Book Review: NOVA by Samuel R. Delany

 

NOVA by Samuel R. Delany

279 pages, hardcover

August 1968, Doubleday Science Fiction.

*Prep for a podcast episode debating the best SF novel of 1968, full review coming, when the podcast is available I will link it here. *

I mentioned this in a Facebook post as I finished reading this book. I made a strange connection to this 55-year-old book. As a writer, I am very aware of the mind meld between writer and reader. Considering that I read this author’s Facebook posts today, it was interesting connecting with Delany of 1966 and 67 (when he wrote it in Athens and New York City). I am reading this now in part because it was nominated in 1969 for the Hugo Award. The winner that year was Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Someone else posted the cover of that book and I said it was the best Science Fiction novel of the 20th century.

Several of my online SF reader Twitter friends disagreed, including several that suggested that it was not the best of 1968. One suggested this novel, and another suggested Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. Not to forget to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and as Professor Lisa Yazek pointed out Joanna Russ also had a novel that year Picnic on Paradise. So I decided we needed to have this debate on the podcast. (recording May 2023 – links here when available.)

That is the context I read this in. As for this review, I will not compare it to the other books. That is for the podcast.

Also if you are not following SRD on Facebook I recommend it, Delany often does long posts about the history of Sci-fi from his point of view. He also has posts about Supernatural a TV show he apparently really digs.

NOVA is not my first Delany, I read Dhalgren, Babel-17 (my favorite so far), and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Due mostly to timing and the radical nature of Delany (the first openly gay Black SF author) SRD is considered New Wave. I am personally sure how he fits into this part of the genre. This novel has a midevil far future that reminds me of DUNE in world-building tones.

Humanity has spread to the stars but culture spread out. This culture feels more like one you would find in a fantasy novel. Set in the year 3172 society should feel different.  The thing is Delany writes challenging prose, it can be hard to explain but he doesn’t worry about clarity, he writes with a flow that can be like taking a boat into the rapids. Dhalgren is downright hard to read at times. Setting a story a thousand years in the future gives Delany a built-in excuse “Eating, sleeping current wages: How do I explain the present concept of these three to somebody from, say, the twenty-third century?” Let alone you 20th or 21st century reader.

 It is OK you are important in this future you can’t totally understand.“…it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that lived on several worlds. Since then, the number of worlds has increased; our informative unity has changed its nature several times, and suffered a few catastrophic eruptions, but essentially has remained. Until humanity becomes something much, much different, the time must be the focus of scholarly interest: that was the century we became.”

On the surface, NOVA is a more commercial Science Fiction novel but the character in the book who is writing a novel explains this to the reader…

“But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me—naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe’s furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration)—but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description.”

Will your brain sizzle during this book?  Set in a pulp SF-feeling future where the Earth is like a hipster planet, we are introduced to the solar system through the idea of a Commercial shipping line called the Shifting Triangle Run: Earth to Mars, Mars to Ganymede, Ganymede to Earth. Much of humanity lives on Draco and the outer colonies of The Pleiades Foundation.

The world-building is something I connected a lot to but I think many readers of this novel will find focus in the characters. Lorq Von Ray is a starship captain who is obsessed with collecting Illyrion an energy source that spits out of dying stars. The science doesn’t make a ton of sense, and you might say well it was the 60s, but still it is a little even so. Delany tries, and there is nothing so silly I couldn’t push through. “After a thousand years of study, from close up and far away, it’s a bit unnerving how much we don’t know about happens in the center of the most calamitous of stellar catastrophes.”   

There are shipping families. Space races, plenty of commentary on the human condition. I don’t mean to reduce the overall effect this novel has. It is a great and deep space opera. I love the balance between the pulpy settings and characters with the deeper themes. This aside from late in the book addresses how technology has destroyed the connection to what we do.

“If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man's work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren't there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise, he would feel his life was futile.”

Do I think this is a masterpiece? It has all the ingredients. World-building, fascinating characters, fun SF concepts including a supernova in the third act. The technology of Cyborg studs and their operation on the ships borders on Cyberpunk a decade before such a literary movement was birthed. The titans of capitalism that pull these characters into their orbit, is interesting enough. The motivations of Obsession, greed, and revenge is powerful in the story.  The meta-commentary on the genre through the writer in a narrative gives Delany the chance to comment openly on what he is doing.

The problem I had was the asides like the Tarot Cards chapter and the moments when Delany’s prose thickened up. This is considered to be the last of Delany’s pulp novels transitioning his work to his most respected period of high-class Science Fiction. I think his best novel is from this pulp period with Babel-17, so what the hell do I know? I really enjoyed this one, but do not consider it a masterpiece. Was it worthy of the Hugo nomination? Sure, but I still think the right book won.