2023 read #98: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente.

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

295 pages

Published 2018

Read from September 12 to September 14

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is another book I’ve avoided for a while. My ex read this maybe a year after we both read The Refrigerator Monologues; I’d introduced him to Valente’s writing, but he gravitated toward the books of hers I hadn’t read. My ex devoured and adored Space Opera, and I always meant to read it afterward. But my time with my ex was also a dark age in my reading life, and I just never got around to it until that whole era imploded in a shitshow of trauma I don’t need to be airing out in a book review. In the years since, I’ve kept Space Opera on my to-read list, but never got any further with it than that.

My first and lasting impression of this book is the sensation of being blasted in the eyeballs by a hyperactive firehose of too-clever-by-half prose that never lets up and never lets you breathe. Valente’s words can waltz into precious on occasion, but this book rockets directly into exhausting. It reads like you gave Terry Pratchett amphetamines, all the candy he could eat, and a fistful of glowsticks. (Or maybe the apposite comparison is Douglas Adams? I don't know, I haven't read him yet.)

I love the characters and the concept. Decibel Jones is a glittery pastiche of every glam rock superstar, rolled in a fine coating of Gen X burnout. Yoinking Decibel and his former bandmate Oort St. Ultraviolet into space for a win-or-get-annihilated Eurovision contest beyond the stars is brilliant. But that narrative voice makes it hard for me to stay engaged for even a chapter at a time.

Like, I appreciate a unique voice for a story. It’s all too rare in SFF. Taken by itself, almost every page here scintillates. Three hundred pages of baroque run-on sentences, now — each stuffed with six different pop cultural allusions and eight sci-fi puns and unrelenting technicolor hyperbole — that adds up. The prose certainly reinforces Valente’s thesis statement that “the opposite of fascism is theatre,” and I approve of that idea. Give us more glitter, more queerness, more lushly explosive orgiastic life! It’s just that my attention span wasn’t fully up to the task this time around.

But Valente, at her best, is almost unmatched when it comes to framing the grief, the rage, the hope, the scale, the fragility, the helplessness, the transcendence of being alive, of being human in this fucked up and pointless but somehow still worthwhile universe. The emotional climax and coda wrecked me in all the best possible ways.