How will humanity prove its worth? By competing against the other civilizations in a galactic-scale Eurovision-style singing contest. Your organic material will be seamlessly reincorporated into your biosphere and your planet left in peace to try again with dolphins or something in another billion years or so. If not? Well, as the alien emissary to Earth puts it, “all memory of your collective existence will be lovingly collated and archived, your planetary resources tenderly extracted, and your species totally annihilated. If we succeed, we join the throng of galactic civilizations out there among the stars. Space Opera‘s premise is that near-future Earth finally makes First Contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence - or rather, it makes contact with us, to tell us that we must prove our sentience. Valente is up-front in acknowledging Adams as a guiding spirit, but Space Opera charts its own corner of our stupid, beautiful universe and displays nothing but originality along the way. As a result, Space Opera isn’t an Adams clone or parody. Valente is up to the task of creating something true to Adams’ spirit, but which also stays true to its own logic, its own set of rules, and its own moral code. What I’m saying is this: bad Douglas Adams pastiches have a surprisingly large blast radius. It was the most passive-aggressive literary response I’ve ever seen. My class and our principal were learning that truth in real time, word after excruciating word. He knew it was terrible, and he was letting me know he knew it was terrible. Thirty minutes of simplistic paradoxes, bad attempts at British humor by way of a Southern American upbringing, and blatant literary theft. He decided to read my story out loud to the whole class. Looking back, our English teacher could have taken it in stride, or toed the line, or taken any number of steps to just get things over with quickly and quietly.īut no.

It could have died there, but our principal visited our English class the next day to keep tabs on our English teacher, who didn’t always follow the script. The details are unimportant: just know that it featured space penguins and a sheltered 17-year-old’s weak attempt at having anything clever to say about life, the universe, and everything. Back in high school, I tanked a composition assignment by writing a terrible Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy parody.

Cat valente space opera