Nova by Samuel R. Delany, © 1968 hardback, Doubleday
This is the 11th in my series of Forgotten Books
Nova - First Edition
This week Patti Abbott, the organizer of the Forgotten Books blogs across the country, asked the various bloggers to talk about books that were special to them in the period of 18 – 23 years of age and how they affected you and whether this is still the case. At least that is how I read the challenge.
To date, that challenge could apply to most of the books I have reviewed here. Certainly, VERMILION SANDS, BLIND VOICES, THE RAKEHELLS OF HEAVEN, A MIRROR FOR OBSERVERS, and the forthcoming review of A. Merritt’s THE SHIP OF ISHTAR were all novels I read during that timeframe which I greatly enjoyed and which, upon re-reading, I found their power undiminished. In last week’s column, I spoke of THE LAST STARSHIP FROM EARTH by John Boyd and how it remains one of my three favorite science fiction novels. I mentioned one of the other novels that fit that group, NOVA by Samuel R. Delany.
Since I just did the Boyd last week, I did not opt to do LAST STARSHIP. NOVA comes from roughly the same timeframe, 1968. I am cheating just a slight bit, as I was not yet 18 when I read this novel, but it impacted me as few novels ever have.
To set the time. This was the year after DANGEROUS VISIONS blasted into the US science fiction landscape, making new waves that were being felt everywhere. Michael Moorcock was revolutionizes science fiction in the magazine NEW WORLDS in London. They were snatching the field from the current ghetto it was occupying and saying to the world, “We are relevant. And literary. And powerful!” I bit into that apple and drank the Kool-Aid whole heartedly. Up until then I had been a fan of Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. Ellison (and Judith Merrill, his chief disciple) introduced me to the work of Ballard, Zelazny, Spinrad, and more. And to Delany.
I suddenly had to find BABEL -17 and THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION; the two novels Delany wrote immediately before NOVA which both won the Nebula for Best Novel. He also got one for short story for “Aye, and Gomorrah” from DANGEROUS VISIONS and was soon to get one for “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stone”. He was not yet 30. Delany and Zelazny were the US wunderkinds. Young, immensely talented, unafraid to experiment, and setting the world on fire. Just prior to Delany’s run, Zelazny had won awards for “…AND CALL ME, CONRAD (aka THIS IMMORTAL), LORD OF LIGHT,”The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth”, “He Who Shapes” (aka THE DREAM MASTER in an expanded form), and should have won for “A Rose For Ecclesiastes”. Two Hugos and two Nebulas by 1968, when he was 31.
So, you calmly ask (if you do not know), what is NOVA about. I glibly say “200 pages.” NOVA is a novel about a scarred captain searching for an impossible object; a Grail quest; Moby Dick; an exposition of what a novel is and how to write it; Tarot lore, space opera about exploding stars,; racism or class prejudice; the secret lives of the rich and powerful; a novel about music; or whatever you want to read into it. It is many things to many people.
Nova - Paperback
Initially I was fascinated with the Moby Dick, Grail quest, and Tarot aspects of it. This time through, the whole subtext dealing with art and how to create and write a novel, I found much more fascinating. Over the last 40 years, I’ve changed a little bit.
I thought it well written before. This time, I read it as a published writer and the prose was white hot. Delany showed a mastery of language and its power in BABEL-17 and Symbolism in THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION. Here, he surpasses himself. Frequently, he eschews regular sentence construction. Thoughts are expressed, half formed. Characters interrupt pr speak simultaneously creating chaos in the page. More often, the writing approaches poetry than prose. His earlier trilogy THE FALL OF THE TOWERS began with fragmented thoughts. Now, the imagery and beauty is everywhere:
“Colors sluiced the air with fungal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odors flushed the wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger, ocean, autumn; ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light foamed in the dimming blue that underlit the Mouse’s face. Electric arpeggios of a neon raga rilled.”
Delany writes as a poet and as a novelist. He was personally a poet, he married a poet, and he edited a poetry magazine. It shows brilliantly in his prose.
The cast of characters is rich: Lorq Von Ray – Captain, filthy rich, scarred across his face and soul, searching for Illyrion. Prince and Ruby Red – equally rich, as psychotic as they are rich, deformed in different ways, they see Lorq as a pirate, murderer, thief, who will break their family and the universe if he succeeds. Mouse – player of the syrynx, an instrument of music, light, sensations, and more; dreamer, thief, cyborg stud for Lorq. Katin Crawford – fascinated with the concept of the novel, a long dead art form, he has thousands of research notes but no subject or will to write. The idea intrigues him, the work does not. The Tarot readers and the twins, each searching for something but not sure what. Lorq is searching for a way to change the world. And Illyrion is the way. And the only way he can do it is to scoop it from the heart of a star going nova. This can only be done in the first few hours of the explosion and it may injure them, blind them, or, more likely, simply erase them from the universe.
It’s a classic quest. And, again, I loved it even more this time. Delany was a master of the SF novel up through THE STARS IN MY POCKETS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND, a novel which did very well, but which was only the first half of the story. The second half has yet to appear, though it is 20 years or more overdue. He has written other books, but for some reason, has not completed that one. Based on the half, it might have tried to surpass NOVA but we will probably never see it completed.
He has written biography and criticism; he has taught at the university level, he is a judge for the National Book Award. He is a demi-god. I met him once and spent only a few minutes talking to him as he autographed my books. He was impressed that I had it all and that they were in good shape. I could not adequately express what he meant to me as I was a developing student and, later, a writer. This review begins to try and explain but still falls short.
