Nova (novel)

The novel is set in 3172, when most humans belong to one of two factions: Earth-based Draco and the Pleiades Federation. The most important family in Pleiades is the Von Rays, and the most important in Draco is the Reds, who own Red-shift Limited, a company making interstellar drives. Starship travel depends on Illyrion, a rare and valuable power source.

The story begins on Triton. A blind man named Dan tells a young drifter called the Mouse how he flew on Lorq Von Ray's starship, the Roc, and how he was injured in a dangerous voyage. A flashback to the Mouse's childhood follows, explaining how he stole a sensory syrynx (a machine capable of producing sound, images, and scents) and learned to play it from his friend Leo.

Lorq recruits the Mouse and other passers-by for a journey on the Roc. One is Katin, an intellectual who aspires to write a novel. Others are the brothers Lynceos and Idas, whose third brother is an indentured Illyrion miner; Sebastian, owner of flying pets; and his companion Tyÿ, a tarot reader. Lorq plans to fly through a nova to acquire seven tons of Illyrion. As the crew members leave Triton, Dan falls into a burning canyon and dies.

The third chapter is a flashback to Lorq's youth, beginning with his boyhood on the planet Ark, when he meets Prince Red and his sister Ruby. Prince was born without an arm and has an artificial one. As they play, Lorq mentions Prince's arm, angering him. Later, they sneak out to an arena and see Lorq's parents and the Reds' father watching animals fight.

Lorq becomes a starship racing pilot; his crew comprises Brian and Dan. He meets Prince again at a party, where Brian mentions Prince's arm. Lorq asks Ruby to run away with him, but Prince finds them and punches Lorq, scarring his face. Lorq's father describes how his great-grandfather secured the Pleiades Federation's independence by piracy and attacking Red-shift's mines, leading to a feud between the families. He also explains that the lower price of Illyrion from the Outer Colonies will shift the balance of power in the galaxy, bringing about the downfall of the Red family and ending Draco and Earth's dominance. Therefore, the two families are trying to destroy each other. Lorq wonders where to get Illyrion; later, Dan tells him how his ship accidentally fell into a nova but survived.

The main narrative resumes. Tyÿ gives Lorq a tarot reading about the mission; however, the Mouse has stolen a card. The Roc arrives at the planet Vorbis, and Lorq visits his aunt Cyana, who tells him a star likely to explode soon. Prince sends Lorq a message bragging that he destroyed Brian's life because he mentioned his arm, and that he intends to kill Lorq. Meanwhile, the Mouse visits some hunters and reunites with Leo. Ruby attacks Lorq, but one of Sebastian's pets saves him and the Roc returns to Pleiades.

The crew try to relax, but Prince and Ruby arrive. They argue with Lorq; Prince states that Lorq's quest will ruin both Draco and the Outer Colonies. Lorq replies that he is fighting for change, and Prince for stasis. Prince then reveals why he hates Lorq: their visit to the arena on Ark showed him how vicious and cruel his father could be. Sebastian and Lorq attack Prince and Ruby; Lorq uses the sensory syrynx to overwhelm their senses, leaving them seriously injured near a river of lava.

The Roc travels to the star, but Prince and Ruby reappear. Lorq boards their ship, and the star begins to erupt. Lorq seizes control and flies toward the star, killing Prince; Ruby dies too and Lorq flies through the nova, collecting the Illyrion but injuring his brain.

At the end of the novel, Katin and the Mouse leave the Roc and Katin declares that his novel should be about the Roc's last voyage. Echoing Katin's observation that stories about the quest for the Holy Grail are never finished, the last sentence of the novel is incomplete.

