I was introduced to science fiction as a boy in the mid-1970s via Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and EE ‘Doc’ Smith, but within a handful of years I’d found other sf authors whose books I much preferred — Clifford D Simak, James Blish, AE van Vogt and Samuel R Delany. By the early 1980s, I was reading CJ Cherryh, Ursula K Le Guin, Frank Herbert and John Varley. My reading widened as the 1980s progressed, even more so when I joined the British Science Fiction Association in the late 1980s.
I remember buying a copy of Driftglass (1971, USA), a collection by Samuel R Delany, on a family holiday in Paris in the early 1980s. And I remember reading Delany’s The Ballad of Beta-2/Empire Star (1965/1966, USA), which I’d taken with me, on that same holiday. Empire Star remains a favourite to this day. I don’t remember when I first read Nova (1968, USA), although I suspect it was later. When it was published as one of the SF Masterwork series by Gollancz in 2001 (№ 37 in the original numbered editions, to be precise), I read it, but I’m pretty sure that was a reread…
Even so, when I began to reread Nova in 2021, twenty years later… I’d actually retained very little of the book. I’m a big fan of Delany’s fiction — Dhalgren (1974, USA) is probably the book I’ve reread most often. But I was never as taken with his most popular science fiction novels — popular among science fiction fans, that is — as most sf fans. As I’ve said, I love both Empire Star and Dhalgren, but I find Nova and Babel-17 (1966, USA), also in the SF Masterwork series (at № 6, in the original numbered series), mostly forgettable. I’m not sure why that is.
Nova is the story of Mouse, a stud jockey from Earth who is also a skilled player of the syrinx. After several years of flying about the Solar system, he’s hired by Captain Lorq Von Ray, scion of the one of the richest families in the Pleiades Federation, one of the three main polities in the galaxy, along with the Earth-centred Draco, and the essentially lawless Outer Colonies. Von Ray wants to end the economic domination of Redshift Ltd, Draco-based builders of starships, partly due to a childhood rivalry with Prince Red, son of the family who control Redshift. FTL is dependent on a transuranic element called Illyrion, which is mined in the Pleiades Federation. But Von Ray has discovered he can harvest sufficient quantities from an actual nova to flood the market and crash Illyrion’s value. This will benefit the Pleiades Federation, not Draco, because the former will be able to build spaceship so much more cheaply.
Delany carefully lays out the economics and (invented) physics of his plot… and then hangs it all on a pair of young men who behave like prepubescent teenagers. Prince Red is plainly a psychopath — and even admits as much — so Von Ray’s insistence on “beating” him seems adolescent at best. But no one reads Delany for the character portraits. He’s good at it — and all of the main cast in Nova are well-drawn characters, even if the central rivalry feels imposed rather than organic — but where Delany really shines is in the use of language. This is poetry as prose. If it feels a little dated in places, it doesn’t actually work against it. And, to be fair, the final confrontation between Prince Red and Lorq Von Ray reminds the reader of a scene in Star Wars 3: Revenge of The Sith, which is pretty good for a book that predates the film by 37 years.
I think what surprised me most on this read of the book was how essentially traditional a space opera it is. Much of it is pure Delany — the synaesthetic musical instrument called the syrinx, the cybernetic “studs” used to control spacecraft, the cultures on the various worlds… But there are also great chunks of exposition that explain the politics and economics of the book’s universe, the use and importance of Illyrium, and the business relationship between Redshift Ltd and Von Ray’s parents. It doesn’t, well, it doesn’t feel like Delany — at least to someone who has read a significant amount of his fiction.
It’s perhaps because of that careful setting out of the universe of Nova that the novel feels like an attempt to write a space opera following the precepts of the day: Delany was trying to prove he could write something more traditional. The Einstein Intersection (1967, USA), a novel famously based on the story of Orpheus, had appeared the previous year, and it would be a seven-year gap until the publication of Dhalgren. ‘We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line’ and ‘Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones’ also appeared in 1968, the first in F&F and the second in New Worlds. Both of those novellas are more typical of Delany’s output of the time.
Nova was the first of Delany’s novel to be published in hardback in the US. Earlier books had been massmarket paperbacks or one half of doubles.(Gollancz had published Delany in hardback in the UK from his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962, USA).) I don’t know that Delany chose to move his output to a more mainstream science fiction place, and it seems a strangely cynical decision for a sf “wunderkind” to take (he was twenty-one when The Jewels of Aptor was published). But Nova still feels like a more… considered take on a space opera story than Delany’s career had suggested to date.
I previously mentioned Empire Star, which was published two years before Nova. It feels much more like a Delany space opera than Nova does. Or rather, it feels much more Delany. Thinking about Nova for this review, it occurred to me one of the reasons I find Nova so forgettable is because it’s the least Delany-esque book he wrote.
Nova is a good book. It was published 53 years ago. It has weathered those decades well (certainly better than I have done). It’s as valid a space opera as any published in the last twelve months. But it is not, I was surprised to discover, an especially Delany science fiction novel.
And when I read Samuel R Delany, I want a hit of the pure stuff.
