Space Opera
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36.
They Can’t Stop the Spring
Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, a soft, rather nice-looking dawn broke over the sea and the green land. It was a usual sort of thing, the dawn. Yellow and quiet and uneventful. Soon there would be movement and sound and the rhythms of sentient life galloping along its absurd way, shaking its head to a new beat.
Until next year.
Two little girls in Cardiff woke to a kind voice and a kiss on the forehead. “Daddy’s home, darlings. And he’s brought your kitty back all safe and sound. I think Capo should live with you from now on, don’t you, poppets?”
An old grandmother in government housing in Kabul woke to see her grandson’s face, fifty feet tall all over again, on every screen in the world.
Point to Nani.
A Klavar on Litost woke to see a young woman with hair like an oil slick, an Esca, and a man in an absolutely splendid coat laughing on the beach, leaping up like they were dancing, trying to touch the wings of a tiny brilliant blue bird with long-lashed human eyes flying just out of their reach.
A red panda waited just down the shore, wondering how to break the news about the necessity of containing volatile entities removed from their timelines. He fretted. Perhaps the girl would like being a Paradox Box. Just her existence was paradox enough to fuel something truly tricked out. State of the art. He would furnish her Box in style. Maybe she could even write a new album in there, if he made the thing really grand. Being a massively powerful ship sailing the infinite deep was better than being dead, anyway. Perhaps Decibel would be interested in a career in captaining starships. All things were possible.
A large golden sea squirt woke to the censure of its government, which never looked kindly on big fat failures.
Despite the judgment of the jury being that the wormholes had placed third-to-last in the Grand Prix and therefore now possessed the rights and privileges of galactic citizens, most of the great, infinite, gorgeous beasts just drifted off into the long light-years in search of more food.
One stayed. The Klavaret named it Darling.
And a man named Arthur Archibald Gormley walked out of the doors of the Hope & Ruin pub—out of the deafening noise of policemen and teachers and electricians and computer programmers and homemakers and children and accountants; out of the cacophony of their cheering and crying, hugging and swearing and singing old football songs because they sounded like happiness—like being alive and drunk and possibly, just for a little while, quite all right—out of the crowd and outside in the middle of the night, laid down on the sparse Brighton grass, and kissed it for everything he was worth.
Life is beautiful and life is stupid. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy, the history of a planet, the history of a person is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of glittering, occasionally peaceful light to help you follow along.
Cue the music. Cue the dancers.
Cue tomorrow.
Liner Notes
With a book like Space Opera, it is hard to know where to begin thanking the cast of thousands that made possible this weird little rocketship to moons unknown. But launch windows wait for no one, not even earnest writers pretending to be covered in glitter while, in point of fact, being mostly covered in cat hair.
Allow me first to thank Marcel Bezençon, who, in 1956, conceived the whole notion of the Eurovision Song Contest, which was the inspiration for this book, and is thereby, in the opinion of this feline hair–bestrewn subalto novelist, eligible for sainthood, having long since affected the necessary two miracles and change. I believe, without irony (for irony was last generation’s hotness), that Eurovision is one of the greatest achievements of mankind, in all its absurdity and flash and pomp. To unite a continent after the most horrifying war in the history of this planet with song, dance, and sequins is so ridiculous and hopeless as to be sublime. It is precisely in seeming without weight or consequence or high artistic authority that Eurovision’s genius lies—if it were all serious business, no one would watch. No one would feel. No one would sing along for sixty-plus years. Thank you for the disco ball, Marcel—long may it reign. And thank you to everyone who has ever sung a single note in any round of the Eurovision Song Contest, even if that semi-semi-semi-final round was in your living room when you were ten.
The lyrics that precede each section of the book are from some of my favorite Eurovision songs—some winners, some close runners-up, all amazing. They are the songs I often play for people to sell them on the whole concept, and the ones who speak to me of the heights and feelings the maddest of mad shows can reach. I owe a great debt of inspiration to Lordi, Conchita Wurst, the Babushki, Loreen, and Måns Zelmerlöw.
The next number on my dance card must go to Molly and Matthew Hawn, who, in 2012, offered to let me stay at their lovely London home with the warning that they would be holding a Eurovision party, and that, somewhat apologetically, my attendance would be required, in payment for room and board. “What’s Eurovision?” said I. And thus, I took my first step into a larger (and better) world. And thank you to everyone, from best friends to conventiongoers to random dudes on airplanes, who, after 2012, put up with my constant evangelizing, squawking like a door-to-door missionary: Have you heard the good news? Eurovision exists!
