Review of Samuel Delaney’s NOVA by David McNicholas

Notes on Samuel Delany’s Nova

1968 – 2026. Earth.

Nova is a world confident with mystery. Its queerness is embodied in literal one-shoe-on-one-shoe-off space pirates and the neuro-congruent defect shared by several main characters. The text is a Tarot reading and a Grail Myth told in 32nd century vernacular from the tongues of a mix of working-class people. Dialog formation shows linguistic drift as cultures form further away from a central canon. This center vs. edge dynamic is reflected throughout the book. The concealed wound of control is visible in the bifurcated rift on Captain Von Ray’s face, the torn mask, revealing the agony beneath every smile.

Gemini tells me that the following jump from high-level literary analysis to personal anecdote is too jarring. What do you think?

2026. New Orleans, LA: Used bookstore.

New Orleans, 2026: I’m driving between Santa Fe, NM and Vero Beach, FL. My quest is severe; fly into the chaos of a dying mind, find the grail, the flickering candles at the center of a dark forest. My mother has dementia.

New Orleans is a favored stopover because it is a living city. And living, it has the edge of chaos which has been kneaded out of gentrified urban centers demolished and rebuilt as sanitized, scripted temples. N.O. has taken damage. It is under attack. It is an outer colony of an extractive machine. The air, water, and government are toxic to the people who live there. As such, it continues to be a true home to music and myth and art and labor.

I walk from the Airbnb toward the gulf, shoulder to shoulder with the tourists who stare at the signs, and locals who gaze into the mind’s eye. I’m modulating my gaze between the two, when the sign for Dauphine Street Books, and windows full of covers… a used bookstore and it’s not even in a strip mall. An archive of human endeavors, passions, dreams… and in I go. 

The bookseller had recently purchased a collection of mass media paperbacks (4.25″x7″) all in clear sleeves, most published in the 60’s or 70’s. It’s hard to choose, but I select two, intended to heal a vacancy. I’ve never read Samuel Delany or Ursula K. Le Guin. They cost me $15 each. The Delany is Nova, a Bantam Edition from 1969, cover price: 60¢.

The striking, yet uncredited cover painting is of the antagonist (this, I learn later) and his robot arm. In the background, a pilot in a visored astronaut helmet flies a golf-ball-shaped spacecraft. Our mythic hero’s face is hidden. We are not shown the dark-skinned space pirate with the keloid fissure running the length of his face. You can just make him out on the original cover illustration, a psychedelic woodblock print. On this second-pressing, his face is completely hidden. Between the pilot in the background and the cyborg in the foreground, a blonde woman in a ravished posture looks over her shoulder toward the pilot. The cover speaks to the operatic drama of the story, but obscures or inverts the POV by foregrounding the antagonists. 

There are only seven chapters in two-hundred pages, which was disorienting at first. I sought the safety of chapter breaks but was faced with interminable story, endless night of song.

Instead of neat and frequent chapter breaks, running headers track space and time above unobtrusive scene changes. Mere line-breaks represent minutes or light-years without the semaphore of section headings. Linear time dissolves in the first half, as the flashback threads of the myth are gathered, and resolves in the second half, as the quest comes into focus. These threads become ropes. Every fiber twisted into length, hold fast the vanes, tacking from sun to sun.

1966 – 1967. Greece – N.Y. : Retrograde and Revolution

A brief author’s note at the end of the book “Athens, June ’66– New York, May ’67” gives an external context to the story, a final meta-nod from a book in conversation with many sources. Delany’s context in which he wrote is as an American citizen living between Greece and New York, sometime after the Greek Apostasia, before the full coup, and likewise beyond the tipping point of the American Civil Rights Movement: organized protest, FBI infiltration, and riots. Nova is a story about power and revolution in a far-flung human future and is unmistakable for its late-sixties optimism. It features a wealthy black starpilot, labelled a pirate by his white, corporate antagonist (who appears on the cover of the book). It resists pedantry, and leans into adventure, telling the story from the various POV’s of the captain and crew. 

Growth must triumph over stasis for humanity to flourish. Our captain is a philosopher and adventurer who fights political stasis in the name of growth. Lorq Von Ray seeks revenge, and the instrument of his revenge is disruption. He will destroy himself and his enemies, to end centralized control and disseminate light into the reaches of the outer colonies. He is a torchbearer, a proto-antihero, in a storymind replete with mysticism, music, and context, and it reads like a poetic myth.

3166. The Milky Way: Persistence and Transformation

In Nova’s 32nd century, our mythic containers are preserved while Delany stirs the content of those frameworks to form new resonances. This evolution of myth demonstrates the book’s thesis of growth. Do you see what Delany did? 

