Space Opera
Ratings82
Average rating3.3
This book may make sense for people who enjoy music, but without that context, it dragged so very much. Valente is a whimsical font of imagination and world building, but even that couldn't save it for me.
Valente's oh-so-clever prose styling is for a particular kind of reader, and that is not me. There were elements that were charming, but mostly it just gave me a headache.
Essentially a short story stretched over an entire book. It was kinda hard to read because every sentence went on forever and ever. I enjoy irreverent humor, but this was trying too hard. I almost gave up several times in the book.
Rock musicians (glam rock!), science fiction, and humor are three of my favorite things. I was looking forward to the book and thought for sure it would be a winner. Valente has a solid imagination, a way with words, and a unique, quirky sense of humor.
The majority of Space Opera was whimsical wordplay and fantastic descriptions and not a lot of plot or interesting/believable characters. I see all the comparisons to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I get it, especially when she imitates or creates homage to Adams with lines like this:
“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.”
That bring to mind this:
“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The Hitchhiker's Guide was also not so strong on plot, I will admit, but Trillion, Zaphod, Marvin, etc., were all vivid characters and Arthur was the “ordinary” guy that served as our guide through Adam's absurd galaxy.
I can't say I'm going to remember Space Opera's lead characters Oort or Decibel Jones (except maybe their weird names) for much of anything. The “superior” alien beings are even less memorable. Other than appearances, it's hard to tell one from the other. They all have a kooky-yet-condescending vibe when dealing with the earthling protagonists. (That was another thing about Hitchhiker's, the aliens looked down on Arthur but the readers knew he had something to offer.)
Instead of letting the reader experience the fantastic new galaxy through the eyes of say, Oort, and seeing the changes it makes on the character, we get countless ways of saying a planet is dark. The first chapter, instead of setting up a story, is nine pages on the notion of who is and who isn't sentient, and just who are we to decide that anyway. The sentience question is a major theme of the book, but I got the point after a paragraph or two. The humans in this story are objects of an agenda and not the focus of compelling storytelling.
This is very similar to the way I felt about Valente's Radiance. It seems with this author, no matter how appealing her concept is, there will be a lot of time spent on zany wordplay for its own sake. What amused me at the start wore me out by the end, and I was glad to see the last page.
Dear Catherynne, I really liked your other novel [b:Silently and Very Fast 12887497 Silently and Very Fast Catherynne M. Valente https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1318737963l/12887497.SX50.jpg 18040996] and was hoping for something along these lines. But instead I got a lot of lengthy, barely coherent, nonsensical, occasionally funny but ultimately unsatisfying and exhausting drivel, something that you might find funny the first time, and I guess the second, but definitely not the third and forth and so on, counting up to the number of Elakhsian moons of Sagrada and beyond, and definitely not every bloody time. This was just my feeble attempt to replicate the method of madness, please don't do this again to this reader, thank you.
Ten??a ganas de leerlo porque la premisa promet??a, pero no me ha gustado nada c??mo est?? escrito. Parece que te metan prisa para que lo leas r??pido. Frases eternas que podr??an resumirse en pocas palabras y demasiadas referencias que no entend??. Definitivamente, no es para todo el mundo.
A mind altering, perspective expanding epic that is akin to galactic euro vision to save the earth.
Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide; narrator and many, lengthy, humorous descriptions. That can be nice at times but not at the moment.
As the author admits, this book has a similar style as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Most of the book is a stream of utter nonsense. Thankfully, it's a short book.
This was sold to me as “Eurovision in space”, but really it's more like “Eurovision in space by way of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with Hedwig and the Angry Inch for a soundtrack”, which is infinitely better. Valente takes a fairly standard sci-fi premise (aliens considering the destruction of Earth), fills it with an intergalactic singing competition, characters that are endearingly over-the-top, and aliens that are completely bizarre and beyond the imagination of most.
I thoroughly enjoyed this!
“Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays”
This book wasn't very good, and I would have quit about 30 minutes into it if I had had the foresight to bring more than one audio book on my Christmas vacation.As it was, I actually hate-listened all the way to the end.
It appears that the author tried to approximate the style of Douglas Adams, but forgot that there as more to the Hitchhiker's Guide than the endless footnotes of unnecessary exposition, and that the exposition needs to be there for a reason, and picked up on at a later point. And you can't have an entire book with characters modeled after Zaphod - you need an Arthur Dent as your straight man. What little story there is, is wilfully absurd, without ever reaching genuinely funny, there's not a single quotable paragraph, and in the end, everything resolves in a puff of deus ex machina.
If only I remembered who recommended this to me, so I could stop listening to them in the future.
