Gigs in space

[bloodygranuaile]

 It took me way too long to read Catherynne M. Valente's Space Opera. This was entirely due to the Freelance Project of Doom, wherein I put in 12 to 16-hour days for the entire month of May, because somehow I have ended up being one of the audio transcriptions people for the poker content industry even though I have terrible auditory processing. I haven't listened to music since Easter.

 

Which probably makes Space Opera a weird choice to be my one-chapter-a-night reward for the days when I even made it to having ten minutes to read before bed, but it made perfect sense to me, because a) it's Cat Valente and b) the elevator pitch for this book was "Eurovision in space." 

 

This is, quite simply, the book I needed, and the book I think a lot of us need right about now. It's extremely bizarre and goofy and joyous, but also stuffed full of heartfelt angry dunks on humanity's general and specific shittiness. Valente reaches for the darkness in the actual history of Eurovision and spreads it across the galaxy, where she stuffs it full of time-traveling red pandas and blue space flamingos and gas-filled glass balloons all called Ursula. 

 

The basic plot is as such: Back in the day, a bunch of aliens got in a huge war over who was sentient and who wasn't. After the war ended, they realized they couldn't afford another one, so they devised a different way to determine whether newly discovered species were sentient or not: the Metagalactic Grand Prix, aka Space Eurovision. When a new species is discovered, it must compete. If it comes in anything other than dead last, it's sentient. If it comes in last, it is expropriated, deconstructed into its constituent galactic resources, and redistributed.

 

This year, the rest of the galaxy have discovered Earth. Because the aliens have what human music snobs would consider terribly taste, the musical act they chose to represent humans is the remaining two-thirds of a one-hit wonder genre- and gender-bending glampunk trio called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes. 

 

The plot follows the usual outlines of a Competition Plot, where our Unlikely Competitors are out of their element for a while as they learn about the other folks all competing in this contest, things go very badly in an unlikely fashion at the eleventh hour, and then things get turned around in an even more unlikely fashion at the very last minute. This is all perfectly fine since the plot is largely a structure for building a fantastically weird galaxy around and exploring the ups and downs of humanity through the characters of Dess and Oort, the remaining two Zeroes who don't get along so well anymore, and also for making lots of jokes about politics and human history via its similarities and differences with the rest of the galaxy's history, as laid out in interstitial chapters that would make great pre-title scenes in a miniseries, just saying. We are introduced to galactic works of wisdom such as Goguenar Gorekiller's Unkillable Facts; to the dramas of former Grand Prix competitions, such as the time a planet full of hivemind T-Rex Hitlers had to be allowed to compete; and to many interesting planets and civilizations, including my hands-down favorite, the googly-eyed little emo dollies called the Elakhon, who are goth as fuck and just sound so absolutely adorable and I want to be friends with them. Also they are an entire planet full of archivists because their planet is so dark that other species thought it was a black hole and used it as a garbage can for centuries, so they know everyone's secrets. They also have a song called "Leave It Black" because they would never paint a door red to start with. They are THE BEST. 

 

If you're familiar with Valente's other work you know she creates beautiful, long, complex, poetic sentences. The same is here too, although instead of being very dignified and mythopoetic, or whimsically pseudo-Victorian-kidlit, here, they're funny. It's an absolute delight to read aloud and I tried not to be too much of a weirdo reading aloud to nobody in my room at 10 o'clock at night but sometimes I failed. I mean, how do you not read aloud a sentence like "Controversially, the twenty-second Metagalactic Grand Prix was held in Dirty Ruutu, the Smaragdi answer to Prague--once the capital of a great empire, torn apart by war, religion, vanished industry, and tourists who know in their hearts that it's not wrong to get so phenomenally plastered that you punch a police horse because everyone knows police horses vote Tory, just so long as you do it while ignoring some of the most sublime architecture in the universe"? It's so delicious. 

 

There are some indications that the Earth this book takes place on is a near-future one in which England has gone a bit fascistic, but this doesn't really get gone into in much detail--which is fine, since the details are easy enough to fill in; it's got a strong resemblance to the sort of stuff going on in the U.S. right now. Even that little bit is quite upsetting, especially if you're currently living in the U.S. and politically aware. 

 

But overall I think the book is still hopeful, because if it has a message, it's that, for all how ridiculous and terrible people are, there are still alternatives to bad systems. The alternative systems might be weird and ridiculous and kind of a pain in the ass too, but it's still possible to not do endless fucking wars all the time and to instead get creative and devise something that values life and art and soul. This is something I believe in very strongly, but that other people need to believe in in order for it to happen, and it would be nice if we as a species started believing it soon before we melt ourselves without even any other species around to recycle our constituent matter. 

 

Also, I drew an Elakh: