Nutshell: always already dashing petit bourgeois outsider seeks to break interstellar monopoly of Old Money aristocrat via innovative stellar semiotics.Text is kickass in its presentation of celestial objects and outer space, “where night means forever and morning’s a recollection” (18). Space itself: “the vermillion rush, in which hung the charred stars” (90). Each star is similarly “a furnace where the very worlds of empire are smelted” (86). One planet’s inhabitants speak with a dicked-up Yodaesque syntax, which is mostly annoying, but does have its corollary moments of awesome: “Into the blasting sun, plunge?” (94).Primary objective of protagonist and his seven samurai sub-protagonists is a fictive heavy element, ‘illyrion,’ found in the centers of stars, accessible during a nova, say—“the whole continuum in the area of a nova is space that has been twisted away” (21). Sufficient illyrion “to keep this moon’s core molten is measured in grams” (26); protagonist accordingly proposes to capture seven tons of the stuff (id.). This is set in an interstellar society, which retains its proto-fascistic losers who complain about “moral degeneration of the young” (40-41), that “economic, political, and technological change have shattered all cultural tradition” (41), that “there’s no reservoir of national, or world solidarity, even on Earth” (id.), and instead “pseudo-interplanetary society” replaced “any real tradition,” a “tangle of decadence, scheming, corruption” (id.).These losers respond with despair to interstellar society’s basic proposition that given any product, half of it may be grown on one world, the other half mined a thousand light-years away. On Earth, seventeen out of the hundreds of possible elements make up ninety percent of the planet. Take any other world, and you’ll find a different dozen making up ninety to ninety-nine percent. (79) This monologue leads up to the point that interstellar society is contingent fundamentally on transit so expensive that only “national governments on Earth, or corporations” “could afford the initial cost” (80). This leads to one sector of interstellar society having been “extended by the vastly monied classes of Earth,” whereas another sector “was populated by a comparatively middle-class movement” and a third sector, the newest, “comes from the lowest economic strata of the galaxy” (83). Protagonist is one of the principal nouveau riche greasers at the head of the ‘middle-class’ sector, and much of the conflict of the novel arises out of a silly set of childhood confrontations with antagonist from the ‘vast monied classes.’ Though the puerile sections are of little moment to the overall setting, the present moment conflict between them has world-historical significance, as though SRD were boiling down class struggle between an aristocracy and a bourgeoisie to these two principals. Protagonist reveals himself to be a ludic nihilist (is that a class-bound ideology?), which we shall recall is the upjumped cousin of lumpenized antisocial nihilism: the worlds we’ve been through haven’t really fit us for meanings. If I survive, then a world, a hundred worlds, a way of life survives. If [antagonist] survives… […] Still, perhaps it is a game. They keep telling us we live in a meaningless society, that there is no solidity to our lives. Worlds are tottering about us now, and still I only want to play. (152) This candor reveals protagonist to be not only a ludic nihilist, but likewise a bearer of Sloterdijk’s enlightened false consciousness: “the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only a habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless, while those actions I construed as gratuitous reveal a most demonic purpose” (166). Protagonist even informs antagonist that “the reason I must fight you is I think I can win” (183). So, he’s, like, supergross--and yet still better than antagonist, who’s merely an Old Right aristocrat.An example of how alien interstellar society might appear: There was a thousand-year period from about fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred, when people spent an incredible amount of time and energy keeping things clean. It ended when the last communicable disease finally became not only curable but impossible. There used to be an incredibility called ‘the common cold’ that even in the twenty-fifth century you could be fairly sure of having at least once a year. I suppose back then there was some excuse for the fetish: there seemed to have been some correlation between dirt and disease. But after contagion became an obsolescent concern, sanitation became equally obsolescent. (123) Interstellar society also relies upon “a revolution in the concept of work” (195), arising out of the invention of “neural plugs,” whereby people plug their brain directly into machines to operate them: “All major industrial work began to be broken down into jobs that could be machined ‘directly’ by man.” This purportedly “returned humanity to the working man. Under this system, much of the endemic mental illness caused by feelings of alienation left society” (196). The conclusion is that this society has allegedly abolished Marxist ‘alienation’ caused by diremptions in the process of production, maybe (this is as yet still a class society based on private property, exploitation of wage labor, and suchlike, though).Manifestly a precursor to Rothfuss (insofar as one sub-protagonist is an orphaned gypsy lutist of sorts) and to The Matrix to the extent that people are plugged directly into machines. Metatextualist component in another sub-protagonist who is “writing a novel” and records notes on his travels for the book, amounting to “some hundred thousand words of notes” (15). Novelist contends that “novels were primarily about relationships. […] Their potentiality lay in that they belied the loneliness of the people who read them, people essentially hypnotized by the machinations of their own consciousness” (159). Something conceptually very interesting in “there are expressions that happen on the outside of the face; there are expressions that happen on the inside, with only quivers on the lips and eyelids” (93), a semiotics of face that we find most importantly later in R. Scott Bakker. One character notes that “on the ruptured features it was hard to read subtleties in [protagonist’s] emotions” (96) (emphasis added). Someone else’s “expression inside was a quick smile” (100). You for a few seconds only [antagonist’s] face have seen. In the face the lines of a man’s fate mapped