Also, it just so happens Oort and Decibel are feeling really, really desperate about humanity's odds of survival. They feed off of the frustration and despair of sentients, but being nearly immortal and as old as the universe, they don't go around causing any, just sort of gravitate to big pools of it.

Emotion Eater: Turns out Wormholes are living things that, if you were far enough away and 4 dimensional, look like cute pandas.

The Yurtmak species were deemed to have a rich inner life, and her song became a hit at weddings. The monstrously violent race known as the Yurtmak was saved and gained recognition as being sentient when their act in the Grand Prix came on stage with the hollowed out corpse of her lover, sang her heart out by blowing life back into the bones to dance, then set herself on fire, and smiled and waved to the adoring crowd as they threw flowers that scorched off her pyre.

Dyeing for Your Art: invokedA common occurrence at the Grand Prix, and at least once with a big heaping of Heroic Sacrifice.

Cats Are Mean: Capo the Earth housecat is a terrible person, which is only confirmed when she develops the power of speech inadvertently through a mishap with a universal translator.

Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence: The first winner of the Galactic Grand Prix won by a point because she did this on stage.

Is a Crapshoot: The 321 are, surprisingly, sympathetic to humanity and other newly discovered organic beings because they were once in their place, and other species considered them like an emotionless IT Guy who could configure their printers for them.

Not to be confused with the 1965 novel by Jack Vance, the 1974 anthology, the 1996 Genre Anthology, or the short story by Ray Russell, all of which have the same title.

Ultraviolet, or rather, what's left of them after a tragic roadshow accident, being enlisted as the only (living) pop group on Earth that has even an ice cube's chance in hell of not placing dead last in the Galactic Grand Prix: the yearly talent contest that decides both galactic resource allocation, whether new found species are sentient (and thus saved from being preemptively cleansed by a atomic fire) and the galaxy's new best singles for the pop charts. Valente, the story of Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, Mira Wonderful Star and Oort St. When the aliens came, no one expected the fate of the Earth to depend on putting up a song and dance number.

Space opera by catherynne m valente