Nova
★★★★★
Nova builds a vivid sense of place not by copious description or exposition, but through the accretion of intimate details of everyday life, vignettes that happen alongside or interwoven with the story. Delany creates a sensory vibe, deeply rooted in the physicality of his characters, an awareness of skin, sweat, muscles, hair, nails, small glances, downtrodden heels, broken clothes, without the heavier transgressiveness of his later work. His 32nd-century worldbuilding is full of social speculation on itinerant work, cultural homogenization, economics, and hygiene, but underlying the technological progress there’s nonetheless the undercurrent of a dystopia sickened by its cultural stasis.
Even though this is explicitly a Grail quest for Illyrion, it lingers long in a handful of deeply social scenes, more an atmospheric play than a Tolkienesque travelogue. Unlike modern space opera, there’s no sense of rushing through a series of fetch-quests, instead the Illyrion is relegated to backstory - obsessive motivation for the Ahab-figure of Lorq with a denouement realised in a handful of trailing pages rather than the meat of the novel. The journey, rich in Argonautic allegories as vaned ships ply the galactic currents, is the story.
That’s not to say that it isn’t quite cinematic in places, particularly the boss fights between Lorq and his nemesis. But it’s a character-focused novel, the core triad of Lorq, Mouse, and Katin are distinctly realised personalities with worldviews that tell the story of the future through the lenses of the emotional, the sensory, and the logical. The rest of the motley crew, though shallowly defined by their quirks (the ones with the pets, the twins), fill out an ensemble tableau of communal life rich with intertwined multi-character dialogue and revelry in an often confusing sensory melange.
Delany’s prose can be hard work - the parallel conversations, cut-off chapters, awkward-to-parse dialects, unsignposted context switching, and ambiguous phrasing. Despite its challenges, Nova is a rewarding read, if more for its rich experiential texture than the adventure.
