I heard about Cat Valente many times from my wife, a fan, but she entered my own scope through a post about how the internet has changed, and how that change has been for the worse as we repeatedly jump from social media platform to platform as each one is invariably purchased by a prick or overwhelmed by trolls. It spoke to me, both as a software developer who has just barely more insight into the health of the web than the average person on the street (insight which disturbs me), and as someone who’s been a participant in online discourse since MySpace. Cat has been online for longer than that, but I’ve still seen enough epochs rise and fall to feel like an old man on the internet, screaming at The Cloud (heh).
Space Opera was already in my Audible library from a Daily Deal, and I’d seen the spectacular cover on my own bookshelf (again, wife’s a big fan) more than once. Having been inaugurated into liking Cat V. and her opinions, I gave it a shot, not sure what to expect. I definitely did not expect what it is: Eurovision in Space. Apparently if I’d followed her on Twitter I would have known this in advance, because she literally pitched it as “I want to write Eurovision in Space” and her publisher Retweeted back, “sounds cool, do it.”
This book drips with imagination. It takes all the best “don’t worry it’s space magic” premising from Star Trek and turns it into absolute camp. You wind up with rock people, plant people, bird people, time-traveling red pandas, all trying to put on the best multi-sensory glam rock phantasmagoria they can to shame the other sentient planets into the ground. It’s amazing.
It’s also a lot. The biggest problem I have with a book like this is that if my mind wanders at all, I wind up missing critical content, even if that critical content is just florid description, which this story has in bulk. I would recommend this story to anyone who likes drag shows, wry humor, trash panda horny protagonists, and anyone who thinks sci-fi needs to take itself a little less seriously.
