Review of Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

I stuck it out for 50 pages or so but was pretty sure 10 pages in that Space Opera isn’t for me.

Surprised? Me too. This has everything I usually like in humorous, Douglas Adams–inspired science fiction: lengthy infodumps, absurd alien species, human characters so over the top they might as well be on Everest … but it just … didn’t work.

Catherynne Valente’s prose just tries too hard for me. That’s not really a critique in any serious sense. I know a lot of people loved this, and I fully expected to love it too. But every second paragraph-length digressive sentence had me screaming, “Get on with it!” in a way that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy never did.

Anyway, I know well enough to know that when I have that grating feeling, I shouldn’t trudge ahead.