Nova (novel)
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Nova (1968) is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. Nominally space opera, it explores the politics and culture of a future where cyborg technology is universal, yet major decisions can involve using tarot cards. It has strong mythological overtones, relating both to the Grail Quest and to Jason's Argonautica for the golden fleece. Nova was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969. It is listed by David Pringle as one of the 100 best science-fiction novels written since World War II.
After completing Nova at the age of 25, Delany stopped writing for several years. When he began to write again (his next novel was the sexually-explicit Dhalgren, 1975), his style had moved on in experimental directions notably different from that of his earlier work.
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[edit] Synopsis
By the year 3172, political power in the galaxy is split between two factions: the older Earth-based Draco and the historically younger Pleiades Federation. Both have interests in the even newer Outer Colonies, where mines produce trace amounts of the prized power source Illyrion, the superheavy material essential to starship travel and terraforming planets.
Caught in a feud between aristocratic and economically powerful families, a scarred and obsessed captain from the Pleiades, Lorq von Ray, recruits a disparate crew of misfits to aid him in the race with his arch-enemy, Prince Red from Draco, to gain economic leadership by securing a vastly greater amount of Illyrion directly from the heart of a stellar nova. In doing so, von Ray will shift the balance of power of the existing galactic order, which will bring about the downfall of the Red family as well as the end of Earth's dominance over interstellar politics.
A central metaphor of the novel, as its title indicates, is a nova: the destructive implosion/explosion of an entire sun that, paradoxically, while it destroys most of a solar system, also creates new elements. In the book, at the eruption of a nova, not only do the laws of physics break down, but so do the laws of politics and psychology. This idea permeates the entire plot and storyline.
The characters follow a quest plotline, in which they visit several worlds to gain information necessary to achieve their goal, all the while pursued by the Red family.
Although the novel does not indulge the literary experimentation found in Delany's later books, it maintains a high level of innovation. Some chapters end or begin in mid-sentence. Also, the point of view regularly shifts between Lorq, Katin, and the Mouse. Each page in the book carries a header that gives the year and location of the scene on the page itself (e.g., "Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162"). This is useful because of the flashbacks in the long journey around the galaxy.
[edit] Characters
- 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 familly's feud with the Reds and, as a result, becomes obsessed with finding Illyrion. When Prince Red attacks him at a fabulously opulent party in Paris, he badly scars Lorq's face; but Lorq refuses to remove the scarring 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. This may have been a mathematical mistake on Delany's part: in the book's first edition there are several such errors, such as the numbering of the centuries: the year 1850 is in the middle of the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth. The year 2375 is in the middle of the twenty-forth century, not the twenty-third. But these mistakes have been corrected in more recent editions. A possible explanation for Lorq's age is the Mouse's speculation that Lorq is "aged, not old"; the disparity in Lorq's age and appearance is so wide, however, the Mouse's theory is sometimes hard to hold onto.
- 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, but who also entertains people by creating illusions and music with his "sensory syrinx" (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. A loner, his passion is the exploration of moons across the Solar System. He also aspires to write a novel, for which he constantly records notes, despite the fact that the form is obsolete by the time Nova takes place. The word "novel" is, incidentally, etymologically related to the word "nova." Both come from the Latin novum, which means "something new." 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 (either lovers or married) 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; both consider it an honor to work for the von Ray family.
- Lynceos and Idas. These twin brothers are black, but one is an albino. Eventually we learn they are two members of a set of triplets. Having been born and grown up in 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." Their names come from the twins who were among the crew of Jason's quest for the fleece. Lynceos means lynx-like, i.e., sharp-eyed. Idas suggests someone from the pleasant fields of Mt. Ida.
- 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 throws as if they were 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.
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, innocentlly, 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 adolescnt, 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 whom Lorq first meets while the Australian is hitchhiking, 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.
The book's third chapter (of seven) is basically a long flashback that shows Lorq and Prince's childhoods and the political background against which the story takes place. Lorq first meets Prince and Ruby when they are all young children, during an attempt by their parents to end the feud between the families. The meeting ends, however, in disaster and embarrassment, and the fundamentally cruel natures of both Prince and his father Aaron--as well as the senior von Ray's innate love of violence--are revealed.
