of an interstellar song competition. The riff: for reasons related to a past space war and the need to establish sentience, representatives of each civilization in known space gather regularly for the musical Metagalactic Grand Prix. First-time competitors must not place last—or they will be eradicated, all traces of their civilization will be erased, and their bodies will seed their planet, in the hopes that the other species living their might do better should they ever evolve into something claiming sentience.
Guess which allegedly sentient species has to prove itself noteworthy this time around?
Our champions? The surviving members of a has-been glam rock band.
Universal has purchased the movie rights, and the book has been nominated for a 2019 Hugo Awards. Having encountered some of Valente's intriguing shorter work, I naturally wondered if the book could measure up to the hype.
Valente, certainly, excels at bizarre and vivid imagery. She, like Life, "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 their local points of interest in the tastiest of light browned rocket ships" (3).
Similarly, this writer orchestrates a strange pop-SF symphony from wordplay, absurd situations, and jokes. Inevitably, even the most discordant reader will find something funny. And the talking cat? That should have been a derivative disaster. Instead, the "enormous four-year-old Maine Coon-Angora-somebody’s-barn-cat-possibly-a-stray-albino-panther mix" who is "entirely unbothered by suddenly achieving the ability to speak" emerges as one of the best things about the book. The cat's a grade-A-a-hole, and I suspect I would have preferred a story about its adventures in space.
The cat's a minor player. Our hero, Decibel Jones, a washed-out hedonist variation of David Bowie at peak Ziggy, has a contextually credible background and I found him passably interesting. Most of the characters don't rise to the level of those simplified but memorable beings who inhabit Valente's acknowledged inspiration, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Valente's novel, for all its labyrinthine sentences, bizarre extraterrestrials, and digressions into past Metagalatic competitions, takes a remarkably straightforward route to a variation of the ending most readers will expect.
Decades ago, when a certain Voltaire-and-Vonnegut-reading, Kubrick-and-Python -watching teenage smartass first encountered The Hitchhiker's Guide, I thought I had found the Holy Grail, in moulded plastic. A much older me really wanted to like this book. And I had a few laughs. But honestly, the shorter works of Valente's I've read impressed me a good deal more. I can't dispute Valente's gifts and potential as a writer. I just don't share the fannish enthusiasm and Hugo-love over this particular book.
YLYMV.