Space Opera (Catherynne M. Valente)

Space Opera
Catherynne M. Valente
Saga Press
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Despite what that human Fermi once speculated on an insignificant watery world, life is surprisingly abundant across the universe - but where there's life, there's going to be war. A galaxy-spanning, world-burning, species-snuffing-out war, to be precise, waged while that watery world remained blissfully unaware and conducted its own quaint species slaughtering. Eventually, the survivors metaphorically dusted themselves off, came to their many senses, and decided there had to be a better way to decide which species were sentient enough to spare and which were acceptable losses in the universal economy. What they came up with was the Metagalactic Grand Prix, an annual musical exposition which determined resource allotment, trade deals, and single sales - and, to any newly discovered civilization, whether they would be allowed to live or would be reduced to their constituent molecules for the safety of the neighborhood.
Danesh was king of the pop charts as Decibel Jones, lead singer of the Absolute Zeros, for a blink of an eye. Now he's in a death spiral of drugs and alcohol and self-loathing as his solo "career" collapses in a heap of flaming reviews and empty venues. He never recovered from the death of bandmate and lover Mira Wonderful Star, and his music has shown it. But when aliens finally make contact with Earth, obligating the species to send a representative to the Grand Prix and prove their worth, he finds himself selected as humanity's ambassador to the stars, along with his straight-laced ex-bandmate (and also ex-lover) Oort St. Ultraviolet. Unless Decibel Jones can pull off the comeback of the millennium, the odds of humanity's survival are about absolute zero...

REVIEW: I'm trying to think of how to describe what I just read, and am struggling... in a good way, for once. Space Opera exists at a peculiar intersection of Douglas Adams, global and interstellar politics, philosophical musings on the nature of sentience and life, utter surrealism, and the power of rock and roll.
Far from being generally humanoid with improbable head growths, the aliens here can be anything from self-aware plants to parasitic viruses to time- and alternate-reality-traveling red pandas to self-aware artificial entities; interludes explore the history and peculiarities and interactions of various species, much of which ultimately comes into play, if as a subplot, in the main story. That story can be a little thin on action - Decibel and Oort are more or less drug along and forced to run the metaphoric gauntlet, and even then have to be prodded more than once to get them to move - but has surprising layers beneath the overt humor and absurdities. Unlike Douglas Adams's genial white middle-class nobody Arthur Dent, Decibel and Oort and the late Mira embrace modern England's diversity in color and origin and sexuality, explosions of neon and holographic glitter in the face of drab tweed... a diversity that many rail against as unseemly and "nontraditional", which is not so much a digression as a theme that runs through the story: how xenophobia leads nowhere but ultimate destruction. The characters are, naturally, rather flawed; rock and roll, and music in general, doesn't grow from an unfurrowed field. They struggle and often fail against those flaws, leaning into them for comfort and familiarity, even as they recognize the harm they're doing to themselves, their loved ones, and the potential fate of an entire planet. On a sentence level, every word and turn of phrase, while sometimes requiring a little extra focus to navigate from the start to the end, counts.
I almost trimmed a half-star for that thinness mentioned earlier, but this isn't really just the story of Decibel Jones and the Zeros. It's the story of humanity, of history, of a galaxy of aliens who somehow found a way to not kill each other by recognizing the truly universal power of a power chord, and hope that maybe, somehow, impossible as it seems, comebacks can happen for even the most monstrous of primate-descended species. The whole book becomes a wild hallucination of a tale, a mesmerizing flurry of sights and sounds and ideas that can dazzle and dizzy and even overwhelm, yet it has a good beat and you can dance to it.

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