• Lorq Von Ray. Lorq is the scion of the wealthy Von Ray family, the most powerful clan in the Pleiades Federation. Originally a carefree playboy, Lorq is drawn into his family's feud with the Reds and, as a result, becomes obsessed with finding Illyrion. When Prince Red attacks him as a teenager at a fabulously opulent party in Isle St.-Louis in Paris, he scars Lorq's face badly; but Lorq refuses to remove the scarring for the rest of the novel and as a result carries an air of menace.
  As the book unfolds, Lorq learns that his family was founded by pirates, who killed members of the Red family in previous generations in order to keep the Pleiades free of Earth-based corporations, although Lorq's ancestors did so with the support of the Pleiades' citizens. The Reds, however, still carry a grudge.
  Although Lorq Von Ray is described as looking between forty-five and fifty years old, according to the dates in the book he is barely thirty. The explanation for this discrepancy between Lorq's actual age and older appearance is provided in the Mouse's speculation that Lorq is "aged, not old". He has a Norwegian father and a Senegalese mother from Earth.
• The Mouse. This is the nickname for Pontichos Provechi, a young Gypsy from Earth, who, by age 18, has led an extremely varied life, and is just beginning to work in a starship navigation crew. He also entertains people by creating illusions and music with his sensory syrynx, a sound, scent, and hologram projector.
• Katin Crawford. Katin is an intellectual from Earth's moon, who received a liberal arts education at Harvard University and who has worked till now at a series of unfulfilling clerical positions. Katin is a loner. His passion is to explore various moons across the Solar System. He also aspires to write a novel, for which he constantly records notes, although the form is obsolete by the time Nova takes place. Sometimes Katin annoys his colleagues by going off on long lectures on any number of topics; in this capacity, he is sometimes comic, even while acting as the novel's expository voice.
• Sebastian and Tyÿ. This wandering, working couple consists of Sebastian, a powerful-looking man who is nonetheless gentle — he keeps a number of unusual pets with him, his "flapping black gillies" — and his companion, Tyÿ, a quiet mysterious woman and tarot-card reader. Like many of Delany's characters, Sebastian is racially mixed: although he has Asian features, his hair is naturally blond. Both are from the Pleiades and consider it an honor to work for the Von Ray family.
• Lynceos and Idas. These brothers – two members of a set of triplets – are of African descent, but Lynceos is an albino. Hailing from the Outer Colonies, all three brothers had a tendency to use drugs and make mischief. As a result of one of their pranks, they ended in a type of indentured servitude and were forced to work in the colonies' Illyrion mines. (Such arrangements are common at that time to "recruit" workers for the mines.) The two talk in tandem. Jokingly Katin calls them a pair of "glorified salt and pepper shakers."
  Characters like the Mouse, Lynceos, Idas, Tyÿ, Sebastian, and even Katin can be seen as hippies, with itinerant lifestyles and drugs.
• Prince Red. The scion of the Earth-based Red family, Prince was born with only one arm. In place of the other, he wears an artificial limb, which has unnatural strength. Its grip can compress sand into quartz crystals, which he can throw with the force of bullets. A troublemaker from birth (in his youth, he was forced constantly to shift schools because of discipline problems), he detests Lorq for numerous reasons, some of which he is not consciously aware of.
  Because of the power his artificial arm gives him, Prince can become extremely violent if anyone so much as mentions his deformity. As a little boy he sprains Lorq's mother's wrist when, innocently, she asks for his hand to take him home when he has gotten into mischief after dark with the other children.
• Ruby Red. Prince's younger sister, Ruby, is a quiet-spoken woman, who appears to be completely under Prince's control. As an adolescent, Lorq falls in love with her, but she rebuffs him because of their families' hostile histories.
  Prince appears to have an unhealthy attachment to his sister—which, often, she seems to reciprocate. While their father, Aaron, is still alive at the time of the novel and in charge of the Red's vast industrial holdings, Prince and Ruby are the most visible members of the Red clan.
• Dan. An Australian drifter and former member of Lorq's crew, Dan is the first to suggest to Lorq how a nova might be a source for Illyrion. Unfortunately, by the beginning of the novel, an accident on the first mission has damaged his senses and probably his sanity. He kills himself soon into the book, and most of his appearances take place in flashbacks.

Nova is set in a science fictional universe with high technology, including interstellar travel and large-scale use of cyborg adaptions. Most people use intravenous drips from nutrition rather than eating,[2]^: 200 and disease is considered to be impossible.[2]^: 136 The novel is an obsolete art form and has been replaced by the "psychorama".[2]^{: 27, 156–7}

However, in contrast to the technological background, reading the tarot is considered both scientific and accurate. Indeed, the Mouse is ridiculed as old-fashioned for his skepticism about it. In chapter four, Tyÿ gives Lorq the most detailed tarot reading in the novel.[2]^{: 112–121} As a child, he also had a tarot reading mentioning a death in his family, about a month before his uncle, Secretary Morgan, was assassinated.[2]^: 114 Later, Cyana makes Lorq draw a card before she gives him the nova's location.[2]^: 160

Politically, the galaxy is divided between three factions: Draco, based on Earth, and the earliest area to be colonized; the younger Pleiades Federation; and the even newer Outer Colonies, where Illyrion is mined rather than manufactured. In chapter three, Lorq's father explains these regions in terms of social class. Draco is primarily controlled by corporations and governments based on Earth. Pleiades was settled later by "small businesses... cooperative groups; even private citizens...a comparatively middle class movement". Lorq's great-great-grandfather attacked ships from Draco, including those owned by Red-shift, attempting to expand into Pleiades, helping assure its independence. A few generations before the novel begins, planets much further from the Galactic Center were discovered to possess Illyrion, and corporations in Draco and Pleiades subsidized people "from the lowest population strata" to move there.[2]^: 89–94

Economic tensions have created a feud between the "new money" Von Ray family and the "old money" Red family, both of whom have a large stake in intergalactic transportation. Shortly before the novel's events (within the lifetime of Lorq's father), the Pleiades region achieved political autonomy from Draco, and is now an independent federation. At the time of the novel, citizens of the Outer Colonies are beginning to support the idea of independence as well.

Delany uses a careful prose style to present his work both sensually and metaphorically. He uses language to differentiate the characters; for instance, people from Pleiades speak with verbs at the ends of their sentences, and Lynceos and Idas begin and finish each other’s sentences. The same is true for point of view; due to their different upbringings, Katin, the Mouse, and Lorq all have different perspectives on the assassination of the politician Morgan.[6] Also, each page in the book carries a header that gives the year and location of the scene (e.g., "Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162"). This is useful because of the flashbacks in the long journey around the galaxy.

