Like Pratchett, Valente suffuses her extremely funny writing with some ultimately serious thinking about who we are as a society and who we ought to be. The obvious comparison is Hitchhiker’s Guide, with its satirical phantasmagoria of space, but the most apt comparison to me is the work of Terry Pratchett. What comes next is hilarious – and smart. That champion is a washed up British glam rocker: brown, queer and old. So one day, the universe is knocking on earth’s door and asks for humanity’s champion. If you are an applicant species, you can’t come last – if you come last, your planet is wiped clean and re-seeded. How you may ask? After a devastating civil war in the galaxy, a singing competition was instated to test sentience. Humanity has reached the brink of leaving for space, and now the sentient creatures of the universe are auditioning us for space adulthood. Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera takes a very similar premise, and spins it into one of the funniest novels this side of Scalzi’s Redshirts (it’s funnier than Scalzi). It is a dark novel that provides an unsettling answer to the Fermi paradoxon, and its logic is grounded in our history of colonialism and imperialism. The situation is simple: in the future, with humanity having colonialized the solar system and about to step outside, someone notices we exist and might be a threat, and, just to be safe, nukes the whole of humanity before coming in and mopping up what’s left. One of my favorite science fiction novels is The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Valente, Caterynne, Space Opera, Saga Press
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