While Lorq is shown to have a good relationship with his parents, it is unclear in the first edition of the book whether they are still alive by the time the novel ends: When Lorq begins his quest, his mother is already dying of a degenerative disorder, but at the end he makes no mention of them, nor does he try to contact them. A passage has been added to the 2002 Vintage Books reprint that clarifies this, somewhat.
[edit] Motifs
Nova has a number of character motifs in common with Delany's later literary and literary-pornographic works: the Mouse, a damaged artist who wears one shoe as does the Kid in the later Dhalgren; Katin, an intellectual and writer who attempts to record the events around him; the twins Lynceos and Idas, one black, the other albino; and Dan, a barefoot derelict, with a rope holding up his pants.
The novel, storyline, and themes of Nova are multilayered and complex, and lend themselves to numerous interpretations. As one critic wrote:
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- 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 overoad, 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.’’ (Judith Merrill, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction).
[edit] Space Opera
Nova takes place in a standard space opera setting with many of the features and tropes peculiar to the genre. Conscientiously the novel emulates many earlier and popular science fiction works.
Delany makes an offhand reference to Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (a random planet is named "Trantor"). Additionally, in one scene, a character has a false tooth with poison hidden in it, a classical trope from many espionage stories, which Frank Herbert's Dune employed three years before.
There is also a strong similarity in names between the scientist, Ashton Clark, who, in Nova, has invented the cyborg plugs and sockets centuries before, which pervade the novel, and the name of the fantasy and science fiction writer from the 'thirties and 'forties, Clark Ashton Smith.
Prince’s ability to squeeze sand into glass and quartz fragment strongly parallels the power of many action heroes (most notably Superman), and the idea of aristocratic families feuding in space is found in numerous other space opera novels.
In keeping with this sort of game-playing, in a scene that takes place in a vast museum, the Alkane, in the city of Phoenix on the planet Vorpis, at one point Lorq and Katin hurry through the "FitzGerald Salon," clearly based on the actual "Rubens Salon" in the Louvre Museum in Paris--after the "Mona Lisa" and the "Raft of the Medusa," probably the Louvre's most impressive holdings. The artist Russell FitzGerald (1935--1976) was a good friend of Delany's and did a number of book and magazine covers for him (including the cover for the first edition of Nova and the cover for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction edition of "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" [1968]) and the three covers for the English paperback edition of the three volumes of Delany's Fall of the Towers trilogy. He is thanked at the beginning of Nova, along with their mutual friend poet Helen Adam, for helping with "Grail and Tarot lore." FitzGerald had a basement studeo on East 2nd Street in New York City's East Village, modeled after a similar studeo used by the Victorian artist and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and known to FitzGerald's friends as "the Black Studeo." There FitzGerald worked on a series of large canvases similar in size to the ones by Rubens that line the walls of the Louvre Salon. Delany often visited the Black Studeo and even worked there on Nova in his notebook, while FitzGerald worked on his great hyperreal paintings, the two of them drinking white wine together. The museum lamp in Nova that allows paintings to be viewed under the same order of light in which they were created grew out of their studeo conversaions. Eventually FitzGerald did an entire tarot deck, which his friends referred to as "the Nova tarot." FitzGerald and "the Black Studeo" are the model for the character "Proctor" and his studeo--and the art objects contained in it--in Delany's novel Equinox (1973). For many years Delany hoped that a FitzGerald painting called Götterdämarung, which he'd painted over the same months as Delany wrote Nova, would eventually make a color cover for the novel. Alas, it never happened. Those interested in FitzGerald's colorful bisexual life can learn more about him in the biography of the San Francisco poet Jack Spicer, Poet Be Like God (Weslyan University Press; Hanover: 1998), by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian. By the time FitzGerald and his wife and family left New York for Vancouver, B.C., the building housing the Black Studeo had been taken over by the New York chapter of the Hells Angels (with whom FitsGerald was on good terms), who stayed on there for many years afterward.
[edit] The Tarot and the Grail
Within the future society, in a strange reversal of modernity, reading the Tarot is considered both scientific and accurate – the Mouse is actually ridiculed as being old-fashioned and uneducated for his skepticism of such readings.