are. […] From the crack across mine, you where those lines my fate can tell will touch? (id.) Similarly, dude notes “the smile the captain had not yet allowed on his face” (175). There is a cool concordance here—just as there are internal and external signifiers for persons, both of which can be read by the trained interlocutor, so too the star has its own semiotics, both internal and external: “Because the make-up of a star doesn’t change in a nova, you can’t detect the build-up over any distance with spectranalysis or anything like that” (88). Much is therefore made of the astrophysics of the nova, which are noted to be “implosions, not explosions” (86); the ultimate explanation for this is kinda cool (not gonna spoil it). This is important because protagonist wishes to pass to the center of a star while nova is in flagrante delicto in order to harvest his unobtainium; he had already done as much by accident when “our ship was funneled directly through the center of the sun—and out the other side” (89). Novel reveals astrophysicist opinion to be lacking consensus on the question: After a thousand years of study [!!!], from close up and far away, it’s a bit unnerving how much we don’t know about what happens in the center of the most calamitous of stellar catastrophes [!]. The make-up of the star stays the same, only the organization of the matter within the star is disrupted by a process that is still not quite understood. It could be an effect of tidal harmonics. It could even be a prank of Maxwell’s demon. (95) So, after 1,000 years of study, the results of astrophysics is to note that the signifier changes but the underlying signified is self-identical (that’s synonymy, I think).Because it’s a Delany book, it can be labor intensive at times, though not so much as Babel, Einstein, or heavens forfend, Dhalgren. Contains however the normal SRD fixation on some body of mythological content, here, working with the Tarot and Arthurian sangraal. Authorial alter ego asks in this connection: I haven’t seen anybody read the Tarot since I was in school. […] I suppose at one time you could have called me quite an amateur aficionado of the Book of Toth [sic] as they were incorrectly labeled in the seventeenth century. I would say rather […] the Book of the Grail? (100) (Am uncertain what the ‘Book of the Grail’ means; there’s a few allegedly lost things out there by that name, but it’s apparently not the name of any standard Arthurian text.) Author’s alter ego explains that “the cards don’t actually predict anything. They simply propagate an educated commentary on present situations” (101), which is innocuous enough. But: the seventy-eight cards of the Tarot present symbols and mythological images that have recurred and reverberated through forty-five centuries of human history. Someone who understands these symbols can construct a dialogue about a given situation. There’s nothing superstitious about it. The Book of Changes, even Chaldean Astrology only become superstitious when they are abused, employed to direct rather than guide and suggest. (id.) Uh, okay? It gets worse: “If somebody had told me I’d be working in the same crew, today, in the thirty-first century, with somebody who could honestly be skeptical about the Tarot, I don’t think I would have believed it” (110). Dude will “doubt if such fossilized ideas could have come from anywhere else but Earth” (id.); he “wouldn’t be surprised if in some upper Mongolian desert town there isn’t someone who still thinks Earth floats on a dish on the back of an elephant who stands on a serpent coiled on a turtle swimming in the sea of forever” (id.); indeed, this setting is so inverted that alter ego will carp “here you are, flying this star-freighter, a product of thirty-first century technology, and at the same time your head full of a petrified ideas a thousand years out of date” (id.). Alter ego can therefore proclaim that the thesis that the Tarot was faked by gypsies is “a very romantic notion” (111): “the idea that all those symbols, filtered down through five thousand years of mythology, are basically meaningless and have no bearing on man’s mind and actions [NB: idealist collective subject as per similar juvenile ideas in Ayn Rand], strikes a little bell of nihilism ringing” (id.). I suppose the basis of accusing Tarot skepticism of nihilism must be a hasty and unwarranted vulgar jungianism. Ugh. Despite all that, alter ego is an interesting cat, who believes that he needs “an awareness of my time’s conception of history” in order to write his novel, which is a fairly Benjaminian approach (cf. the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ especially No. VI, VII, & IX). History begins with the ancient Greeks as “the study of whatever had happened during their own lives” (116), and became in the hands of Anna Komnena “the study of those events of man’s actions that had been documented” (id.); a thousand years thereafter, it morphed again into “a series of cyclic rises and falls as one civilization overtook another” (id.), with events outside the cycle as “unimportant.” It may be “difficult for us today to appreciate the differences between Spengler and Toynbee, though from all accounts their approaches were considered polar in their day” (id.). Dude’s theory of history is revealed, after several deferrals, as “a great net, spreading among the stars, through time” (126), which is kinda philistine as a figuration, but may have some applicability when diffusion is dependent upon interstellar transit. A “great web that spreads across the galaxy,” “the matrix in which history happens” (155). Each person is a “junction” and each event “like a ripple” (id.). The effect of this doctrine: The United States was a product of that whole communication explosion, movements of people, movements of information, the development of movies, radio, and television that standardized speech and the framework of thought—not thought itself, however—which meant that person A could understand not only person B, but person W, X and W as well. People, information, and ideas move across the galaxy much faster today than they moved across the United States in 1950. You and I were born a third of a galaxy apart […] Still, you and I are much closer in information structure than a Cornishman and Welshman a thousand years ago. (137-38) Recommended for those who make a last stand for cultural autonomy and all that, readers unable to distinguish between laughter and rage, and persons who between you and your flaming sun will come.
