Space Opera

The frontiers of the sublime extend into the far reaches of space in Georgi Gospodinov’s cosmic adventure starring archetypal astronauts Adam and Eve, Laika the dog and naturally, a Musca domestica or fruit fly. The Bulgarian author’s exercise in libretto writing takes the shape of a “giant poem” patterned after a hyper-saturated present where “information is everything/And everything is information…isn’t it?”. In answer, Gospodinov heads out of bounds, roving between Mars and Earth; voices, scales, valences of emotion. Mediated by camera cues and an insectoid chorus, Space Opera is a genre-collapsing work engaging an irreducible expanse of human and more-than-human experience on the cusp of seismic evolution.