space opera
ISBN 9781481497497 | April 20181.1. 304 pages | List Price $19.99 List Price $19.99 Buy from another retailer • Excerpt 1Excerpt 1Space Opera | Book by Catherynne M. Valente | Official Publisher Page | Simon & SchusterSpace OperaSo where is everybody?The Rare Earth Hypothesis means well, but it’s colossally, spectacularly, gloriously wrong.flora and fauna! Oxygen! Carbon! Water! Nitrogen! Cheap! Cheap! Cheap! And, of course, all the intelligent species you can eat. They spin up overnight, hit the midway of industrial civilization, and ride the Giant Dipper Ultra-Cyclone till they puke themselves to death or achieve escape velocity and sail their little painted plastic bobsleds out into the fathomless deep.Lather, rinse, repeat.Yes, life is the opposite of rare and precious. It’s everywhere; it’s wet and sticky; it has all the restraint of a toddler left too long at day care without a juice box. And life, in all its infinite and tender intergalactic variety, would have gravely disappointed poor gentle-eyed Enrico Fermi had he lived only a little longer, for it is deeply, profoundly, execrably of hell-spit, free-range acid clouds, and the gravitational equivalent of untreated diabetes, a stellar expletive that should never be forced to cope with something as toxic and flammable as a civilization, and before you can say no, stop, don’t, why? the place will be crawling with postcapitalist glass balloons filled with sentient gases all called Ursula.Yes, the universe is absolutely riddled with fast-acting, pustulant, full-blown life.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. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, frThis book is that disco ball.Cue the music. Cue the lights.And there is always too little space.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.No one weeps for meat, after all.