★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Nova
• Author: Samuel R. Delany
• Year: 1968 (mine was 2002 trade paperback)
• Pages: 241
• Genre: Science fiction
• Publisher: Vintage Books
• ISBN 978-0-375-70670-7 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

Nominated for the Hugo Best Novel award in 1969 (losing to John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar), Nova was one of many sci-fi novels I’d never heard of until recently (I hadn’t heard of Delany either) — I became aware of it while researching the history of Black authors in science fiction.

An obsessed starship captain (in the 3100s) gathers a crew of oddballs for a mission to obtain the rare (fictional) element Illyrion — from the heart of a stellar nova. It follows something of a “quest” storyline, reminding me of some mythological stories about a band of people leaving everything behind to obtain some powerful thing (Holy Grail, Golden Fleece, etc.), risking lives and livelihood. Within the story, one character occasionally reminds the others that he’s going to write a novel and has a lot of thoughts about that — forming kind of a subplot in which Delany explores the process of novel-writing. In the end, that character (Katin) flat-out says he’s going to write a quest novel and actually mentions the Holy Grail.

 

Praise

This future is well-conceived with thorough world-building — which the author manages without laborious exposition. (More than a thousand years from now, humanity has spread across hundreds of worlds, most controlled by either the older Draco government or the newer Pleiades Federation.) The characters are startlingly diverse for a 1960s sci-fi novel — by this I do mean that Delany included multiple women and people who aren’t white, but also that the characters were more different from each other in motivation, background, and personality than you usually see in novels from this time period.

Instead of using the same fictional future inventions that so many science fiction authors employ, Delany chose a few of those but mostly went his own way in this respect. The ubiquitous cyber-plugs by which any person can plug into any machine to operate it mentally (I was reminded of the connectors Neo had in The Matrix), the fog crawlers, net-riders, energy vanes (for faster-than-light travel), the sensory-syrynx (an artistic instrument that produces sound, odor, and holographic projections), and so on — all felt unique for the 1960s. (Even if some of them, individually, were in other stories of the time, they way they merged together to form a cohesive setting was superb here.)

I was also interested in the conversations between Mouse and Katin about how art should be (or can be) produced. One makes his art spontaneously and emotionally, improvising as he goes, sometimes startled or angered by his creations. The other is methodical and meticulous, highly educated, and prone to procrastination. (I have noticed both these tendencies in myself, rarely in balance, and assume other artistic creators have some degree of both as well.)

I wish I’d noticed earlier, but every page has a location and date stamp at the very top, so the reader doesn’t have to get lost among the multiple flashbacks into various characters’ backgrounds. Since I missed these (fairly obvious) clues, I was occasionally distracted from the story trying to figure out how long ago something had occurred or where a particular flashback was taking place. Now it’s obvious to me that the story begins on Triton in 3172, flashes back eight years to Istanbul when Mouse was a youth, returns to Triton in 3172, goes back to New Ark in 3148 when Captain Lorq Von Ray was a child — and so on.

The story also had a satisfying conclusion — something sorely lacking in many novels I’ve read recently.

 

Points Off For...

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this book is the way words are sometime put together: perhaps not improperly, but certainly in unusual ways. Many sentences required multiple re-readings on my part; sometimes I still failed to grasp the full meaning. For example:

“Bearing Lorq’s fear was a net of exaltation.”

—page 202

Or:

“Triumph was laughable and terrible and his.”

—page 232

Additionally, Delany sometimes made stylistic choices that critics called “experimental”, but which were jarring to me as a reader. For example, he ends some chapters in the middle of sentences, with an em dash (—) instead of a period. Two characters (twins — one black and one albino) can apparently only speak in tandem, each saying part of a sentence and getting interrupted by his brother to finish it. This works sometimes, but other times the second half of the sentence clearly isn’t what the first brother was about to say. When one of them is alone, he can only speak in half sentences, so neither the reader nor the other characters can divine what he means.

 

Interesting Quotations

One subjective thing that defines a good book for me is whether a number of sentences stand out as quotable, even out of context. This book had several, like the following, when Captain Von Ray is explaining that he needs a crew to fly into a nova:

“Where we’re going all law has broken down.”

“Which laws do you mean?” Katin asked. “Man’s, or the natural laws of physics, psychics, and chemistry?”

Von Ray paused. “All of them.”

—page 24

The following is part of one of Katin’s monologues about novel-writing, which sounds almost like the author is using his own thought processes as part of this novel:

“Note to myself number five thousand three hundred and seven. Bear in mind that the novel — no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective — is always a historical projection of its own time... To make my book, I must have an awareness of my time’s conception of history.”

—page 128-29

And then later, after Katin observes another character performing an action, he comments to his recorder:

“Characters are fixed most vividly by their actions... There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.”

—page 186

The following, from Capt. Von Ray, sounds like he’s talking about our current corrupt president, though I’m certain that in 1968 the author had other corrupt presidents in mind.

“Those with the greatest power must ultimately commit the greatest felonies.”

—page 233

And, from the Mouse to Katin:

“But I don’t dislike you half as much as I dislike a lot of other people.”

—page 240

 

Conclusion

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this novel wasn’t that. It was unusual — especially contrasted with other science fiction novels from the 1960s (the ones with which I’m familiar, I mean), but also enjoyable — which is my primary rating criterion for fiction. The sentences I mentioned above which were difficult to understand were rare enough that the story wasn’t lost. I especially enjoyed Katin’s monologues about art and culture, history and novel-writing, and how Delany managed to work them into appropriate places so they didn’t seem forced or gratuitous.

There was definitely a “meta” element — when Delany uses the character Katin to comment on this novel, and when the Mouse reacts to those monologues. This overt use of self-reference in fiction would probably be tiresome if I saw too much of it, but it was refreshing here.

And everything tied together. The flashbacks, the exposition, the descriptions of various scenes and places were all relevant to the story and came in handy later. I’m glad I read it and sorry I wasn’t aware of Delany earlier in life.

 

 

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