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Space Opera Q1: Is it funny?
It's meant to be a comedy. Did you find it funny? Did you laugh out loud, did you find the situation entertainingly zany, were some of the puns and references amusing? Did you get on with the writing style of detailed but indirect description, or were there too many adjectives for you?
The "liner notes" only refer to Douglas Adams, but there's a long history of SFF comedy: Harry Harrison, Bob Shaw, and of course Terry Pratchett come to mind. What are your comedy favourites?
What pop culture references did you spot? (Beyond Eurovision, that is.)
Comments
Pop culture references slid by me, I'm afraid. I'm enough of a musical snob that I only _just_ consider Eurovision to be proper music at all. And don't really relate to the idea that they've been chiefly responsible for preserving Europe from wars for over half a century!
My own musical taste runs much more to prog rock (and my own sf books tend to foreground that particular genre, by way of self-indulgence). So Space Opera might have been riddled with real-world Eurovision references and I would have missed them all. I hadn't even realised that the section quotes were from Eurovision songs! which in retrospect should have been an obvious authorial ploy.
I am a musician. I found the book to be not funny - I never laughed once, and I am not sure I even smiled - but interesting in spite of that. Mostly I think due to authorial voice, but that's a different subject. The musical references were boring and narrowly focused. How can she write a book on space music and not once mention Parliament-Funkadelic? Or Sun Ra? Actually all her references were rather bleached. Unlike Richard, my love of music is genre free, and I did get those referred to. As far as SF comedy, the only one who makes me laugh of those listed in Adams. Vance makes me laugh a lot as well. Perhaps her humor, like her references, is not black enough?
Eurovision isn't a thing on my radar. I assume it's America's Got Talent for Europe - and as such it doesn't interest me much. Pop culture has taken a seriously wrong turn in the last 20 years, as far as I'm concerned.
I also didn't find the book funny as a whole, though it did have some amusing bits. The comedy mainly seemed to ride on the stringing together of incongruous adjectives, which I didn't find funny and actually came to find rather tiresome. However, apart from this, I thought the book worked rather well as a social satire and I enjoyed it on that level. I did laugh once, near the end - possibly it was at the gushing over the christmas carol.
I'm not really one for mixing my SF or fantasy with comedy. I liked Hitchhikers - the first 3 books, anyway. When I was young I like Asprin's Myth Inc. series, and the puns in Anthony's Xanth series, but have never had the desire to go back to them. I never got on much with Pratchett, though I do find his stuff to be witty. Ankh-Morpork, city of the dead? That's quite funny.
I know there were all kinds of pop culture references in the book that I spotted, but I didn't make notes of them and finished too long ago to remember any specific ones.
I didn't find it was funny. The writing style was trying too hard to be funny, and the trying to be funny interfered with my enjoyment. It felt like taking Douglas Adams but missing the point.
Some of the puns I appreciated. I nearly laughed at two scenes (the racist Daily Mail reporters - yep, the author knows England - and the cat being interviewed to test for sentience).
This is the biggest problem of the book. The author thinking 'If I imitate The Hitchiker's Guide, and turn it up to 11, it will be even funnier!' is a big problem. Trying harder does not make you funnier.
There were two problems for with the humour. One was the Hitchhiker's Guide Turned Up to 11 writing - it worked when Douglas Adams did it, partially because it came in bursts rather than being like it all the time. But even these bursts weren't as over the top.
The other problem was all the characters being over the top. It wasn't relatively normal characters in absurd situations reacting to absurd characters. It was absurd characters in absurd situations reacting to other absurd characters. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy needs Arthur Dent as well as Zaphod Beeblebrox. Absurd characters reacting to ordinary situations is also funny - and that's not part of the humour here.
On another note, on humorous SF/F books I really like, I adore Terry Pratchett's Discworld books once they get into their stride. Not just humour, but to me also laugh out loud funny. Outside of the SF/F genre, there's definitely comedy books I appreciate. P.G. Wodehouse for instance makes me smile in appreciation rather than laugh, but I smile a lot.
And serious novels, like serious RPGs, have comedy moments.
Agreed 100%! Nailed it, Dr Mitch!
I can't disagree. I found the Douglas Adams caricature tiring, but I think she toned it down as the book progressed (or perhaps I got used to it).
As for the absurd characters, she made a ploy for a sensible one with Oort in his persona as Englishblokeman. Did that not work? Was that enough of an everyman, or was the such an extreme everyman as to be absurd again?
Eurovision has been going since 1956 and so vastly predates the various "xyz country's got talent" shows (it even predates me
). But it has never interested me as an event, and I share your view on the musical quality of the vast majority of the entries...
Eurovision and I were born in the same year.
@NeilNjae I really liked Oort, and the contrast to Decibel, but he felt like a secondary character. More from his point of view would have been good. He was exaggeratedly deliberately "normal" but really so was Arthur Dent (the Hitchhiker's comparisons are unavoidable).
I agree that things either got better or I got used to it as the book went on,
I struggled with the humour - I found myself rolling my eyes at it more than laughing. I did like the multiple-possibilities-koala alien, but maybe because he only arrived after some plot had landed. I'm not sure if I got used to it, or the sentence construction just improved with the need to actually describe things happening rather than things being.
I think perhaps the issue was that there was only really the one plot going on, dressed up with a lot of "hilarious" setting guff. I'd got the joke after the first couple of chapters, and they were such hard going I hadn't laughed.
Agree that Oort (and the cat!) were much more likable characters than Decibel, but... it's marginal. I would have been equally pleased with the destruction of Earth and everyone in it at the end.
LOL - in retrospect, so would I. I find this funny because it reveals a truth that hadn't occurred to me, and because it seemingly came out of the blue. Truth and Spontaneity - the essence of comedy?
Close. The essence of comedy is absurdity and timing. The truth is usually absurd, and spontaneity is a way to get proper timing - spontaneous quips are always apropos.
Here I come rolling in weeks late again. I thought it was too over the top to be funny. Three incongruous comparisons at a time might have been funny, but every description included at least eight.