Space Oddity
Get your feather boas and glitter ready, folks. It is time for another round of the Metagalactic Grand Prix! Or, in other words, Catherynne M Valente has written a sequel to Space Opera.
To understand these books we need to consider what Eurovision means to people. It can be very different for Europeans and Americans. In particular, for those of us young enough to have seen it live, Abba’s arrival on the Eurovision stage was strongly reminiscent of Dorothy stepping from monochrome Kansas into the glorious Technicolor world of Oz. Music would never be the same again.
For Americans, however, Eurovision is a window on that vast and ancient mystery called European civilization. That is for them, what ancient Egypt is for us: impossibly old and long-lasting, and full of strange and eccentric customs that thrill and delight the tourist. Thankfully, ancient Egypt is no longer with us. If it was, Pharoah TV would have shows such as Mummies for Dummies, Good Morning Kephri (Wake Up and Smell the Dung), and Sekhmet’s Hunting Party. But Europe still shambles along, zombie like, through the world, and thus we have Eurovision in place of The Book of the Dead. Americans have spent decades trying to decode its mysteries. Valente has perhaps come closest to understanding it.
She has also created a version of it that is beyond the wildest imaginings of most entries.
Whereas Adrian Tchaikovsky (see elsewhere in this issue) ramps up danger planets to the max, he still plays by the rules of science. Valente rips up the rule book, cuts it into little confetti unicorns, and scatters it willy-nilly across the face of the universe, daring it to explode them in as creative a way possible, while also humanizing the process with outlandish analogies. Valente asks us things like–and I’m making this one up, her stuff is much better–what if the universe were Los Angeles, and all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas, and are royally pissed about it? What would a royally pissed superheated ball of hydrogen gas behave like?
Along the way she also comes up with some amazing rants. This one about the English language is a particular favourite of mine. I shared it with my Welsh tutor, who also loved it. Welsh might seem a very weird language, but it has its own internal logic. English is just, well…
“That English robs other languages blind, saws off their best vocabularies, and wears them stapled, still dripping, to its own face, is both well-known and not much of a problem for man, mushroom, or Meleg. But English, inasmuch as it has rules, is so constitutionally incapable of obeying even itself that virtually every possible sentence contains some exception, some rude gesture of pug-nosed defiance toward the concept of order itself, some precious little bit of spelling or syntax that thinks it’s so special it doesn’t have to behave like all the other children. You can hardly turn a phrase without being accosted by silent letters lying in wait for innocent spellers-by, half-dressed homonyms beckoning with come-hither stares, red-light district infinitives doing the splits, some dubious fellow in a trench coat lined with irregular verbs, delinquent subclauses loitering in the night, delusional plurals insisting they’re perfectly normal, broken sentence fragments desperate for the love of a good subject, unhinged apostrophes clinging to your clothes, and roving gangs of wildly disparate diphthongs all pronounced eh.”
Quite.
But anyway, what about the plot?
Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes have saved Earth from destruction by not finishing last in the Metagalactic Grand Prix. However, all is not well with our heroes. Oort St. Ultraviolet has gone home to his family. Mira Wonderful Star is alive only because her twenty-something self is stuck in a time loop that allows her to resurrect in the present for limited periods. And as for Dess, he’s in a massive funk because they didn’t win.
You see, that’s the thing about song contests. If you win you can hold your head up high and go on to bigger and better things. But if you don’t, well, that was the pinnacle of your career. From now on there is nothing for it but endless touring of backwater planets where you will play gigs to audiences who prefer corporate hospitality boxes to mosh pits, you will appear on celebrity game shows, and you’ll shoot advertising videos for household cleaning products. In other words, the only reason that you are not actually dead is that one day you might be sufficiently old and infirm and well-loved enough to be asked to come back one last time to headline Glasto.
So Dess is in a massive funk, despite the fact that he has command of a luxury starship on which to conduct his mandated post-contest tour. Foolishly he asks the ship to take him somewhere cool, and the ship drops him in very hot water indeed.
Specifically it causes Dess and his crew to make First Contact with a new intelligent species. That means that there has to be a new Metagalactic Grand Prix, in which Dess’s new “friends” are in danger of having their planet destroyed. And it is Dess’s job to help them through the process.
Along the way we get a look at the internal working of the Galactic Broadcasting Union. It transpires that it is run as a never-ending committee meeting which operates on Rakevat’s Rules of Chaos. Yes, this is a WSFS Business Meeting joke. It is probably also the most Douglas Adams aspect of the book, and Valente generously acknowledges the debt she owes to the master of absurdist SF.
Thankfully(?) for Dess and the crew, Öö the Keshet is on hand to cause even more trouble as only an over-excitable time-traveling red panda-like species can.
If I have a complaint about this book, it is that it resembles a large helping of exceptionally rich Death by Chocolate. Yes, it is delicious, and you can probably manage a couple of helpings. But after that you just have to give it a rest and come back for more tomorrow. That makes reading the book quite slow compared to one that rushed you from one chapter to the next (for example, the new Green Man book from Juliet McKenna, which I also had the pleasure of reading this past month).
That said, Space Oddity features one of the oddest star systems, many of the oddest aliens, and absolutely the best music of any book out there. Somewhere in an alternate universe, David Bowie has read it and loved it.
Title: Space Oddity
By: Catherynne M Valente
Publisher: Little Brown
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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