I really, really loved Catherynne M. Valente's Space Opera, a sort of Douglas Adams-style take on the Eurovision Song Contest. I'm not sure if this book is entirely groundbreaking or whether it deserves a Hugo Award and it has its share of problems (for example, it's all just a bit too much sometimes), but I just might give it my #1 spot for the Hugo Awards because I love humorous science fiction and I think the universe might be a better place if we had more of it.
The central plot is pretty simple: Mildly washed-up rock star Decibel Jones is tasked by aliens to be the human representative in a sort of galactic Eurovision contest. If he's in last place, all life on Earth will be destroyed. There's a bit of a dynamic with the rest of his band, but really, that's about it. Most of the rest of the novel is hilarious galaxy building, which is fine by me.
One criticism that I share with many readers is that a lot of Valente's prose is a bit overwritten: there are few adjectives or complex sentence structures she doesn't like to employ as often as possible. I personally find this sort of thing amusing most of the time, so I can forgive it, even if it sometimes feels like she's trying too hard.
Valente admits her debt to Douglas Adams in the Acknowledgments, and while I don't think she's quite as funny or as good as Adams, she's not merely doing a Douglas Adams impersonation. If anything, I don't think he loved glam rock as much as she does. I chuckled a lot while I read it, although I'm not sure there was anything that will make me chuckle for years like Adams's Babel Fish proof for the existence of God or the scene with the philosophers.
So the novel is pretty funny, but are there philosophical bits? There are!
One of the biggest is that the aliens see the mark of sentience not as the ability to use language or in any generic Turing- or Voight-Kampff- type test, but in the ability to write and perform a good song. This is a bit funny, sure, but I think there's a serious point here. Music requires a degree of intellectual, emotional, and physical coordination that nothing else really does. The other tests are a bit... simplistic and one-dimensional by comparison.
Russian bots can almost pass the Turing test (if they can't already... Hi, Russian Bots who are reading this!). [News break: Alan Turing will deservedly be on the new £50 notes in the UK. You wouldn't be reading this without him. Carry on.]
Subjecting replicants to the Voight-Kampff test has a bit of a beat, but you can't dance to it (the test administrators are also more likely to be harmed in the process). If a being can write a good song, then why not grant that they are sentient? I'm all for it. Let's call it the Valente Test or maybe the Disco Turing Test and hope for some awesome AI or alien music to come our way.
Another philosophical bit is that the whole point of the Metagalactic Grand Prix: the sentient species of the galaxy simply got sick of fighting each other. The contest became the method of adjudicating disputes about resources. You end up with a lot less blood (or whatever various aliens have instead of blood), and a lot more catchy tunes. It's a lot more civilized, not to mention a lot more fun. Of course, it doesn't work out so well for the last-place newbies, but no system is perfect (although this is explained somewhere in the novel).
I've often thought that Earth would be better off if we just had the leaders of various countries duke it out personally instead of sending a bunch of 18-year-old kids to die on their behalf. I'd rather watch two old dudes attempt MMA than have civilian casualties, destruction, and refugees. But Valente has a better idea yet: Why not have a big music contest, and let that settle our disputes? Personally, I'd rather have a song in my head than a bullet. It sounds silly, sure, but if you really think about war from a more galactic point of view, that's quite a bit sillier, isn't it?
Stay tuned to see where Space Opera ends up on my Hugo ballot in the next few weeks! I haven't finished reading everything yet, so the answer may surprise me, if not you.
See also my Goodreads review.
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