Delany makes it clear that the Tarot should not be used for outright prediction. As Katin tells the highly skepticle Mouse: "[T]he cards don't actually predict anything. They simply propegate an educated commentary on present situations[.]" (Nova, 112). "[Tarot cards] only become superstitious when they are abused, employed to direct rather than guide and suggest." (Nova, 113) But as the plot developes, sometimes it's difficult to distinguish clearly between useful "guiding" and abusive "directing."
The story of scarred Captain von Ray's obsessive quest for a nova with his crew of outcasts recalls Melville's tale of wounded Captain Ahab's search for the white whale in Moby-Dick. (At its publication in 1968, Time Magazine reviewer Roger Sale wrote, "[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show.") In Nova, the events are interpreted by Katin as a quest for the Holy Grail, with Illyrion playing the part of the Grail. As in the Grail story, there is a failed attempt to gain it, and someone must make a major self sacrifice (in Nova, his sanity and senses) in order to succeed.
Katin, for his part, is constantly trying to find an archetype in which to place his novel, and finally discovers it within the Grail quest. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Nova is the book Katin eventually writes.
[edit] Creativity, Art, Change, and Stagnation
Although the novel takes place in the 32nd century, the society within it is described as being highly stagnant, even taking into account the spread of interstellar travel and cyborging.
Cyana Von Ray Morgan, who is Lorq’s aunt and a curator at humanity’s largest museum, remarks that one-fourth of the displays at her museum are devoted to the Twentieth Century. She justifies this by saying that, despite all the progress made by mankind, the Twentieth Century encompasses the greatest change in mankind's situation: "At the beginning of that amazing century, mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that lived on several worlds." (Nova, 156) We must note that when Nova appeared in 1968, a shy year before the first manned moon landing, many people--including many science fiction writers--had great hope for the development of the space program. Few people forsaw that the moon-landing would effectively shut down the aggressive part of the program for the next twenty years. If the transition Delany so optimistically predicted is to come about, it will have to come in the twenty-first century--or later.
Because of such attitudes at the time the book was written, today some readers might find that characters seem to make a disproportionate number of references to 20th century culture: at Prince’s party in Paris (which takes place in the year 3162), a group of entertainers start performing a song by The Mamas and the Papas. Katin makes an offhand remark that indicates the board game Monopoly (which was invented during the early 20th century) is still in existence, if not widely played. When he needs to name a "Renaissance Man," Katin mentions Bertrand Russell, despite the passage of more than a millennium since Russell died.
A main interest of the book--unusual for a science fiction novel--is the two approaches to art characterized by the Mouse and Katin. In playing on his sensory syrynx, the Mouse is spontaneous, improvisatory, highly personal and immediately emotional. While he uses whatever material is around him as the basis for his art, the Mouse's creations on his syrinx are, however beautiful, ephemeral and disposable. In Nietzsche's terms, he is a Dionysian artist. Katin on the other hand is (again in Nietzsche's terms) an Apollonian artist. He is deeply intellectual, highly theoretical, largely impersonal, and concerned with the richness and complexity of the statement his artwork will make in terms of history. The irony of his approach is that, for all the hundreds of thousands of words he has written on his recorder about his theory of what the novel should be and do, he is still looking for a subject--a story--that is important enough in historical terms to stand up under all his theorizing. When Katin's approach gets out of hand, the result is paralysis and silence. When the Mouse's approach gets out of control, as the novel dramatizes in one climactic sequence, the instruments of art become murderous weapons. The conclusion the Mouse arrives at to Katin's problem--and for the reader appreciating the book on this level, it should be no surprise--is that Lorq's quest itself, which will shake up the power structure of the entire galaxy, is the historically proper subject for Katin's novel, at the same time that Katin realizes he must learn how to employ some of the Mouse's immediacy, spontaneity, and energy. It does not hurt that, by the end of Nova, Lorq's quest has achieved the shape of a classical tragedy: Lorq has had to sacrifice his senses in the same way that Dan--at the start of the book--has already lost his; and in the way that the Mouse has been so afraid might happen to him. In many ways the novel is about perception itself--its value, its pleasures, the information it allows us to access, the sense it allows us to make of the rich and colorful social universe.
