Well, after a few serious books in a row, I was ready for some mindless escapism. Boy, did I find that! Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente is about the silliest bit of SF I've come across, yet based on an idea worth thinking about.
Scenario: When the aliens arrive, they arrive to everyone at once. By some kind of projection, a bizarre-looking alien being visits every single human on Earth, wherever they happen to be at the time, and converses with everyone individually (only much later in the book is there just a hint about translation technology). After various amounts of time for the human involved to get over the shock, the discussion gets serious (as serious as anything gets in this book): One human person or group is to be entered into a Galactic singing contest, to determine if humans are sentient. It turns out that "sentience" is not so self-evident as we'd like to think.
According to the Esca, the species chosen to "recruit" a human singing group, all entrants in the song festival are ranked, including any newcomers (in this case, humans). If a newcomer winds up ranked dead last, the species is indeed "Dead Last": the entire species is to be exterminated and the planetary biosphere will be given another few million years to evolve a new, purportedly sentient, species. Rinse, Dry, Repeat as necessary. The Esca were the most recent species to "enter" the contest, and are quite proud that they came in Eighth, rather than something like Seventy-Fourth, or whatever Dead Last would be. The proven sentient beings of the Galaxy have decided that the extinction of an occasional species is the price to be paid for the peace-promoting songfest. It succeeded "Galactic War X", after all.
To give you an idea of the hyper-enthusiasm of language Ms Valente, here is the description of the leading member of the Absolute Zeroes, the group that is taken a few thousand light-years to the competition venue, a certain Mr. Decibel Jones (né Danesh Jalo):
…a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambiguous glamrock messiah…The prose reminds me of teachers of the art of composition, who advised us, "Use more adjectives!" This book is about 2/3 adjectives, frequently in sentences that run 100-200 words. Sentences full of immense enthusiasm. Also full of neologisms. Amazingly, newly coined words seem to fit into the text around them and practically define themselves. Other than the occasional jarring bit of potty-mouth, prose like that just washes over me like perfumed olive oil.
The concept is actually based on a real bit of history, though "last place" in a certain global competition does not result in anyone's being exterminated.
I don't know if I could call this escapism at its best, but it is certainly escapism of a most compelling sort.
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