Question #321: Absinthe is to Radiance as _______ is to Space Opera.
a) seratonin
b) melatonin
c) aerosolized cocaine
d) all of the above, combined with a knocked-over bottle of champagne, late night ice cream, and the survival of a species. So you might as well enjoy it.
The correct answer, of course, is D. Excellent.
I really wanted to like this; the premise and story itself were great. But the endless quips, non-sequitur side anecdotes, and rambling analogies that go on and on and on really got old after a bit. It's like the author has a case of Ryan Reynolds syndrome combined with a huge helping of Peter Jackson “throw everything I can possibly think of into this” lack of restraint. It's funny stuff, but about half of it could've been cut out and the book would be more streamlined and better paced. We get it, Catherynne, you're witty. Just dial it back a notch.
If this doesn't sound like something that would bother you, then by all means you could absolutely love this book. And in that case I'd like to recommend the audio version. The narrator is fantastic. Heath is a perfect fit for this kind of silly story, and handles the many alien voices, accents, and dialects very well. Enough so that it made the more rambling bits a little less annoying.
I had sky high expectations of this book, how can you not when it advertises itself as a mix of Hitchiker's Guide and Eurovision. But more than either of these it reminded me of a rather obscure old anime called Legend of Black Heaven, wherein a retired rock musician is approached by an alien to save the world with music....and by it reminds me I mean it's literally the same premise.
The Hitchikers Guide comparison is fair, though I found it nowhere as funny (the book couldn't even get a chuckle out of me sadly). The actual space eurovision part could have worked if the book was actually about that, it's actually more about some ex-musicians moping about about how great they used to be and how they're all going to die mixed in with some Hitchikers-guide style outtakes about other alien species and history. The different parts never connected in a meaningful way. I kept reading along for surely once the competition started for real it would be amazing....It was, well, not BAD, it was just kind of there, and didn't even last that long.
Which is also how I feel about the whole book. Not BAD just..doesn't do justice to it's premise.
A weird, funny, and totally oddball little book that defies categorization.
Valente is a master wordsmith. 3.5 stars rounded up.
3 stars I was expecting a lot more. The writing is freaking gorgeous and amazing. The world-building and characters were great, but where was the actual plot? I would've liked to actually see the competition. I feel like nothing actually happened :/ Maybe the whole point of this just went over my head, but yeah. Kinda disappointed.
I feel bad abandoning this one, since I'm a fan of Cat Valente's work. Still, it was due back to the library, I have other books I need to get to, and was starting to feel like a slog.
Maybe I'll come back to it again some time in the future, give it another shot and see if it was just matter of my mood, of bad timing or some other ephemeral factor.
Strangely, I'd finished Valente's The Glass Town Game perhaps 2 or 3 weeks before this one. That one, a sort of Wizard of Oz by way of the Brontës, was delightful. So, I was expecting this one to be equally brilliant
I think it's really hard to pull off a work like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which Space Opera is aiming for. I figured Valente, a wonderfully talented writer, could have pulled it off. For lack of a better word, this just felt excessively twee, missing some element to ground it and make the jokes really pop.
Though Space Opera is better written, it reminded me of The Eyre Affair, another HGTTG-influenced work which didn't really work for me.
No star rating since I didn't finish, but the part I got through would probably be a 2.5 stars. I'm hoping I get a chance to revisit it and find I was wrong.
There's a lot that I liked about this book: the hitchhiker's feel and clear influence, the wild aliens, the general idea of Eurovision in space. But I wish it had more plot! The actual competition felt rushed when it got there but it felt like it took ages to happen. But, a fun, weird read for Douglas Adams fans.
really confused me when the deathless companion's entry on goodreads was changed to this, which sounds amazing and is still a must-read, but i don't get how the two were merged rather than making a new entry and getting the shelved one removed...?
A quarter into the book, the charm of the humour has faded, and now I just would like the plot to move on. Because it's been painstakingly slow, while the author - to my taste - overindulges in overly-clever overly-long funny sentences. I am sure [b:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 11 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1) Douglas Adams https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1513003890s/11.jpg 3078186] must have done it better, or maybe scifi humor (and humorous books in general) aren't doing it for me anymore. Gonna stop reading this now.
I imagine Catherynne Valente thought to herself...
I think I'll write something sort of like Douglas Adams, but with MORE!
Uh, how to review this? First, I listened to the audio book so maybe I would have enjoyed it more had I read the print version? I can't say. I can say that I started out being highly amused listening to this while driving around, then it started to grate on my nerves, then I just wanted (dear God) for it to end, and then it was over. It's unfair to say that it was all of the (many, many) tangents that killed it for me-because there were some tangents I liked more than the actual story. I think I hung in there because I expected it to end with some glorious bang-and it kind of did.
I don't know. This is the second time I've tried Valente without real success. It's cool, she's just not my cup of tea.