Space Oddity

In the first volume of her Space Opera series, Catherynne Valente envisioned an interstellar civilization that uses a pop music contest called the Metagalactic Grand Prix to test a species for sentience. It is a “ritual of alpha-species musical chairs,” Eurovision gone galactic, that is everyone’s alternative to genocidal warfare. A down-and-out rock group, Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, are somehow picked to be humanity’s entry. They win and become a sensation that saves humanity. But since “peace is civilization’s problematic follow-up album that never quite works,” Decibel and the gang still have work to do.

Valente’s prose is best accompanied by ingesting or injecting something hallucinogenic and a playlist show more of Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead. Here’s a sample that begins with a bit of homage to Jane Austen: “Unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any single person or object in possession of a matter transmitter must, eventually, somehow, going in, coming out, or along the way, explode.” We are reminded that the “first rule of teleportation is: No.” Makes sense.
If you like Valente’s extended acid-trip style, you will love the novel. If not, well, sentience may not be your bag.

3.5 megastars with a drum solo. show less

This is the sequel to Catherynne M. Valente's Space Opera. In that one, aliens make first contact with humanity and require some washed-up glam rockers to compete in Interstellar Eurovision to prove our right to be treated as sentient beings. In this one, said washed-up glam rockers accidentally make first contact with another civilization and the whole thing has to happen all over again.

I remember really enjoying the first one, with its wacky, clever, sardonically philosophical Douglas Adams-esque humor and its extensive and interesting detail about all the weird and ridiculous life in the universe, despite its rather thin plot.

This one... Well, somehow, this one felt to me like it was just trying way, way too hard to be wacky and show more clever and sardonically philosophical and very, very Douglas Adams (except perhaps in the places where it was trying to be very, very Terry Pratchett). Which made it hard to just relax and enjoy it. And this time I quickly started getting impatient with the long digressions about galactic civilization. Although, really, they're not so much digressions as the bulk of the novel, randomly interrupted here and there by a few pages of character development or a brief visit to the plot.

Which, in a way, is maybe not a terrible thing, because I found it impossible to take the plot with even the slight, faint, notional hint of seriousness it expected, so I didn't exactly love my visits to it. On the other hand, there was something in the character stuff that had real emotion and heart, although it was never really given time to breathe in a way that would have made it really affecting.

I don't know. I do appreciate a lot of what the novel is trying to do, and some of the humorous language, and objectively, I'm not sure it's very different at all from the first volume. So I can't for the life of me decide why I enjoyed that one so much more. Is this one genuinely not as good? Is it that you can really only get away with this sort of thing for a few hundred pages and it's overstayed its welcome now? Did the first book have a sort of comic momentum that got completely lost in the wait between volumes? Is it just the sort of thing you have to be in the right mood for to really enjoy and I simply wasn't this time? show less

My reaction to Cat Valente's "Space Opera" was that it was about as good a homage to Douglas Adams as one was going to get, really needed no follow-up, and if it had been one page longer it would have run on too long.

This brings us to "Space Oddity," the inevitable, but probably unnecessary follow-up. While I was happy to get more of Decibel Jones and company, there are a number of pit-falls here. The big one is that Valente apparently felt the need to explain what was really happening in the first book, when it really wasn't necessary; if you have to explain the joke then it isn't funny. Second, clocking in at 80 pages longer than the first book, this one overstays its welcome a little. Three, you could argue that this book really show more isn't about our protagonists from the first book; it's really about the sore losers, and who cares about sore losers?

With those caveats in mind, I still think this is worth reading if your feelings about "Space Opera" are still positive. show less

This follow up to Space Opera was such a mixed bag for me. Up to the point where I abandoned it, I was regularly reading funny passages aloud to my husband. However, I was also struggling with the wildly tangential sentences, passages, and even chapters that are whimsical and outlandish, which started off as charming but eventually began to wear and leave me wondering, "when are we actually getting to some plot?" This definitely has appeal for fans of Douglas Adams, so if you like the books after Hitchhiker's Guide, where in my opinion the plot goes off the rails and I find the joke less funny, this one might work great for you. After spending a week to get 120ish pages in to Space Oddity, I had to admit this oddity just isn't for me.

***.5

There are some good bits, but overall it didn't work as well for me as the first book.