![]() ![]() ![]() Le Guin’s Changing Planes as much as the waggish inventions of Adams, but that’s not a bad thing at all. At times her inventions seem to echo the satirical alternate worlds of Ursula K. ![]() That is probably just as well, since how many of us remember the actual meandering plot details of Douglas Adams’s epic, at least compared to his overpacked, Where’s-Waldo canvas of alien critters and bizarre civilizations? Valente takes up Adams’s implicit challenge with an even more crowded universe and with an unflagging, nonstop manic humor that hits far more than it misses, offering endless capsule descriptions of worlds ranging from the impossibly sweet Litost (“the kind of world a child would design if that child had never been harmed by the world in even the smallest way and wanted to be a rainbow when it grew up”) to the cemetery-covered world of Fenek, where virtually all life had been infected and turned into rotting zombies by the intelligent virus called the Voorpret. Valente’s Space Opera is something of a Christmas tree: a fairly generic template adorned with so many glittering ornaments and exuberant sentences careening along like beaded garlands (some of Valente’s more ambitious sentences sound as though they need bongos for backup), that pretty soon the plot itself begins to seem like just another ornament. Like its acknowledged inspiration, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Catherynne M. ![]()
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