But perhaps the biggest hand-drawn sign to be hoisted into the air must say: THANK YOU, CHARLES TAN. For without his idle joke during my annual live-tweet of the only sporting event I care about, without his dashing off the immortal wish—Ha-ha, you should write a science fiction Eurovision novel—none of us would be here, there would be no blue space flamingos, and Decibel Jones would never have gotten himself knocked up. A large silver balloon attached to that sign must read: THANK YOU, NAVAH WOLFE, my editor, for immediately messaging me and offering to buy this idiotic idea, sight unseen—plotless, titleless—in what my agent still refers to as the fastest deal he ever made. She also deserves much consideration for her patience while I wrote something so far outside my comfort zone as to be more teenage runaway than novel. Much thanks also to Joe Monti and Liz Gorinsky, for letting Navah and me sneak off during the big show and do something weird in the shadows.
Thank you, now and always, to my incredible agent, Howard Morhaim, who looks after me and my books with superpaternal conviction.
Thank you also to Max Gladstone and Arthur Chu, whose conversation on the topic of glam and political angst late one night gave this book a much needed focus. Thank you to Kris McDermott, for telling me that it didn’t suck in the beginning, and Rebecca Frankel for telling me it didn’t suck in the end.
I also cannot thank Christopher Priest enough for giving me the confidence when I had run out and teaching me more about how to live my life as a writer and a comedian in one weekend than I’ve learned in the last ten years.
Thank you a thousand times over to my Patreon supporters, without whom I would be living much like Decibel, but in a less advantageously located garret; in particular, Nicholas Tschida, Shawna Jacques, and Wesley Allbrook. Thank you to my assistant, Niki Taylor, and my Web maven, Deborah Brannon.
And thank you, however obliquely, to Douglas Adams, or at least his ghost, who looms somewhat benevolently over all science fiction comedy, like Jesus making dirty jokes at the Last Supper. Without Hitchhiker’s Guide, this book would simply disappear in a puff of logic. Good lord, without Hitchhiker’s Guide, I would disappear in a puff of logic. And while I am thanking ghosts and declaring patron saints of my own novel like it’s a little baby heading off into a cold and unfeeling world, which obviously it is, the glam-elephant in the punk-rock room will always be David Bowie, our most beloved space oddity, who passed away a few months before Space Opera began its life as a hardcover tribute band—not gone and not forgotten; simply waiting for us on another planet, as he always was. Whenever two or more of us are gathered to devote ourselve
s more ardently to our weirdest personal aesthetic than anything else in the world, he is there.
And of course and forever, thank you to my partner, Heath Miller, whose support of this novel ranged from being a literally infinite, nigh Google-level font of pop music trivia, somewhat chagrined Eurovision facts, comedy consultation, and London geography, to assuring me repeatedly that I am not the worst writer of all time, to building an office for me out of nothing at all, to gamely engaging in multiple hours-long conversations on which is the funniest fruit and whether “wang” or “willy” is the more amusing euphemism. He is my galactic glamrock muse, and he’s got the pipes to prove it.
Lastly, I would like to come back to the cat hair for a moment. Because there can be no truly good pop music without sorrow, I wrote this novel while my gorgeous alien Maine Coon cat, October, was, unbeknownst to me, dying of lymphoma. The last eight days of her life were spent closeted with me in our library while Decibel Jones sang his heart out on the page, watching old Star Trek episodes with suspicion while I hand-fed her through a syringe, and listening to me filk every Eurovision song I knew until they were all about her getting better and us snuggling for all time. Alas, even Eurovision can’t save us all. The day I finished Space Opera, she achieved escape velocity and left our poor, humble orbit. Good-bye, Toby. I love you. You were one of the most sentient Earthlings I’ve ever known.
About the Author
Author photo courtesy of the author
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of more than two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including The Refrigerator Monologues, Palimpsest, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, James Tiptree Jr. Memorial, Mythopoeic, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo Awards and has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human. You can visit her at catherynnemvalente.com.
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ALSO BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Refrigerator Monologues
The Glass Town Game
Radiance
Six-Gun Snow White
Silently and Very Fast
The Folded World
The Habitation of the Blessed
The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Deathless
Palimpsest
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden
Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams
The Labyrinth
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Catherynne M. Valente
Jacket photographs copyright © 2018 by Thinkstock
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Valente, Catherynne M., 1979– author.
Title: Space opera / Catherynne M. Valente.
Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Saga Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017028788 | ISBN 9781481497497 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481497510 (eBook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera. | FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3622.A4258 S63 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028788