Nova by Samuel R. Delany (1968)

This was my first Delany, and I wasn’t sure what to think. First I liked it, then I disliked it, and finally I liked it very much. It’s an odd book, not because it’s experimental or quirky, but in the way it manages to be — or attempts to be — both conventional and unconventional, to be pulpy Golden Age SF while at the same time transcending or parodying that genre. Or maybe the word is appropriating: it appropriates SF tropes to explore wider questions about storytelling, art, language, and culture, and also to take the genre away from its white American traditions (Delany is American but most of the Earth locations and future cultures in this novel are not, and only the antagonists represent a kind of WASP aristocracy.)

But if you focus on the plot you see a contrived, hokey space opera, with shallow characters, bad dialogue, and a dash of made-up physics. I think that’s why I was in two minds about it, until its metafictional concerns came to the fore towards the end. Which is not to say that the last act is the best or that the preceding stuff is all bad, just that it made me reassess the whole book following my hasty negative assessment when I was in the middle.

It was when I was in the middle that I formed my uncharitable opinion, namely that back in the sixties Delany wanted to have his cake and eat it too: to follow the money by writing within a popular genre, but also to wink at sophisticated readers to say, “I know how clichéd this is.”

Later on I thought: well, what’s wrong with that?

And anyway, the purely science fiction aspect of the novel is not in fact entirely clichéd or formulaic. It is quite serious, not a mere surface or conventional framework within which Delany can be clever and literary (SF vs. literary fiction is, of course, a false dichotomy except in marketing terms). In its far-future worldbuilding, it touches on some stimulating ideas. Here are some of the best:

• Tarot card reading has become respectable, and it’s the scepticism about it which is regarded as simplistic, superstitious, and a relic of the ignorant past.
• Personal cleanliness is a thing of the past now that contagious infection has been wiped out.
• The vast majority of people are cyborgs with sockets that enable them to plug into various items of technology such as spaceships, production lines, and drilling machines. (This idea has been very influential, though whether it was entirely original I’m not sure).
• This allows Delany to imagine a society that, while still capitalist and socially stratified, has banished alienation (in the Marxian sense) and to some extent the division of labour, giving everyone job-satisfaction and self-respect by restoring craftsmanship to the individual.
• But he presents conservative arguments against this state of affairs, which now seem prescient, viz., that the freedom and mobility of workers leaves them unmoored from tradition and community (arguments that he proceeds to knock down).
• Earth and its sphere of influence are reactionary and still ethnically divided, while the breakaway colonies of the Pleiades are revolutionary (though in the bourgeois rather than socialist sense), liberal, and ethnically diverse from top to bottom.

Beyond those purely science fiction ideas, Delany uses his characters to comment on the novel itself (that is, Nova) and to explore his own artistic personality. The battle between the hero and villain is paralleled by a recursive and metafictional conflict between two other characters, one, Katin, who is writing a novel, and another, “the Mouse,” who is a kind of musician or multisensory entertainer. Katin is an intellectual concerned with permanent artistic legacy, and the Mouse is only interested in moving people sensually and in the moment. This has the effect of creating a two-sided novel, with action on one side and commentary on the other, formally revolving — in a knowing way — around a Grail narrative, and thematically revolving around ideas of revolution and rebirth.

And it is two-sided in two ways. Not only is the central conflict between Lorq Von Ray and Prince Red paralleled by the artistic tension between Katin and the Mouse — where the latter functions as a commentary on the former — but Katin and the Mouse also represent the two competing demands of science fiction, and Nova itself, namely literary vs. popular, or intellectual vs. aesthetic. In other words, the disagreement between Katin and the Mouse, which at first seems secondary but by the end has become central, is on one level an in-universe commentary on the events and characters of the story, and is also a second-order commentary on the story as a work of science fiction.

The writing, I was again in two minds about. It’s slapdash and yet full of energy, confusing yet often effective, original, and precise. The flashback sections set in Istanbul, Paris, and Athens, are involving and evocative, but at other times I couldn’t keep track of exactly what was happening, who was standing where, what kind of physical space the characters were in, why such-and-such a character just made that remark, etc. I put this down to Delany’s youthful exuberance (he wrote it in his twenties) and sloppiness rather than my inability to read experimental literature, but I could be wrong  — or it could be both. Perhaps nearer the mark is that Delany’s lurching, knotty style takes some getting used to.

Some of the dialogue is awkward, the subject-object-verb dialect of the Pleiades can be annoying and unconvincing (and unfortunately now brings to mind Yoda), the antagonist is an unrealistic, camply psychopathic villain, and exposition is dumped on the reader via Katin’s notes. But these criticisms miss the point: it is not a realist novel (although it does have excellent realist sections, such as the party in Paris) so much as a playful meta-romance. I particularly appreciated the way that the metafictional aspect of the novel, rather than dropping away in the final denouement as you might expect from the shape of the plot and the conventions of popular fiction, actually ramps up at the end towards a satisfying logical conclusion, one that seems obvious in retrospect.

Close to the end, the character Katin says something that might be straight from young Delany himself:

Right now I’m just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.

Recommended.