Delany is an African American. It is not surprising that the story's main character, Lorq, is black. He is described as a mulatto (though the word itself does not occur in the text). His father's family is originally Norwegian. His mother is a native of Senegal. Indeed, the residents of the Pleiades Federation are an extremely mixed racial population. Within the Pleiades and Outer Colonies, races tend to mix. In addition to appearances, characters from the Pleiades sometimes have names that indicate a mixed racial heritage (i.e., “Yorgos Satsumi,” a mine owner and Von Ray family friend, has a clearly Japanese last name, but a first name that indicates an Eastern European or Russian background). This is in sharp contrast to the Earth-centered Draco society, where the leaders tend to be uniformly Caucasian. Moreover, according to the Mouse, Earth still has problems with racism: he recalls seeing Gypsies lynched when he was younger.
The race issue may well be a driving point in the novel. The Red/von Ray feud is revived after Prince Red violently attacks Lorq for showing a romantic interest in his sister, Ruby. While not spelled out, there is a suggestion that one reason for the anger might be prejudice against interracial mixing on the Red family's part.
Additionally, the novel refers repeatedly to an historic "Vega Republic," presumably among the worlds circling the star Vega, which flourished several centuries prior to the novel’s beginning. At one point, apparently, the Republic staged an uprising and attempted to declare both political and cultural autonomy from Earth. During those years the Vegans created a new and different style in furnature, fabrics, and architecture. Many of their artists, musicians, and writers produced highly distinctive work that, in later years, caught the imagination of intellectuals in both Draco and the Pleiades. Before Nova begins, however, the Vega Republic uprising was violently suppressed, and Katin claims that the ability to identify remnants of Vegan culture has become nothing but an intellectual "parlor game."
Lorq, for his part, and as the quest continues, largely drops the rationalizations for the Red-Von Ray vendetta except for the fact that his actions, for better or worse, will produce a major cultural shift in humanity, even though nobody can tell what that change will be, or if it will be a positive or negative shift.
[edit] Man and Machine, Deprivation and Alienation
Culture is central to the story in Nova. Because the human race is so widely spread among so many star systems, there would seem to be no common cultural capital. The society is in a pre-revolutionary state. Social class and economic tensions have caused the feud between the "new money" von Ray family and the "old money" Red family, both of whom exploit the Outer Colonies (akin to today's Third World). In this respect, the relationship between Draco and the Pleiades resembles that between the British Empire and the USA in the 19th century. The Pleiades are an increasingly successful breakaway federation with their own distinctive dialect, yet its elite still speak with the dialect of the parent federation of Draco.
One thing all characters have in common is their cyborging. Individuals who cannot or will not accept these implants are effectively removed from society. The Mouse, for instance, mentions that his people (the Gypsies) refused the implants and, as a result, were treated with intolerance and even killed on Earth.
Prince’s anger over his artificial arm, while irrational on the surface, is eventually hypothesized to have been caused by its affect on his ability to cyborg. Generally, a person has a total of five implants, two of which are located in the arms. Since Prince was born with only one arm, he cannot fully connect himself with a machine.
Although the society seems on the edge of a revolution (or some other unspecified major change), the future of the novel is optimistic. As Katin reveals in one of his expository monologues, the problem of labor alienation has been overcome through the use of technology: practically all humans have cyborg socket implants that allow them to interface directly with the machines they use. These sockets are highly adaptable. Characters plug them into everything from small vacuum cleaners to the navigational systems of starships. By directly interfacing with the machines, workers are able to identify with their work, and the result is greater psychological wellbeing and less labor alienation.
[edit] Sex and Incest
Delany is an open homosexual, and several relationships in Nova suggest a gay or bisexual reading. Although Sebastian and Tyÿ would appear to be a heterosexual couple, and Lorq von Ray lusts after Ruby Red, Delany is not explicit about other central characters' sexualities. Katin's sexuality is never mentioned, and although the Mouse is described as having had relationships with women in the past, he and Katin (a Gypsy with only a vocational education, and a Harvard intellectual, respectively) have a clearly homosocial friendship. In the same way that a homoerotic subtext informs the relationship Melville describes between Captain Ahab and the cabin boy Pip in Moby-Dick, a similar undercurrent vibrates through the scenes between Captain von Ray and the Mouse.
