Chapter 0: How Everything Began 0. How Everything Began First, there was nothing. Then, there was everything. The time between nothing and everything was mainly concerned with the challenges of decorating your average middle-class, two-car starter galaxy using only several billion buckets of overcooked lava, radioactive stardust, corrosive gases, then, eventually, inevitably, and quite unfortunately for the new drapes, sentient life. The time between everything and a century or so ago (begging the pardon of the speed of light and its tendency to make all known measurements of time euphemistic at best) was mainly concerned with wars over the central design concept of the universe. This resulted in a ghastly percentage of the inhabited planets arranged around that lovely open-floor-plan galaxy getting blown apart, vapor-mined, equatorially unzipped, fatally shrink-wrapped, backhanded out of orbit, sent back in time to become their own proto-planetary masses, laser-whipped, stripped clean by invasive magnetosphere leeches, unmooned, unsunned, uncarboned, vigorously gentrified, devoured by interdimensional bees, dissolved legally, financially, and actually, drop-kicked into a variety of voids, infected by self-replicating knifenados, reflexively teleported into themselves, and rolled down wormhole bowling alleys directly into the front gardens of a great lot of monsters who everyone just knew very slightly disagreed with right-thinking folk on how to cook a proper steak. This went on for thousands of years, because big booms are quite fun right up until one does you and your nephew medium-rare with a nice pan sauce. So on the booms and counter-booms went, until the exact millisecond someone on some planet looked out their window at the oncoming bee-tsunami and suggested a slightly, but only slightly, less stressful methodology for conflict resolution. The time between a century or so ago (begging the pardon of etcetera) and now was mainly concerned with the Metagalactic Grand Prix, the greatest experiment in musical diplomacy in the history of smashing civilizations together to see what will and will not burst into knifenados. For a hundred euphemisms, the Milky Way galaxy's vast and gorgeous powers have agreed to put down their weapons, get dressed up to eleven, look in the mirror, tell themselves this is all fine and very normal and they will of course abide by the result without unzipping anything too important, then sit on their hands, grin, bear it, and, for the foreseeable future, pretend singing and dancing for interstellar domination is every bit as much fun as punching each other in the planet. To the victors go uncontested hegemony, which is really quite nice if you can get your hands on it. To the losers go whatever's left lying about on the floor when the lights come up. Repeat as necessary for best results. But no matter how civilized everyone considers themselves over tea and sandwiches, no matter how thoroughly two or more political entities, gathered in the name of nicking anything they can off one another, assure themselves they most certainly are , and always have been, and always shall be the most evolved and sophisticated of music enthusiasts, the following remains Goguenar Gorecannon's Tenth Unkillable Fact: Don't ask me why, but if you ever do manage to put together a real stab at lasting peace, stability, and basic median happiness, that is the precise second you are closest to losing the whole bag to absolute blithering chaos. Schoolyard, barnyard, marriageyard, legislative floor, it doesn't matter. Peace is civilization's problematic follow-up album that never quite works. Actually, do ask me why, it's because all it takes to prevent us from having nice things, over and over, is one single person. One single person who doesn't want to play the same game everyone else is doing pretty bloody well at, so they won't give over the ball even though everyone is yelling at them to get over themselves, because eventually that person will figure out that setting the ball on fire works a treat. In this case, absolute blithering chaos arrived out of nowhere wearing a lurid badge handwritten in crayon: HELLO MY NAME IS HUMANITY ASK ME HOW The grand final of the, euphemistically speaking, one hundredth Metagalactic Grand Prix was held on the distant planet of Litost, a world so aggressively pleasant that unhappiness is considered an invasive species with which all arriving visitors must report any recent contact to customs and submit to a strict fourteen-day bouncy castle quarantine. It was hosted by the previous cycle's champions, the Klavaret, a species of hyper-optimistic potted roses who used their hard-won time at the top of the Milky Way hierarchy to compel everyone, legally, financially, and actually, to hold hands, open up to each other, and process their core traumas once a week or face crippling system-wide sanctions. This particular Grand Prix featured a new species vying to join the galactic drum circle already in progress. A quite loud, fairly squishy, suspiciously moist group of obligate-contrarian off-brand lemurs called human beings. For the first time, these failed-up monkeys joined the great interstellar tradition of sorting out one's political, military, economic, cultural, historical, logistical, romantic, culinary, and any other assorted outstanding problems through a nice, friendly musical competition rather than playing beer pong with each others' gas giants. Unless your species has only recently been discovered, wedged down between the nebular mattress and the asteroidal bed frame, at which point the stakes get a lot less, or more, fun, depending on how long it's been since you got to whip anything to death with a laser. Alunizar and Keshet, Smaragdi and Elakhon, Sziv and Voorpret, Lummutis and Slozhit, Esca and Azdr and the Ursulas and the Meleg and the Trillion Kingdoms of Yüz, the Yurtmak, the 321, the single, solitary remaining Inaki/Lensari symbiote, and many more, including, quite dramatically, a gang of wild regret-eating wormholes who happened to be in the neighborhood, all gathered to take part in the fiery ritual of alpha-species musical chairs (fire being still very much encouraged as a traditional instrument). They did so with smiles all round, despite knowing exactly what would happen should the new kids on the quadrant finish in last place. Some of them, mostly the ones who manufactured laser-whips, rather hoped it might actually come to total existential annihilation, for once. Humanity's continued existence rested on the excessively tattooed shoulders of an over-the-top postpop glamgrind gendershrug one-hit-wonder band called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, consisting of drummer Mira Wonderful Star (deceased 1 ), man-of-all-instruments Oort St. Ultraviolet, and lead singer D. Jones, all of whom were born with a genetic allergy to restraint of any kind. Had they lost, Earth would have been mercifully disinfected of the collective yearnings and night terrors, ambitions and neuroses, champagne wishes and caviar dreams of Homo sapiens sapiens and the biosphere left alone for a few million years to think about what it had done and try to make better choices next time. They didn't lose. They didn't win, either. Life, with some new content, color schemes, highlights, and restrictions, went on. Which just about sums up the whole human experience to date. Yes, yes, of course Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes saved the world. But what have they done for us lately? 1 . Reply hazy, ask again later Excerpted from Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
