Unfortunately for Earth, the alien ambassador, a blue flamingo-ish Esca being with eerily human eyes and fluttery eyelashes, has chosen as its representatives the remaining members of the washed-up electro-funk glamgrind outfit “Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros,” whose heyday era album Spacecrumpet was described by The Guardian as
“a continuously detonating carnival-cum-Bollywood-dream-sequence in which you may, at any moment, be knocked sideways by a piece of dismembered French clown or tenderly made love to by a prize Neptunian show-horse behind the lyrical equivalent of the fairy floss cart.”
The Zeros – Downtrodden Decibel and former band mate, current studio musician, Oort St. Ultraviolet (minus the source of the band’s undoing, the deceased Mira Wonderful Star) – are whisked away to an intergalactic early 21st century-style Hilton in a ship fabricated from the contents of Oort’s flat and containing his stowaway cat (who has been granted the ability to converse in English), charged with penning the song that will win over the universe and redeem humanity. There are several additional catches, like massive writers block, and the Grand Prix’s Rule 20: any band who does not show up to perform automatically loses, and dooms their species to annihilation.
They are introduced to an extraordinary array fantastical species, from the Voorpret (a virus that takes over cadavers zombie-style and has a complete disregard for bodily autonomy, but makes a truly excellent cup of coffee), to the time-traveling, red panda doppelgangers the Keshet, to Clippy, a super-helpful info-being who seems to be the galactic progenitor of the Microsoft paper clip assistant. All of whom are, of course, trying to ensure their survival by disqualifying the humans with a mix of poisoned projectiles, morality tests (which Oort’s cat fails spectacularly), and murderous, sentient cocktail beverages.
This book is described as “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets the joy and glamour of Eurovision,” but that fails to completely capture the book’s fantastic style, which can best be described as a psychedelic Mad Libs© version of Big Blue Marble in Space as completed by a reanimated and fully modernized Oscar Wilde, and delivered in the form of an extended John Oliver rant.
Fantasmagasmically weird
The scenarios are at times hilarious, moving and bizarre, with ruminations on violence, redemption and, of course, the ever-present wisdom of Goguenar Gorecannon’s Unkillable Facts (First one: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem? And don’t forget Fact 14 Special: Everybody fucks). The aliens are drawn with amazing specificity, like the self-deprecating Smaragdi, who
call their pale, minimalist sun Lagom, a word that means, in their exceedingly specific language: “a spouse who habitually withholds affection but comes through with a squeeze when you really need them and always pays the bills on time.”
And the descriptions of musical genres, such as “hard-core trashfolk acid-ska,” and staggering range of performance styles, like the Meleg who “serve their own hearts sashimi to the crowd, and, via the digestive process, the song of their beings actually becomes a part of you” are totally mind blowing.
How can the broken Absolute Zeros compete with the absurd richness of this universe?!!! Does humanity even have a chance?!
Well, I’m not tellin’ – read it now!
And if that’s not enough, Universal Studios recently acquired the rights to Space Opera, so look out for that in a theater near you!*
What’s your fave funny Sci Fi? Do you Eurovision? What are you doing to make the Metagalactic Grand Prix a reality?
*Dear Universal: please cast “reanimated and fully modernized Oscar Wilde” as the Smaragdi “Nessuno Uuf”. Thank you.