The relationships within the Red family are portrayed as extremely dark. When Lorq, Prince, and Ruby meet as children, a five-year-old Ruby makes an innocent comment that indicates their father, Aaron Red, leads a colorful social life back on Earth. After the three children get into trouble, Aaron becomes extremely upset and hints at an abusive nature, remarking that Ruby "knows what’s going to happen when I get her home." Aaron’s words are enough to scare both Prince and Ruby, driving the latter to tears.
Later in the novel, Prince tells Lorq outright that Aaron abused both him and Ruby as children, with an emphasis on Ruby, and describes his father as "a charming, cultured, and utterly vicious man" who often took out his anger (e.g., after unsuccessful business deals) on his children.
Throughout the novel, the intelligent and beautiful Ruby remains both loyal and subservient to her brother, even to the extent of going against her own feelings. Their relationship, as mentioned above, has a highly incestuous nature. Prince refuses to allow her to interact with Lorq. Ruby, in turn, maintains a close emotional attachment to her brother, one that, in a suggestive scene near the novel’s end, proves disastrous.
[edit] Assassination, Pain and Violence
In Nova, a culturally iconic political assassination has taken place. The advanced technology at the time allowed many millions of people throughout the universe to experience the sensations and emotions of the victim ("Secrerary Morgan," the leader of the Pleiades Federation) as he died and, directly afterwards, the emotions of his widow (and Lorq Von Ray’s aunt), Cyana Von Ray Morgan.
Clearly this death is a dramatic rewriting of the "televised" assassination of John F. Kennedy, which had taken place only five years before Nova was published. Cyana Von Ray Morgan, the widow, strongly resembles Jackie Fitzgerald Kennedy (at least, at the time of the novel's publication) in her response, appearance, and interest in art.
Lorq, Prince, and Ruby -- all heirs of wealthy clans who grew up in luxury -- live what Lorq refers to as "meaningless" lives, indulging in sex, expensive hobbies (i.e., space-yacht racing), and partying. Lorq's transformation begins when his face is mangled by Prince's artificial hand. Later in the novel, both Lorq and the Mouse attack Prince and Ruby, causing them great pain. As the novel nears completion, Ruby remarks that, prior to that event, neither she nor her brother had a true concept of what pain was really like; none of them truly fanthomed the importance of their actions and the feud until they were personally hit by it.
Practically all the socially powerful characters have fundamentally violent natures, which often they try to hide or repress. Despite the elder Von Rays' attempts to end the feud, befriend Aaron Red, and have their children become friends, the Von Rays cannot escape the fact that the family wealth and status were based on piracy and murder. Although outwardly Aaron Red appears harmless (he is described as bald, portly, and easily embarressed) and he seems to be friends with members of the Von Ray family, events can bring out his natural violence and reveal him as an abusively indulgent father.
The novel hints at these burried emotions, when, for example, the Von Ray and Red families meet in the Outer Colonies at a reconcilitory reception. Seven-year-old Prince uses his artificial arm and its strength to kill Lorq's mother's pet bird in front of Lorq and Ruby. Later that night, the adults leave to watch the future equivalent of a cock fight, but with winged reptiles rather than roosters. The novel's violence gathers force in an unexpected eruption from Prince against Lorq at his party in Paris; much of the novel tries to explain the origins of this rage.
Both rage and pain are eventually recognized by the mature characters to have been a necessary component of their lives. Lorq realizes that, without Prince's attack to 'wake him up,' he would have gone on with a carefree life; he maintains his scar as a reminder of this. The successful completion of Lorq's quest has an extremely painful outcome for Lorq personally. As well, now that the need for Illyrion mines is gone, we know, the Outer Colonies will collapse socially and economically. The Red children fought for the status quo; only near the end of the novel do they experience the pain that goes along with the realization of what Lorq is trying to do.
[edit] Influences
Nova is considered one of the major forerunners of the cyberpunk movement. It prefigures, for instance, cyberpunk's staple trope of human interfacing with computers via implants.
While the New Wave of science fiction was concentrating on near-future science fiction stories and the highly subjective exploration of "inner space," in 1968, the year it was published, Nova seemed a deliberate throw-back to traditional space opera--and space opera at its grandest and most operatic. While reviews in the American professional science fiction magazines, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy, by Judith Merril and A. J. Budrys, respectively, were highly praiseful, the review in the New Wave outlet, England's 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."
