A review by thwipys
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

2.0

okay…so.

first of all: adjectives. if you love adjectives and hyphenated descriptors in rapid fire assault on your eyes, this book will be like your wildest dreams.

most times, there was almost no sentence variety. of course there are short choppy sentences for which i was grateful, but the abundance of exhaustingly long lines made me wanna put the book down. i read this on my phone so the pages were already a little shorter than a print book, but sometimes the paragraphs were like impenetrable walls of text despite only being two or three sentences. and that’s coming from someone who loves writing long sentences.

take this line for example—it’s the opener to chapter 2 and the introduction of the main character:

“Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery country called England (which was bound and determined never to get too excited about anything), a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambitious glamrock messiah by the name of Danesh Jalo was born to a family so large and benignly neglectful that they only noticed he’d stopped coming home on weekends when his grandmother was nearly run over with all her groceries in front of the Piccadilly Square tube station, stunned into slack-jawed immobility by the sight of her Danesh, twenty feet high, in a frock the color of her customary afternoon sip of Pernod, filling up every centimeter of a gargantuan billboard.”

although that stuff let up a little as the book progressed, i never quite knew what was going on because everything demanded its own anecdote or infodump. i stuck with it anyway because i’m desperate for gay science fiction and the premise of this book really intrigued me.

that’s not to say i hated it. i like infodumping sometimes, and i found a scene in chapter 3 where an alien drops a ton of exposition very entertaining. the saving grace seemed to be the dialogue, though not always the case (when i’m trying to meet an essay’s word count: “N! O! Spells NO! The importantest word you can make out of teensy tiny N and weensy old O—that’s NO! The biggest little word I know, know, know! I mean no.” (dialogue taken from that aforementioned exposition scene)).

and hey, i am a huge hitchhiker’s guide fan. it’s clear that this novel isn’t just trying to capitalize on hgttg’s style, but instead that it’s written with a genuine love for that style. it isn’t the author’s fault that it’s a tough style to emulate successfully.

i’m not here to tell anyone not to read this. just trying to warn you what you’re getting into before you do. there are moments that cut through the noise and really spoke to me. questions of sentience play a big role in the plot and the prose—what does it mean to be sentient? what sets humans apart from every other living thing? are we actually that different from anything else? valente connects sentience to music and soul in beautiful, thought-provoking passages. those are the moments that got me to keep reading. at the end of the day, i’m glad i did.

i can say i came off the last page wanting to practice my guitar more, that’s for sure.

i do think my problems with this book stem from me just not being smart enough to engage with the rest of the rambling text. maybe you are. i hope you are.

i do however believe this book would make a truly fantastic film.