Tempting – to call it a grail myth at its core, but the theme of rhizomatic dispersal interrupts my urge to centralize this influence. An annotated bibliography for the story would fill volumes. Instead of centering ideas, Delany chooses to center a conflict between two men, and allow its manifold references and projections to swirl, engage, and alter each other. Thus, what might be a Grail Myth, dips into more ancient myths, unearthing foundational components of Arthurian legend, a recursive rhizomatic recipe where each ingredient is another recipe.

All this substance floats on poetics that ring and tremble against the plot. I register this as the voice of a generation, Rock + Roll. When Hunter S. Thompson described the era as having “…that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil,” of the sixties as a great rising tide that rolled back after the decade ended, leaving an imaginary high-water mark, he wrote of the same musical optimism Nova steeps in. 

A Grail Myth is a quest to revive a sick king or kingdom, through the transformative power of a magic item and/or (but especially) transformation is conferred through the journey, itself. Illness can be viewed through the lens of deformity and injury which affect multiple characters. Medically speaking, in the 32nd century, permanent injury or disease is nearly unthinkable, even to people of limited economic status. Delany invents the neuro-congruent defect to give several of his characters a deep wound that even advanced technology cannot heal. By doing so, the story points us toward spiritual/political solutions.

Nova foregrounds the human body as a frontier of experience. It questions the role of ability and defect in determining character, the connection between body, labor, and soul. 

Mouse, the youngest of Von Ray’s crew, has a broken voice that rasps out of his throat. Prince Red, the antagonist, has a chip on his shoulder (likely, a chip in his shoulder) an artificial arm, which he uses to tear Von Ray’s face in half. Medico facilities exist which can repair any physical injury or defect, short of inventing brain tissue from whole cloth. Von Ray accepts the scar, because it reflects a deeper wound that cannot be erased cosmetically. His purpose is to heal his hidden wound, not to bury it further under layers of cosmetic affordances.

To accomplish his goal, he intends to mine the heart of a dying star. 

3166. The Milky Way: Withering at the Reaches

The Earth system is called Draco, house of the dragon, hoarder of riches, home of the antagonists, heirs to Red Shift Limited. Lorq Von Ray was born in the Pleiades System, a middle child between Earth and the outer colonies. While the etymology of “Pleiades” is disputed; one contender is plein (Greek) – to sail. The story is woven from a multitude of such effortless resonances as this. The Pleiades are an astronomically young star cluster, mythologically contiguous across ancient human cultures, and the birthplace of revolution kickstarted by an interstellar pirate.

Red Shift Limited controls the manufacture and distribution of Illyrion, the most important element in the galaxy. It powers starships, makes worlds habitable by melting their cores, and exists in such a finite amount that an additional pocketful would make your descendants generationally wealthy for 1,000 years. Lorq aims to find seven tons of it. His quest: part revenge, part madness. Already heir to a massive fortune, his connection to a sickened galactic kingdom is torture, the only cure is absolute disruption of power.

At the edges of human civilization’s expanse, the outer colonies shimmer. The extraction of resources transfers wealth back to Earth, enriching the Draco system and Red Shift Limited, the corporate body of antagonists Prince and Ruby Red. The outer colonies are depressed. Their cultures rely on an intoxicant called bliss, to survive the twin darknesses of economic depression and life on sunless moons, mining for wealth, which when found, will be withheld from them. 

Crewmen Idas and Lynceos hail from Tubman, a mining planet in the outer colonies. They are the twins, one dark, one light, plunged beneath desperation, mining below a surface scorched by three suns. They finish each other’s sentences, and when they are separated, they speak in unresolved clauses, as though waiting for the other to finish for them. Their melanation mirrors the twin environmental exposures of living on Tubman.

2200 – 2500. The Milky Way: grail within Grail

The refrain, “Ashton Clark go with you,” is reminiscent of Brave New World’s “Our Ford.” Both derive from veneration of secular philosophers who shaped their worlds and they seem deliberately at odds. Ford as a philosopher is antihuman. The extreme optimism of Nova‘s world is shown by the pro-human condition at the foundation of their galactic culture: human wellbeing at all levels is directly congruent to their physical intimacy with labor. This feels true. Stating it feels like naming a stake in my own survival.

The author’s biography lists his experiences as a poetry editor, bookseller, shrimp boat laborer, and musician. Delany’s clear apprehension of the woven nature of labor and art is the fire that illuminates the dark of space. In the 32nd century of Nova, the civilization defining technology is a system of connection. Unlike our current relationship to labor: distance, disconnection, outsourcing; in Nova, human connection to work is an inalienable right baked into the technology that moves their world.

