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An old woman has to coordinate the defense of her country after a colonizer invades. …
Adita loved to lie in the grass, daydreaming as she watched clouds twirling and morphing into fanciful shapes, but that morning she glared at the sky.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
Honestly, Space Opera became a hate read for me. I find this writing style exhausting, like the literary equivalent of the manic pixie dream girl.
"What if intergalactic eurovision" was a fun concept, I appreciate the diversity of the humans involved
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
The key to a happy life, Capo devoutly believed, was never giving much of a damn what happened in any given day so long as you got in a nap, a kill, and a snuggle, and the snuggle was optional.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by lightyears.
fediverse vibe
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
oh no, it's a Funny Author
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
This is our October 2026 #SFFBookClub pick. I read this eight years ago when it came out, and thought I'd give it a reread for book club.
This feels much in the same lane as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, with ridiculous band name puns, extremely long sentences, and constant digressions. The book explicitly doesn't take itself seriously, and unsurprisingly the book is incredibly light on plot. You could probably sum up the events of the book in a couple of sentences, but maybe also that's ok. That's not what you're here for.
(I do wonder a little how much this will hold up in ten years, with its references to Uber, Skrillex, and Clippy. This is already somewhat true for how Eurovision itself has soured.)
There is a moment of brief moment of seriousness when we finally see the details of the tragic incident at the …
This is our October 2026 #SFFBookClub pick. I read this eight years ago when it came out, and thought I'd give it a reread for book club.
This feels much in the same lane as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, with ridiculous band name puns, extremely long sentences, and constant digressions. The book explicitly doesn't take itself seriously, and unsurprisingly the book is incredibly light on plot. You could probably sum up the events of the book in a couple of sentences, but maybe also that's ok. That's not what you're here for.
(I do wonder a little how much this will hold up in ten years, with its references to Uber, Skrillex, and Clippy. This is already somewhat true for how Eurovision itself has soured.)
There is a moment of brief moment of seriousness when we finally see the details of the tragic incident at the core of the band breaking up, of the parallels of UK deportations with galactic war, and the terror of uncertainty of whatever horrors the television is always bringing you. I think this extremely brief few paragraphs give the book just the tiniest bit of depth and seriousness that it needs.
Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down.
A book whose climactic moment is singing your tragedies and heartbreak so hard that you and your entire species are finally seen and saved is probably not going to have a nuanced view on this, but it's interesting how much my feelings on whether art will save us have changed over time. It's hard not to think of the classic Vonnegut quote about the Vietnam war here.
Also tangentially, I was just watching this Verity Ritchie video about bisexual chic in the 2000's (youtube link, sorry) which intersects with the aesthetics and vibe of this novel quite a bit. The band members in Space Opera feel like they are copying the aesthetics and bisexual glam of the 70's while on stage but then being staid heterosexual monogamous Englishblokemen behind the scenes, much like a number of emo bands that this video discusses. Bringing this back around to my original tangent, this video also makes the argument that it's more likely that society changes art than the other way around—they point out that Will and Grace got released right as US opinion polls shifted to the majority being supportive of homosexuality, and talk about different times where it's been more or less popular for celebrities and musicians to engage in bisexual chic.
At any rate, this is all to say that I quite disagree with this book's position that the opposite of fascism is theater. Art and music can certainly be one tactic in our arsenal, like unicorn and frog mascots at a protest. This isn't to say that art isn't necessary or important! I just don't think it's going to save us, and we're certainly not going to defeat fascism by going to the theater.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
I would do just about anything to make a Christmas carol stop.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
Everything could be divided into angerchords, sadchords, and happychords, and anyone worth their liner notes knew you only reached for more than one or two happychords in a genuine fiscal emergency.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
Nico and Siouxsie Calișkan’s enormous four-year-old Maine Coon–Angora-somebody’s-barn-cat-possibly-a-stray-albino-panther mix was entirely unbothered by suddenly achieving the ability to speak rather posh English. Oh, certainly it had been alarming at first. But adjusting to sudden changes in your circumstances was easy when you didn’t really care about anything. As far as she was concerned, she’d always talked. By some miracle, everyone else had recently achieved the ability to listen properly.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
Faster than a well-ordered queue, more powerful than a muttered tut, able to walk right by police officers without being harassed. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No—it’s Englishblokeman.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race.
Space Opera is a 2018 science fiction novel by Catherynne Valente, about a galactic version …
Once upon a time on a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth, in a small, watery country called England (which was bound and determined never to get too excited about anything), a leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambitious glamrock messiah by the name of Danesh Jalo was born to a family so large and benignly neglectful that they only noticed he’d stopped coming home on weekends when his grandmother was nearly run over with all her groceries in front of the Piccadilly Square tube station, stunned into slack-jawed immobility by the sight of her Danesh, twenty feet high, in a frock the color of her customary afternoon sip of Pernod, filling up every centimeter of a gargantuan billboard.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Your job is not to know what it once was or what it will become. Your job is to simply enjoy it.
This book opened by describing itself as a circular tale, and as promised it truly did meander through various layers of stories to get back where it started. In some ways this reminded me of the Orphan's Tales books by Catherynne Valente, in its use of nested layers of stories that all interconnect a bit to tell something bigger in the whole. But Orphan's Tales is quite explicitly a story about stories, and here... I'm unable to quite put my finger on what this book is doing. It's definitely a story about sisterhood. It's a story about the grief of inevitable separation and change. It's a story about memory and creation.
I did enjoy this book, and especially enjoyed the stories of Magali and …
Your job is not to know what it once was or what it will become. Your job is to simply enjoy it.
This book opened by describing itself as a circular tale, and as promised it truly did meander through various layers of stories to get back where it started. In some ways this reminded me of the Orphan's Tales books by Catherynne Valente, in its use of nested layers of stories that all interconnect a bit to tell something bigger in the whole. But Orphan's Tales is quite explicitly a story about stories, and here... I'm unable to quite put my finger on what this book is doing. It's definitely a story about sisterhood. It's a story about the grief of inevitable separation and change. It's a story about memory and creation.
I did enjoy this book, and especially enjoyed the stories of Magali and Wisa. I was amused the academic interludes. I liked the weird worldbuilding: magic space whales, "sailing" through the black sea of the universe of island planets, a portal that only children can go through. But overall I also don't feel like any of these elements quite cohered for me (even as I also wonder how much that's just on me as a reader).
This was our book for the September 2026 #SFFBookClub.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Mad Sisters of Esi was an odyssey - in the sense that it was an epic adventure of mythic proportions, but also in the sense that it seemed to randomly wander along a chain of apparently unrelated events. Everything was tied together in the end, but basically in the way I'd been expecting for much of the story. Fully half of the book is a flashback.
It seems to be about the opposing desires to leave everything you know and explore the novel, and treasuring everything you already have, and the regrettable fact that they can't really be balanced against each other.
Myung and her sister Laleh are the sole inhabitants of the whale of babel—until Myung …
Everything is more powerful when you don’t understand it.
