Space Opera (Space Opera, #1)

by Catherynne M. Valente

the Fermi Paradox. If you’ve never heard this catchy little jingle before, here’s how it goes: given that there are billions of stars in the galaxy quite similar to our good old familiar standby sun, and that many of them are quite a bit further on in years than the big yellow lady, and the probability that some of these stars will have planets quite similar to our good old familiar knockabout Earth, and that such planets, if they can support life, have a high likelihood of getting around to it sooner or later, then someone out there should have sorted out interstellar travel by now, and therefore, even at the absurdly primitive crawl of early-1940s propulsion, the entire Milky Way could be colonized in only a few million years. So where is everybody?

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat? Of course we are people, don’t be ridiculous. But thee? We just can’t be sure.

“an incomprehensible and humiliating radioactive bukkake show of genres, styles, and vocals akin to a peacock vomiting forever into the howling void without one single note of merit, true innovation, or even a nodding acquaintance with the concept of depth in art—but you can dance to it. If you hate yourself.”

“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 light-years.”

Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.

Perhaps it was just because, when the paradigm shifts directly into a brick wall, all anybody really wants is a stiff drink.

So, you see, coming in second-to-last may be too much to hope for a planet that still uses Auto-Tune.

“Life is stupid and beautiful that way.”

He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did.

For lo, does not Goguenar’s Third Unkillable Fact tell us: ‘Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does’?

No one expects more from a species that still uses electric kettles.”

“We’re going to save the planet,” Decibel Jones said in the voice that launched a thousand sexual awakenings.

Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other reason than that it rocks?

Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?

Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.

‘Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?’ ”

People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters.

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.

‘Dying happens to everyone, even stars.

“We are not your mate, friend, nor do we understand what you mean by ‘imposter syndrome.’ Is that a popular narcotic on your world?” Decibel Jones gave this a beautiful, ephemeral, jewel-like moment of genuine thought. “Just about the hottest one going,” he admitted. “And we all get high on our own supply.

Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn’t admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn’t admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love.