Space Opera
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Space Opera
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Narrated by:
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Heath Miller
About this listen
Finalist for Hugo Award for Best Novel 2019
Finalist for Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2019
In space everyone can hear you sing.
A century ago, intelligent space-faring life was nearly destroyed during the Sentience Wars. To bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity and understanding, the Metagalactic Grand Prix was created. Part concert, part contest, all extravaganza, species far and wide gather to compete in feats of song, dance and/or whatever facsimile of these can be performed by various creatures who may or may not possess, in the traditional sense, feet, mouths, larynxes or faces.
This year, humankind has discovered that it must fight for its destiny not with diplomacy, gunships and stoic councils - but with glitter, lipstick and electric guitars.
A washed-up glam-rock trio from London, Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, has been chosen to represent humanity on the greatest stage in the galaxy. The fate of Earth lies in their ability to rock.
©2018 Catherynne M. Valente (P)2019 Hachette Audio UKListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Space Opera
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Michela
- 01-12-20
Fun, cool and imaginative
Lots of cool, weird, colourful aliens and detailed descriptions of their physical singing-related characteristics perfectly complement the "best" human glam rock band that is chosen to represent the just-discovered Earth in the intergalactic music competition at the centre of this novel. The stakes are high: only if the humans win will they gain survival for their own species / planet. Because of course you can only be considered sentient and worthy of living if you can write, play and sing really good music. It's all quite complicated for a number of foreseeable as well as unexpected reasons, including rules, pre-show parties and tests, opponents attempting to murder each other, and a cat who nearly ruins everything, but is too lazy to actually carry out destruction. Along with the singing competition developments, readers also learn about the glamorous past of the band, as well as their sad and bitter end. A fantastic read, and the audiobook of course also features actual singing!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 30-08-23
reminds me of Douglas adams
Loved this crazy space rollercoaster story! reminds me of hitchhikers guide. funny and meaningful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- AudiobookDevotee
- 15-07-22
Not recommended
The book has horrendous pacing issues. Very little happens for the initial 5-6 hours and the entire final act whizzes by in the last hour or 30 mins. Really poorly handled in that regard.
The characters are fairly dull. They spend a lot of time ineffectually bickering and they are almost non-existant in the first half of the book. None of the side characters are memorable either. There are some racist/monarchist characters who are caricatures of anyone you would ever meet in real life. The author's blunt, inaccurate handling of racism actually pulled me out of the story.
The plot is exactly what you would imagine it to be from the blurb. Like, had I written it myself based on that I think I'd have been fairly close. Don't read it just to see if the ending goes like you think it will, it does.
The world building is shite. If the author sat down for a pop quiz I doubt she could name 10% of the alien species in the story, definitely not 20%. Honestly, there'll be some line like "Two heads are better than one." then some alien species invented for a cameo appearance about that line like "Except for the flarglewargs who had one antimatter head and one matter head and would have rather had just one." Just endless alien species invented and discarded like that, incredibly tiresome.
What was even more tiresome was the lists. List of qualities, lists of what ifs, lists of aliens, lists of music genres, lists of people, lists of reasons, lists of descriptions. If the editor had limited the author to a maximum of one list per chapter it would have vastly improved the book. I'm not sure it would survive having most of the prose cut out though.
What little of the story there is amongst all the crud is ok. It just earned 2 stars. The narration was good too although the foreign accents weren't great.
I would not recommend this book to anyone. If you want a talking cat, Dungeon Crawler Carl does it better. If you want a book about how great music is, Soul Music does it better. If you want humans fighting to save the world every sci-fi book does it better. It's a shame such an original idea was so squandered.
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