Space Opera (Space Opera, #1)

by Catherynne M. Valente

leggy psychedelic ambidextrous omnisexual gendersplat glitterpunk financially punch-drunk ethnically ambitious glamrock messiah by the name of Danesh Jalo

our protagonist

The Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz won three cycles ago with an upbeat little earworm called “Love Means Forgiving the Sins of Our Colonial Expansion Phase,” and when the bass dropped, their entire proletariat became a comet.

(You might think that Musmar the Night Manager could not possibly have known about the regional human holiday known as Halloween, but by one of those many curious coincidences that comprise the only real evidence for a divine and wobbling hand in the design of the universe, some variant of Halloween is celebrated by every sentient species in the galaxy. There is, it would appear, something about the achievement of sentience that immediately fills the afflicted with the longing to become something else, something brighter, something wilder and more fearsome and morbid and covered in felt and glue and glitter, to escape into the mask of some other impossible life, and to afterward consume vast quantities of sweets.)

The question has never been: Can you build cities? Ants do that. The question has never been: Are you capable of considering your own existence and getting kind of depressed about it? Any animal in captivity does that. The question has never been: Can you use tools? Crows do that. Otters do that. Apes do that. Good Lord, everybody does that. The question has never been: Can you perform complex problem solving? Dogs do that. The question has never been: Can you experience love? Nobody doesn’t. The question has never been: Can you use language? Parrots and dolphins and cuttlefish do that. The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young? Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t. The only question is this: 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? Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything pulses to a ...

the central manifesto of this book <3

Decibel Jones always lived in the moment; Omar Calișkan always lived in an uncertain future. Mira, he supposed, had always lived in her own head and allowed others to visit once in a while. With advance notice. And extensive decontamination protocols.

I relate to Mira on this one

A feeling of oceanic calm he hadn’t felt in years descended over Decibel Jones. Someone else was taking care of the details. Someone else was handling logistics. Thank Christ.

mood

a savage and anguished melody called “Death Is a Wish Your Fists Make.”

Öö’s attention-deficit-disordered dialect wasn’t actually a stutter, but the only visible effect of all this constant cosmic channel surfing—each time they get stuck repeating a word, it is a slightly different Keshet in a slightly different timeline trying out different linguistic paths through the mess of it all.

i relate to this

Litost is the kind of world a child would design if that child had never been harmed by the world in even the smallest way and wanted to be a rainbow when it grew up and only ever read books about unicorns, wildflowers, and everything working out very nicely, not only in the end, but in the beginning and the middle, too.

Dess had always said Coco Chanel was full of insipidly scented shit and, before he left the house every day, looked in the mirror and put one more thing on,

yesss

The carpet of the id doesn’t match the drapes of the superego, if you know what we mean.

Jones selected aren’t-we-just-an-exclusive-club-of-two-in-the-midst-of-an-unforgivably-plebian-mob from the drop-down intimacy menu. That always worked best on posh hobgoblins who thought everyone else knew who they were.

why don't i have one of these dropdown menus

I’m not like that. I’m not prejudiced against you like those stupid colonialist phlegmwads. I don’t even see species. I just think of everyone as pre-Voorpret. I love you for who you are: a viable host.

The definitions of sex across worlds vary so much that the Elakh word for “to make love,” which can be loosely translated as “emblackenate,” also means to swim, to dance, to fish, to grow up big and strong, to hide a body for a friend, to be surprised that they’re still making the candy one loved as a child, to really and truly self-actualize, to maintain an antiquated belief in fairies, to jump, to sing, to dig, to secure financing, to stalemate, to lay tile, and to vigorously debate the social issues of the day.

Nessuno Uuf used the pronouns “she” and “her” only because it seemed, in the cultural documents from Earth, that people utilizing those pronouns got to wear flashier clothes and considerably more tribal paints.

There are, naturally, a few asexual species, and they do seem to get a lot more done in a day, but even they give it a try once in a while, just to see what all the fuss is about, before shrugging and going back to grounding their self-esteem in concrete accomplishments and finding fulfillment in skills and hobbies like the twisted kinksters they are.

Dess thought he could imagine how sex with a swaggeringly masculine moonbeam might go, and it did, more or less. Gobo shone all over everywhere and promptly passed out without returning the favor.

“Think of it as passing a kidney stone, if your kidneys were located in the pleasure center of your brain. Most of us do it once a day before bed. We have whole china cabinets full of stones. A perfect, utterly honest record of every emotional state we experience.