Life is the ultimate narcissist, and it loves nothing more than showing off. Give it the jankiest glob of fungus on the tiniest flake of dried comet-vomit wheeling drunkenly around the most underachieving star in the middle of the most depressing urban blight the cosmos has to offer, and in a few billion years, give or take, you’ll have a teeming society of telekinetic mushroom people worshipping the Great Chanterelle and zipping around their local points of interest in the tastiest of lightly browned rocket ships. Dredge up a hostile, sulfurous silicate lava sink slaloming between two phlegmy suns well into their shuffleboard years, a miserable wad of hell-spit, free-range acid clouds, and the gravitational equivalent of untreated diabetes, a stellar expletive that should never be forced to cope with something as toxic and flammable as a civilization, and before you can say no, stop, don’t, why? the place will be crawling with postcapitalist glass balloons filled with sentient gases all called Ursula.Hi there, Ursula! Admittedly this is from Chapter 1; by the time the story is in full flow, Valente dials it back down to eleven, but even so she is clearly having an indecent amount of fun, using SF privilege to drop this into a description of a sleazy Brighton pub:
...those rickety singleton tables as ringed with pint-glass condensation as an Ent’s arse,...Eat your heart out, Howard Jacobson. Apparently this kind of thing is too much for some people but I suspect it works really well in the audio book.
It's a simple tale in essence. Galactic civilisation contacts Earth with an ultimatum. Compete in the Metagalactic Grand Prix with your best song and don't come last, or else we will carefully archive your cultural achievements and tidily eliminate your species. The have a helpful list of acts they think might do well. Unfortunately, it's a bit out of date: Everyone from Yoko Ono to the Spice Girls are dead. Björk "lost her voice in an accident with a narwhal and a spinning wheel", and so down the list to Decibel Jones, the only surviving candidate. But Jones, aka Danesh Jalo, is washed-up, twenty years past his half-minute of superstardom, and, besides, he's nothing without his band, which was only a trio and it's lynchpin, Mira Wonderful Star, killed herself in a stupid road accident fifteen years ago, while its musical genius, Oort St. Ultraviolet, aka Omar Calişkan, is barely on speaking terms with Dess. Nevertheless, off go Dess and Oort to the contest, along with the invaders, who closely resemble the Roadrunner and a time-travelling red panda, plus Oort's cat, Capo, who can now talk thanks to the Roadrunner's intervention (or according to Capo, can now be understood by his humans). Will they find a way of putting Mira's untimely death behind them? Will they come up with a song to win the contest, or at least do better than the sea-squirt-like Alunizar, cordially detested for their former Galactic Empire? Will they even survive the preliminary round, in which subversion, sabotage and outright assassination are not just tolerated but encouraged?
Interspersed with the main action, Valente inserts snippets of Galactic history including accounts of previous Grand Prix, introducing the other species in the competition. Top marks for invention, here. Most aliens are amused and slightly disgusted by the human habit of "singing" by producing sound waves from their digestive sphincter, as opposed, say, to releasing a cloud of literally infectious earworms. We also get a good selection from Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts, a compendium of universal truths made unforgettable in part by the temporary agony inflicted on turning each page.
One great virtue of Space Opera is that unlike Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, who really exist just to utter one-liners, Dess, Oort, and the departed Mira are fleshed out enough to make you care about them. All three are from immigrant families, and, rather surprisingly from an American writer, the novel offers a sympathetic portrait of the kind of semi-mythical Englishness that somehow attracts people from all over the world to make their homes in places like Blackpool, Sheffield and Manchester. Given that Valente is inhabiting Douglas Adams' deeply jaundiced view of humanity, it's no surprise that the fragility of that myth is brutally exposed. Mira's death starts by seeming just another rock'n'roll tragedy, almost played for laughs, but the narrative keeps circling back to it and we see more and more clearly how awful the circumstances were, and why it took a sledgehammer to both Dess and Oort's lives. Some UK reviewers took umbrage at Valente's portrait of Britain, but it rings true to me.
Valente's jokes are pretty good, if not quite up to Adams at his best. The book is loaded with easter eggs for hardcore Eurovision fans, most of which went straight over my head, but the entry by perennial losers the Alunizar, “Is Your Continual Mistreatment of Our Entire Species Fair Trade?” by We Are Better Than You, was a low blow, smack on target. Valente's real venom, though, is reserved for the AI species, the 321, who are prone to incarnating as Clippy, the early Windows software assistant. There is a pure gold chapter for true lovers of cats, who of course are under no illusions that cats love them as anything other than a convenient warm pillow.
The book has high production standards, with classy starscape title pages for each part, but unfortunately there are too many editing fails, from the trivial, such as writing Piccadilly Square for Piccadilly Circus, or the nineteenth Metagalactic Grand Prix transmuting into the twenty-second halfway through its description., to the downright catastrophic, in which we are told at one point that Mira was born in Sheffield, but later, the emotional bombshell at the heart of the book depends on the fact that she wasn't born in the UK at all. I also found the timeline distractingly hard to pin down, partly because as a glam-rock messiah clearly based on Bowie and Mercury, Decibel Jones' heyday should really have been in the early '70s and although Valente soon specifies the late 2010s the cognitive dissonance made me misinterpret that as the date of the alien invasion. My bad, I guess. For all that, I loved this book more than any of the other Hugo nominees this year.
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