The novel’s prose style has been called "poetic", with every metaphor serving the larger design.[6] The sensory syrynx is an example of this. The name alludes to the Greek god Pan’s pipes;[13] moreover, early in the novel, the Mouse refers to it as his "ax".[2]^: 25 This is both a weapon and a slang term for a guitar, fitting both the functions it performs in the novel. Furthermore, it symbolizes writing and invokes the Cretan labrys, implying the labyrinth. This allusive style has been described as a way to overcome the linearity of prose and enrich the text by invoking the textus, or web of meanings, in which Delany considers any given text to reside.[15]

Another example of this is the word nova itself; literally, it denotes a supernova, but it is also the plural of novum, Latin for "new thing", a term that can be used to mean science fictional inventions. Lorq describes the nova is a place where all law, human and natural, breaks down, to which the Mouse replies that the voyage will be "real changey".[2]^: 24 As the title indicates, this is the novel's central metaphor: the destructive implosion/explosion of an entire sun, which both destroys most of a solar system and creates new elements.

Cover of 2002 paperback edition.

While awaiting publication by Doubleday, Nova was submitted to Analog editor John W. Campbell for potential serialization. Campbell rejected the novel, saying in a telephone conversation with Delany's agent that, though he had enjoyed the book, he did not feel his magazine's readership "would be able to relate to a black main character."[18]

Because there was no magazine serialization, however, in its first six months the novel did not get the initially wide exposure to readers that might have helped gain it a Hugo Award.

Bantam Books' 14th and final printing of the novel was in 1990. After this is it was out of print until 2001, when Gollancz reissued it as part of their SF Masterworks line.[19] In 2002, Vintage published a new edition with some textual changes. The Library of America included it in their 2019 anthology American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968-1969,[20] and in 2022 Centipede Press published a limited hardback edition including tarot cards designed by Russell FitzGerald, who created the original cover art.[21]

Algis Budrys reviewed the novel in Galaxy Magazine, declaring that

"Samuel R. Delany, right now, as of this book, Nova, not as of some future book or some accumulated body of work, is the best science-fiction writer in the world, at a time when competition for that status is intense. I don't see how a writer can do more than wring your heart while explaining how it works. No writer can."

He praised Nova as "highly entertaining to read" and commended Delany's integration of his sociopolitical extrapolation into his story, his accomplished characterization, and his "virtuosity" in presenting the novel's "classically posed scientific puzzle."[24]

However, Judith Merril's review in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was mixed. She noted the variety of readings it allowed and experiences it detailed:

"Here are (at least some of) the ways you can read Nova: as fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; as archetypal mystical/mythical allegory (in which the Tarot and the Grail both figure prominently); as modern myth told in the SF idiom . . . The reader observes, recollects, or participates in a range of personal human experience including violent pain and disfigurement, sensory deprivation and overload, man-machine communion, the drug experience, the creative experience – and interpersonal relationships which include incest and assassination, father-son, leader-follower, human-pet, and lots more."

However, she described it as "more of a fascinating exercise than a satisfying achievement" and "somehow lacking".[14] Kirkus Reviews said that though Delany had "an extensive imagination", the reader might be overwhelmed.[25] The review in the British New Wave magazine New Worlds by M. John Harrison, while acknowledging the skill and energy with which it had been written, called the book a "waste of time and talent".

Nova was soon regularly referred to as "the perfect science fiction novel". It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969.[1] In 1984, David Pringle listed it as one of the 100 best science-fiction novels written since 1949.

Jo Walton wrote articles about Nova on Tor.com in 2009 and 2010, describing it as "one of the best of Delany's early works" and noting that it had aged well and felt "cutting edge". She called the setting "a fully realised and kaleidoscopic future" with "surprisingly interesting economics". However, she thought the female characters were few and poorly developed.[6][9] Alan Brown also reviewed the novel for Tor.com, opining that it was "a classic of the genre" with few obvious anachronisms.[5]

Nova is considered one of the major forerunners of the cyberpunk movement.[26][27]^{: 208, 216, 264, 331} It prefigures, for instance, cyberpunk's staple motif of humans interfacing with computers via implants; however, in Nova these are not used to enter cyberspace but to control physical machinery.[5]

William Gibson has said he was influenced by Delany,[27]^: 279 and Nova has been described as the stylistic bridge between Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and Gibson's Neuromancer.[27]^: 20 Neuromancer includes allusions to Nova. The character Peter Riviera resembles the Mouse in that he also has holographic projection powers (although via implants) and is introduced in Istanbul; but unlike Delany's character, he is a psychopath. Likewise, Gibson includes a character who awkwardly wears only one shoe; this character, Ashpool, is an insane killer.

In 2023, it was reported that Neil Gaiman was adapting the novel into an Amazon Prime Video series.[28]

• Errata for Nova, approved by the author.
• Nova at Worlds Without End