This is probably my least favorite novel by Samuel R. Delany, which is to say that it’s excellent, but not perfect. It’s actually more ambitious than The Fall of the Towers, but, perhaps because of that, winds up not having as many interesting digressions or memorable characters. On the whole, it is classic Galactic Space Opera, though it tries at times to be something more.The central story wants to be a kind of Grail Quest, but it’s actually more of a Moby Dick revenge tale. We have the driven, disfigured captain, and even the monster whale in the shape of a nova, but a nova is a rather placid enemy (leave it alone, it leaves you alone), so there are human-demigod-like foes in the form of competing star-fliers, whom the captain has known since childhood, and with whom his family has a traditional feud. The structure wants to be an ensemble, focusing on the crew of the Roc, but Delany doesn’t give much depth to most of the characters, and I couldn’t keep them straight. Only two of them, Katin and the Mouse, had enough personality to be seen as the protagonists, and they essentially watch the demigods dueling from ground-level. I assume that Delany was either in the closet or had been told that only heterosexual sci fi was publishable at the time, because the female characters are presented as love/sex objects, but the only physiques he ever describes well are those of the men. I said that there were less interesting digressions in this book; that’s not to say that there were none. In imagining a society 1000+ years in the future, Delany winds up creating some very interesting socio-technological conceptions. One, which appears to have influenced the Cyberpunk genre, is the existence of “ports” in humans which allow them to control machines cybernetically. Delany even explains that this is a case of deliberate inefficiency: making the machines dependent on their human users gives humans something useful to do in life, safeguarding high employment levels and psychological well-being. I don’t know whether this novel was the first to suggest that in the future complex machines would be physically connected to human nervous systems, but it’s the earliest example I know of. He also explores a bit of the entertainment technology of the period: first, “Psycho-ramas,” which are essentially dramas experienced by the audience as through the eyes of one or more performers, and, in far more detail, the “syrinx,” an instrument that creates holograms and scents as well as melodic sounds for the player. Ever a self-reflexive writer, Delany uses the character of Katin for expository purposes. He is an intellectual with a fascination with history, and is constantly saying things like “you know, a person from the past would be confused about what you just did” or “this aspect of our society is only about 400 years old.” It’s all a bit heavy-handed, if a bit endearing as well. Katin is interested in writing a novel in a society that has forgotten what they are, and this gives Delany an opportunity to reflect out-loud on his own writing process, and also to end on a joke.
What do You think about Nova (2002)?
This was fun. Samuel R. Delany is a talented writer with a lot of ideas and a good sense of character and social context. He's certainly not reaching here like he did in his masterpiece, Dhalgren, and a lot of this boils down to a drama cast in archetypes: bold, vaguely Ahab-esque captain, back from previous failed expedition plans next. Semi-amoral rival with a beautiful sister. Street-smart orphan who tries to live in the present without introspection. Etc. Except Delaney manages to make most of these central roles pretty compelling and well-fleshed out nonetheless. And in this case the melodrama plays out over a trip to fly through the center of an exploding star (via some very dubious, very exciting physics).
—Nate D
Bizarre psychedelic jewel of novel that sometimes reads like prose poetry. Allusions to Bester, Holy Grail, Moby Dick, tarot, City of the Dreadful Night add to the enjoyment all with interesting thoughts on film and music, the future of the novel, humanity and technology, work and other weird thoughts.This book has an especially chilling finale alleviated by the humurous last line and an unsuspected conclusion. First Delaney I've made it through but maybe this will give the urge to tackle more(I failed my first attempts at Dhalgren and Einstein Intersection)
—Adam
Un libro que irradia. Un anterior (y único) libro leído de Delany - En Ciron Vuelan - me pareció intimista, agradable pero sin mayor brillo. Pero Nova es una explosión. Un poderosamente creado capitán - Lork Von Ray - que es, por supuesto, un capitán Ahab del siglo XXXII persiguiendo obsesivamente, no su ballena blanca, sino a su enceguecedora estrella. En torno suyo, un universo de notables personajes, bizarros pero de una sólida riqueza, sorprendentes para una novela relativamente corta. Y todo este cóctel de complejas relaciones, en un coherentísimo universo galáctico dominado por enormes conflictos de poder y orfandad cultural, bajo la guía del Tarot y suavizado, a veces, por la música del syrynx. Nova es también alegoría: piensas en el Gral - Illirion - en una iniciación - Nova se destruye, pero al hacerlo, crea - y en sacrificio - el mayor, que es el propio. Y, de yapa, una escritura llena de energía contenida, densa y absorbente. La mejor sorpresa (de CF) del año.
—Julio