So, is this a ‘Forgotten Book”. I don’t think so. It is still in print and studied. But, for Patti’s challenge, I think it will do.
Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts more Friday Forgotten Book reviews at her own blog, and posts a complete list of participating blogs.
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Another great Forgotten Book, Scott. We were discovering these books at about the same time, and passing them back-and-forth. Any R. A. Lafferty titles coming up in the series? I am absolutely positive that you were the one who turned me on to his work, probably starting with Past Master.
Scott and I are pretty much the same age–with exposure to many of the same books in that critical age period of 18 to 23. Reading Delaney made me want to be a writer. To me, Katin’s revelation- that his novel had to be about somebody, not some thing- was a revelation to me as well.
Nova led me to “The Jewel Hinged Jaw” and, later, to Dahlgren. I owe a big debt to the works of Samuel R. Delaney, Jr.
Guy – Lafferty may certainly be on the horizon. I recently replaced my copies of PAST MASTER and 900 GRANDMOTHERS and I want to read them both, which pretty well ensures that they will appear here.
William – Amen to that!
Scott, you have one thing notably scrambled here…Ellison was one of Judith Merril’s chief disciples in championing what was coming to be tagged New Wave writing in what she was the mainspring in tagging broadly Speculative Fiction. DANGEROUS VISIONS, Ellison’s anthology, grew out of a stillborn anthology project that Merril was putting together for the Hamling-owned Chicago paperback house Ellison had been editiong…and Algis Budrys succeeded Ellison, as HE was being pushed out, the same Burdys who would lead off his review of NOVA for GALAXY with the statement that with this novel, Samuel Delany was the best sf writer in the world. But it was Merril who had been championing the more adventurous prose forms in her THE YEAR’S BEST SF (notably not BEST SCIENCE FICTION…) annuals for Dell, in cahoots wtih Avram Davidson and then young Ed Ferman at F&SF, Cele Goldsmith/Lalli at FANTASTIC and AMAZING, Ted Carnell at NEW WORLDS and SCIENCE FANTASY and certainly her ex-husband Frederik Pohl at the GALAXY group…all of whom publishing proto-”New Wave” work mixed in with other sorts in their magazines, and a good chunk of that pushed together every year and mixed with items from little magazines and SHORT STORY INTERNATIONAL and Malamud and Bahevis Singer in the Merril annuals, before Merril produced the Moorcock and Co.-heavy ENGLAND SWINGS SF. Hell, even her other old buddy Robert Lowndes was publishing surreal new work by Joanna Russ and Roger Zelazny and Terry Carr & Ted White amid the Seabury Quinn reprints at his no-budget magazines. They were, in every sense, interesting times. And aren’t they always?
Or even the Budrys who tagged Delany thus. It must be Early. (Ellison was Regency Books’s editor, and still isn’t too happy about that firing.)
And, of course, it was Isaac Bashevis Singer I refer to above…Bahevis would comment on klezmer videos with Rumplepunim on OiTV.
And, of course, Ellison and Merril had their most blatant falling out over a character in an Ellison MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. script which Merril apparently rather acutely saw as a swipe at her. But Ellison and Merril were among the best-equipped arguers and fallers-out in SF at the time…
He and Marilyn Hacker, married at the time as you note, edited the very avant QUARK series of sf+ anthologies…I’ll have to go look for the poetry magazine you cite. But a good citation, NOVA.
Todd – Thanks for the clarification on Ellison and Merrill. I was unaware of the Man from UNCLE incident. I just recently got the DVD set so I may have to hunt that one down. QUARK was an interesting little anthology series, wasn’t it? And Budrys later did the introduction to the Gregg Press edition of NOVA.
Another writer I have missed entirely. Shame on me.
I’m a bit more partial to Delany’s THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, the last of Delany’s work published by ACE BOOKS. I stopped reading Delany after slogging through DHALGEN and TRITON. Years later, I found a copy of HOGG and wasted an hour reading that vile book. Delany sure was a quirky writer.
George – I can understand not liking HOGG. Delany got off into some truly weird stuff for a while. It did not work for me, nor did MAD Man. But NOVA still does.
Regarding the sequel to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand: Delany has spoken and written about this on various occasions, and I have spoken to him (at an event for his induction into the SF Hall of Fame) and friends of his about it. He’s unlikely to ever finish it (although an excerpt was published in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1996) and he states two reasons for doing so. First, most of the impetus for writing Stars came from his relationship with his then-partner, Frank Romeo (to whom Stars is dedicated); they broke up less than a year after Stars was published, so that creative energy was gone. Second, Stars, with its above-ground and institutionalized public spaces for casual public sex, draws inspiration from the pre-AIDS gay sexual scene, and Delany doesn’t really want to revisit it given the large number of people he knew who died as a result of AIDS sweeping through that community.
Scott,
Great article about an amazing book. Nova has been next on my “to-re-read” pile for a while. Just need to find some time.
One very small correction: While he loves and reads poetry voraciously, Delany himself has never been a poet. This is a misconception that’s been around for years and he often has to refute it in interviews.
Erich – Thanks for the update on STARS. It makes sense that he does not want to revisit, but I really enjoyed what there was of it.
Kevin – He may say he is not a poet, and may not write in poetic forms, but those words are pure poetry to me. Thanks for the comment.