#but also it’s like a colonialist elephant in the room that could be explored through creative liberties

[headspace-hotel]

So, the premise is that first contact happens and the humans are made to compete in this intragalactic Eurovision type of thing to determine if they are sentient enough to join the rest of the sentient species in the galaxy.

The reasoning being that only a sentient species could have the capacity for artistry needed to do such a thing.

This is a book that has been described as critical of colonialism, and that is true in the sense that the protagonists Angst over whether the sins of colonization can be atoned for sufficiently for humans to really “deserve” the label of sentience. But in that sense it’s also…uncritical of colonialism? in that the book interrogates the concept of determining whether another species deserves to be labeled sentient relatively little.

Like, I feel like the huge elephant in the room here is that the idea of an outsider judging whether or not a species’s art, morality, and so on shows that they’re worthy to be labeled sentient is a very colonialist sort of mindset in itself, and the book explored this fact relatively little.

Most of the asides where it delved into the history of Space Eurovision showed the great diversity of species that won in the past and how they proved their sentience even in spite of their seemingly revolting or strange characteristics. This draws attention away from the inescapable bias and unfairness that would be involved in such a judgment; the book shows the judgment being capable of seeing through outwardly revolting or strange characteristics, but does not show the judgment having shortcomings.

I can accept the idea that music is somehow the one thing that is universal among sentient species in the galaxy. Sure. It’s an absurd novel with an absurd premise up front. But absurd premises should be written in a way that actually explores the questions they raise honestly. The idea that “true” artistic expression is capable of being universally recognized as such, or recognized at all by an outsider? I have questions. The question I am left asking by this book is, “Do we have to be able to recognize value in a species for it to have value?” The book did not seem to understand that it raised this question.

This is where my problem with the ending comes in. The humans win—because of course they do. Because of course the protagonist’s deep heart-wrenching display of feeling moves the audience, because of course there is something universal about art and of course that universal thing is seen and understood, because of course it is because we’re human and humans are special.

It’s a novel that glories in the bizarre details of wildly diverse alien species, but doesn’t really fully explore the consequences of the diversity of life because in spite of these differences, the aliens still have some universal concept of what constitutes art.

As I said, this makes the book an example of a story that doesn’t follow through with the questions its premise raises. Humans have to compete in Space Eurovision to be deemed sentient—what does this mean? How does our understanding of what good art is differ from theirs? Can you externally judge the value of a culture or a species at all?

Instead, the book pulls a Deus Ex Machina by resurrecting the protagonist’s dead girlfriend at the last moment, who helps them win the competition, and she has been dead the entire book and has only existed to provide the protagonist with something to Angst over.

She’s the prototypical Fridged Woman, a casualty of Main Dude’s Character Development, which is not necessarily a sin as long as it’s good character development, but the book then gives him negative character development instead because instead of moving on and discovering that maybe Every Bad Thing In The World isn’t His Fault, he is proven correct in his disordered judgment that everything good about his art resided in her and that she was Super Special and therefore Needed to do something like win Space Eurovision.

It was all just troubling.

Anyway, to go back to how *I* would have ended the novel, there’s a subplot where the protagonist’s best friend’s cat ends up accidentally taken on the spaceship and granted the ability to talk.

I thought the ending would be that the humans unilaterally fail the competition, but then the cat wanders onto the stage and starts, like, purring to comfort her human or something, which leads the aliens to decide that cats are definitely sentient and therefore Earth must be spared.

My ending was a lot better than the actual ending of the novel.

I finished Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente a week or so ago and the ending has been bugging me ever since.

I think it bugs me especially because I know exactly how *I* would have ended it.