The Rare Earth Hypothesis means well, but it’s colossally, spectacularly, gloriously wrong.
In one afternoon not too far off from today, every one of the seven billion people on planet Earth is visited by a representative from an alien race bearing a message for humanity: Prepare to be destroyed.
OR…prove that you’re sentient. Convince us that – despite centuries of genocide, wiping out other species, and cooking your own planet to a crisp – you can maybe learn to play well with others. Demonstrate to the entire galaxy that as a species you can do the one thing animals can’t: throw on a glittery costume, find some back-up musicians, and belt out a pop hit in the biggest music contest in existence.
Cue the music. Cue the lights. It’s time to put on a show.
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?
It’s a totally ridiculous concept that works astoundingly well. With all the variations that life takes, how exactly do you know that the fish you’re eating, the mineral you’re mining, or the creatures in the spaceships currently bombing your planet aren’t all people instead of just something following a biological imperative? After the Sentience Wars almost wiped out all life in the galaxy, the survivors knew they had to do something to answer this thorny question. Something for everyone to celebrate together. Something that’s only possible when all the separate elements of civilization come together in just the right way to reach the point where pop music exists.
The solution was the Metagalactic Grand Prix, the music contest to end all music contests, Eurovision on a galactic scale (Catherynne Valente is apparently a great big fan of Eurovision, and it really shows). Participation is mandatory for all sentient races. Any newly-discovered species who might be sentient has to compete and beat…somebody. Anybody. A first-time competitor who comes in last will have their species quietly wiped out so some other life form on their planet can try again in a few million years.
All of this is explained to humanity by the Esca (a race of helpful almost-telepathic blue space flamingos) in a hilariously disjointed chapter where the holographic avatar of the Esca has a separate conversation simultaneously with every person on the planet, using the voice of whoever that person trusts the most, be it parent, lover, or favorite cartoon character. Every possible question is answered as cheerfully as possible, but it all boils down to this: yes, you’ll be wiped out if you come in last, no, you don’t have a choice, and don’t even bother with threats because we’ll all just laugh.
Look at you! Who’s the cutest? YOU’RE THE CUTEST. And what a sense of humor! Your mummy must be so proud. Don’t be stupid. We would obliterate you. My clumsiest offspring play with more powerful weapons than your most psychotic defense contractors dream of on Christmas Eve. We know what you’re packing, and we don’t care. I have fashion accessories more technologically advanced than the business end of your cutting edge.
Humanity doesn’t even get to choose who is going to compete. The Esca have already evaluated who has the best chance, and their top choice – Yoko Ono – has already passed away by this point. As has almost all their other prospects, except for the very last name on the list, the king of glam, Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros.
The problem is that Decibel Jones is a washed-up has-been, and he and the last remaining member of the Absolute Zeros haven’t spoken for more than a decade. The talent on display at the Metagalactic Grand Prix is like pitting Hamilton against Waiting for Guffman, except times a million. And that’s without fact that cheating at the Metagalactic is technologically advanced and occasionally fatal, but so popular with the audience that it’s now an official part of the game. Even with assistance from a couple of helpful species and a godlike (and easily annoyed) AI consciousness, there’s a good chance the human contingent won’t last until the performance.
“It looks like you are trying to survive the night and not get slaughtered in the next five minutes like the miserably finite mortal organics you are. Would you like some fucking help?”
And that’s the core of the plot. The rest is the endlessly entertaining details.
Don’t expect a universe where aliens are just humans with prosthetic foreheads and everyone speaks with a British accent, because Valente has created a variety of life that’s mind-boggling. There’s a planet where the sentient race looks like glass balloons, all of them named Ursula. Another planet is entirely lightless, so life evolved to see in the dark and make a killing on the sale of all the illegal items and forbidden technology that other civilizations keep trying to hide there. Sentient races can be moonbeams, or rhinoceros-chainsaw hybrids, or holographic avatars awarding themselves points in a game no one else knows the rules for, or a deadly virus that makes a damn good cup of coffee.
The song-and-dance numbers from all these races can be audio, visual, chemical, telepathic, and sometimes daringly contagious. Valente’s prose splashes all over, with paragraphs that fly along for a whole page without getting tired, descriptions of alien life that use word combinations that I don’t think have ever existed in the English language before now, and sentences that can give you the best kind of literary whiplash.
The life cycle of a Quantum-Tufted Domesticated Wormhole (Lacuna vermis familiaris) takes place on a scale that beggars the imagination, kicks it while it’s down, and lights it on fire.
There’s no chance to get bored, because the chapters bounce from the story-in-progress, to the history of the Metagalactic and the races that participate, to the history of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros and what exactly happened to bring them from obscurity to stardom and back again so fast.
Every single planet is insane in its own way, but Valente adds a little more of an edge to her descriptions of Earth. You have to admit, humanity has a terrible track record when it comes to treating our own kind like sentient beings, not to mention wiping out whole species because we think pieces of them will make it easier for us to have sex. If you’re not good with taking criticism…well you should probably learn to do just that because this book is too good to pass up just because you don’t like hearing something negative.
And it’s not all negative anyway. The history of pop music is the history of the individual, of the world, of the universe: brilliant and tragic and joyful, not always fair, very likely crazy, but at its best when we stop trying to making everything have a purpose and just celebrate something simply because it’s part of being alive.
“Life is beautiful and life is stupid.” It’s the First General Unkillable Fact of the Universe after all. And we only manage to do real damage when we try to pretend that either of those things aren’t true.