The novel has always been popular with readers, but it took a decade-and-a-half for cyberpunk writers and readers to begin praising its handling of drugs, tarot cards, and its off-hand presentation of racial variety, its narrative energy and sense of historical sweep, and finally its exploration of the relationship between politics and art--indeed, for the cyberpunk writers it soon became an iconic text. Characters like the Mouse, Lynceos, Idas, Tyÿ, Sebastian, and even Katin can be seen as hippies, with itinerant lifestyles and drugs. As well, the design and terminology of the Mouse's sensory syrinx has an overriding feel of a 1960s electric guitar.
Writer William Gibson claimed to be greatly influenced by Delany, and his novel Neuromancer includes allusions to Nova. However, while Delany's vision of the future is optimistic, the cyberpunk movement has a distinctly dystopic outlook. Gibson's novel includes a character, Peter Riviera, introduced (like the Mouse) in Istanbul, with the same holographic projection powers (although via implants) as the Mouse in Nova; but Gibson's character is a psychopath. Likewise, Gibson includes a character who awkwardly wears only one shoe; this character (Ashpool) is an insane killer.
[edit] Publishing Status
Despite its status, reputation, and influence on science-fiction as a genre, for a dozen years after 1990 (the date of Bantam Books' final 14th printing), Nova was out of print. Hardcover copies were highly prized. Not until 2002 did Vintage Books rerelease it. Before then, students taking courses in science fiction could only read Babel-17, Delany's novel two before Nova.
Over the years before Nova appeared, Delany had already won the Neubla Award twice for best science fiction novel of the year: Babel-17 had gained the award in 1967 (in a tie for best novel of 1966 with Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, a.k.a. Charlie). The Einstein Intersection won him the award the following year in 1968 (for best novel of 1967). While still in manuscript, Nova was submitted to John W. Campbell, famous editor of Analog Magazine, for possible serialization. Campbell rejected the novel with a letter to Delany's agent saying that, though he'd enjoyed the book, he did not feel the "science fiction readership was ready for a Negro protagonist." It's possible, of course, that the recreational drug use in the novel (though the novel makes it clear that these drugs are legal) and the hints of incest around the villainous brother and sister, Prince and Ruby, were also on Campbell's mind. Still, in many ways Nova seems the quintessential Analog Magazine adventure, except for its cultural diversity. 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--though it was nominated and soon regularly referred to as "the perfect science fiction novel". In the pages of Galaxy Magazine (Analog's rival), resident critic Algys Budrys would write the following August, "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"--heady praise for the work of a young man completed before his twenty-sixth birthday. And the hint of racism in Campbell's rejection letter is at least as strong as the hint of incest among the novel's villains.
The Vintage edition of the novel corrects some minor mistakes in the original version. It also adds an entire passage that does not appear in any of the older published versions.
In the Vintage edition, a passage is included in which Prince Red brags about how he is responsible for the death of Brian, a character who disappears, in earlier editions, after a single chapter. In the Vintage edition, toward the end of the book Prince describes how, using his wealth and power, and for no other reason than a careless comment Brian made about Prince's arm, he slowly destroyed Brian's life, until Brian became homeless and died of exposure. Prince claims that he has killed perhaps two dozen other people in a similar manner.
This passage significantly alters Prince's characterization. In earlier editions, the worst that could be said about Prince is that he was "spoiled" and had a violent temper. However, the added passage turns him into a remorseless murderer. The passage adds a moral component to Lorq's quest absent in the earlier versions. If Prince defeats Lorq, the most powerful man in the galaxy will be a psychopathic killer.
The above passage is in the original typescript of Nova, however. It is also in Delany's handwritten version of the novel in his notebooks from 1967. Both are in the Delany Holdings on store in the Howard Gottlieb Archives at the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University. It was omitted before publication of the first edition, when a friend, who had read the manuscript for Delany, found it too extreme. In later years Delany decided to return it to the novel, because he felt readers needed to know what happened to Brian, after he seems to vanish from the book.
In another passage added in the Vintage Books edition, related to the above, Lorq has a memory that implies both of his parents and Aaron Red (as did Dan and Brian) died during the past ten years. This is not in either the original typescript or the notebook version, and is a true addition.
