2024 science fiction, sequel to Space Opera. What does a post-famous
musician do after their performance at Space Eurovision has
unexpectedly saved the world?
Save the universe, of course. But not deliberately. This book
feels like the previous one turned significantly up; the stakes are
higher, Decibel Jones is stupider, plot and character are even more
subverted in service of a good line. I mean, I can quite enjoy
something like this:
That English robs other languages blind, saws off their best
vocabularies, and wears them stapled, still dripping, to its own
face, is both well-known and not much of a problem for man,
mushroom, or Meleg. But English, inasmuch as it has rules, is so
constitutionally incapable of obeying even itself that virtually
every possible sentence contains some exception, some rude gesture
of pug-nosed defiance toward the concept of order itself, some
precious little bit of spelling or syntax that thinks it's so
special it doesn't have to behave like all the other children. You
can hardly turn a phrase without being accosted by silent letters
lying in wait for innocent spellers-by, half-dressed homonyms
beckoning with come-hither stares, red-light district infinitives
doing the splits, some dubious fellow in a trench coat lined with
irregular verbs, delinquent subclauses loitering in the night,
delusional plurals insisting they're perfectly normal, broken
sentence fragments desperate for the love of a good subject,
unhinged apostrophes clinging to your clothes, and roving gangs of
wildly disparate diphthongs all pronounced eh.
But there's a passage like that every few pages, and oh boy does it
kill the pace. Yes, I get it, you can channel the early good Douglas
Adams. You do it pretty well. But Adams also had characters with
slightly more than one-note personalities, and a plot running through
the thing that worked on slightly more than "bad thing happening, good
guys pull impossibility out of hat".
Describing the colour of something as "viridipuce" is quite funny the
first time. Not so much the second or third time. And when Valente
needs another pause in the action, we're far more likely to get a
lectureslab of worldbuilding (that doesn't connect to any of the other
lectureslabs of worldbuilding) than we are to spend time with the
people we're supposed to care about.
The friend of mine who detested Space Opera should go nowhere near
this. I came close to giving up. Once things finally get moving and
the great long lists of funny are put aside for a moment, it gets
rather better, and I enjoyed the last third or so quite a lot. But my
goodness this felt like a slog.
Which is a shame. There are some lovely ideas here! But they never
quite came together for me.