While the relationship between human and labor is enshrined in a sacred/profane dialectic, the relationship between labor and capital in Nova‘s 32nd century is still highly extractive. Perhaps Delany is giving us a midpoint in the long battle for emancipation. Lorq’s quest is the Grail, The Golden Fleece, but he already apprehends the grail of labor, in a sense: the human relationship to labor is a social construct capable of free energy, because when human beings are free, the energy within them is also free.

When I wore a hammer and wielded a circular saw, the rhythm of the handle slapping my thigh, the precessional force of a spinning blade, these things were alive against my body. My energy was free to me. The relationship was direct and meaningful. I was drawn to that work because it felt good. I walked away when I had exhausted my love for it and it became a thin performance of purpose, which took far more energy than building houses. 

To the last, we must feel our work! Ashton Clark’s 23rd century theory became the foundation for later cybernetic enhancements, literal cables plugged into sockets at wrist, ankle, and base of spine, a physio-spiritual link between laborers and tools that respond to neuronic impulses. In our 1980’s, such interface with technology became body horror against the backdrop of paranoia in a decade overrun with cyberpunk, preceded by Videodrome and capped off with Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The body as interface became our greatest horror, because by the 1980’s many of us had blatant confirmation that we were the tools, and that we would never be asked to consent to being used. Perhaps, I read too much optimism in Nova. Is the socket technology of Nova an early body horror pointing not at connection between human and work, but instead a physical manifestation of dissociation and distance? 

The ubiquity of socket technology in the world of Nova arrived in 2500. The exception to this social contract occurs in people who either have religious objections or neuro-congruent defects that limit their ability to interface with socket tech (Prince Red’s missing arm). The disability class becomes visible in new ways as a vast swath of people can be fixed, easily. Ableism critique, anyone? In fact, you could write book length dissertations on each character, theme, motif, and plot device. Even so, Delany writes with such a profound love for story, every idea he pens is wrapped in the luxuriating fabric of relatable human emotion.

2026. Earth, America.

58 years have passed since this book was printed. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that in those intervening decades, Americans have become more alienated from the labor they do with their bodies. Sometimes it is hard to see, this is just a snapshot of our moment in time. The story of Nova includes us, includes thousands of years of human myth that preceded us, and its most optimistic idea is that there are yet thousands of years of continuous myth ahead.

The mass media format is designed to travel. It was made to be affordable, not to take up shelf space. Its discontinuation is startling in hindsight. When I was a child, my mother had made herself a nest in the attic of our house. Pink-fiberglass made the air sparkle, and the thin plywood flexed underfoot. Among the thin mattress and disarrayed drawers of clothing, wine-bottle-boxes of mass media paperbacks haunted my young imagination.

Mass media paperbacks are a nearly extinct format. In the name of Ashton Clark, they should be revived. They are a working-class format. The copy I read, a Bantam edition from 1969, originally cost $0.60. Given inflation, that’s about $5.50 today. When was the last time you bought a new book for $5.50? Accessibility rights are a charter for differently abled people, why is there not an economic rights charter for the working class? Why should literature be routinely priced in the range of half-a-day’s salary for the average American, not to mention, a week’s (or a month’s) salary in some parts of the world?

In 58 years, critique and adventure have drifted apart, and many people who choose critique, have never done anything worth critiquing. I have been bitter and scared of hope. I have believed that arguing a side is all it takes to make a political statement. I don’t believe that anymore. I once thought there was no way that I would ever be strong enough to help my elderly mother live her elderly life, that I would rather she be lonely or alone. I have been scared of growth.

Stasis is an element used by the powerful, to consolidate their stake. They label growth chaos and present it as a danger to civilization. They weaponize uncertainty, and out of fear, we take them at their word, despite knowing one thing more than anything else: they use truth as a lie. But a crushing stasis dooms humanity as much as it dooms a person. A myth is a lie that tells the truth. For a myth to function in any age, it must grow to fit timely context. Delany knows this. Nova is winking at the reader. It is also asking them, will you work to honor growth in your life and the lives of others? What will you sacrifice to take the Grail from the dragon? Will it destroy you? What is the cost of your participation in the systems that prohibit your freedom?

I don’t want to leave you with just questions. 

Caregiving sometimes feels like a dangerous quest. It doesn’t feel like the challenge I would choose. I must face this change with dignity, but also agency. That is the challenge I choose. That is how I make meaning from it. I don’t want to leave you with only questions, but I feel it’s better than leaving you with confidence masquerading as answers. Keep questing. Keep writing. You are not alone.