Reading Nova (1968): The Summer of Samuel, No. 1.
In June 2022, while recovering from a concussion and unable to write, I embarked on a personal mission to read every one of Samuel Delany’s science fiction and fantasy novels. I began with his 1968 novel, Nova. These are my thoughts on the novel.
I did some research before I decided which Samuel Delany novel to begin with. I was not interested in a chronological order of reading. Instead, I was going to pick each book on something like a researched whim. I did some forum-lurking and found that many people regard Nova as one of his “best science fiction novels,” though I have not seen Delany make any comment to that effect. I also heard that it was a good entry-point into his work, having a mixture of both conventional science fiction tropes and ideas and Delany’s challenging themes and complicated psycho-social innovations.
So I started with the death of a star.
In way of a brief plot synopsis, Nova centers on a quest. A crew led by the heir apparent of a wealthy family (economic arrangments feature heavily in this story), Lorq Von Ray, heading for a nova. If they can manage to reach and navigate this Nova safely, they will radically alter the economic landscape of the entire galaxy. Novas, we learn, produce the science-fictional element Illyrion, which enables interstellar transport. The crew is composed of a number of oddballs and misfits, a tarot card reader, an intellectual who wishes to write a great novel (novels now being considered a highly anachronistic art form), a large but gentle man with strange alien pets, and a Romani character named Mouse who plays a sensory syrynx, an instrument like device that produces sounds, lights, and scents simultaneously when played by a skilled user. They race to the Nova while being pursued by another scion of a wealthy family, Prince Red, a violent individual who has a heavy economic interest in beating Lorq to the nova, or killing him first.
I can’t talk about everything I want to in this post, or I would probably spend the rest of the next few years, let alone the summer, writing about Samuel R. Delany and nothing else. But I want to talk about a few themes, moments, and ideas which really sunk their fangs into my mushy gray matter.
The novel features lots of what I would come to think of, as I read more of his work, as Delany “staples.” Musical instruments, which I view the sensory syrynx as an extension of, often appear in the hands of Delany protagonists and characters. A foucs on outcasts. The quest structure of searching for a specific location that will change or upset the economic and/or social fabric of a society. The interaction between the mythic and magical (almost everyone in the galactic world of Nova seems to believe in the Tarot) and the science and economic (the focus on transportation and its fuel as the main driver of the galactic economy). These are just a few recurrences.
What I want to focus on, and something I particularly loved in Nova, is the exploration of how technological (and, inextricably, economic) conditions shape not just society at large but the very psychological foundation of the individual.
In Nova, almost every human has a jack in their body which they can use to plug into almost every technological tool that exists, from vacuums, to assembly lines, to the starships. This connection is not described as a virtual interaction, but a phsycial one. Connecting to a machine expands the users senses so they are coextensive with the machine. It is a mark of difference for a character to not have one of these jacks, and seperates them from large swaths of the galactic economy.
I came to view the world of Nova as a kind of McLuhanian fever dream: Every technology (or “media”), according to famous Canadian and media theoriest Marshal McLuhan, can be understood as an extension of the human body. The telescope extends the eye, the car extends the legs, and language extends the brain. “Any extension,” McLuhan writes, “ whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.”
In Nova, this bodily extension is literalized as humans connect their bodies, in the most physically invasive sense, with technology, thereby expanding it. Much of the novel is focused on the psychic effects this has. Most relevantly to the story, starships are navigated using these jacks. To navigate, the crew plugs into the starship. This allows the ships to pilot through space in a uniquely sensory kind of way, as they sense the space outside and around the ship. This carries great personal risk, and we meet a character early in the novel who has been blinded and deafened by a star while piloting a ship. This character eventually kills themselves, having also had their psyche damaged by this experience. There are sensory experiences, when expanded with technology, that the human body and mind simply cannot handle.
Extensions of humanity through technology inform many aspects of Nova, including the antagonist, the violent Prince Red. Prince Red is missing a biological arm and has a cybernetic one replacing it. He uses this cybernetic arm to violently attack others, most often anyone who offends Prince Red in some way (usually by making a comment about his arm, though this can happen accidentally, such as when a character asks him, colloquially, for a hand with something). In Prince Red, and his insecurity over his arm, we see the ways in which a psyche can be damaged by its extension. I think it’s important to add that much of Prince Reds violent psychology is explained through by economic station. He seems to be using the arm as an excuse for his violence, and the true cause does run far deeper. As the son of one of the wealthiest families in the galaxy, he has been freed from the consequences of his violent actions from an incredibly young age, and is in fact enabled to commit increasingly horrible and complicated acts of violence against those he views as slighting him. This culminates in a terrifying scene where Red describes destroying a man’s life slowly, over years, by getting him fired, then keeping him unemployed and destitute. He describes how easily and effortlessly he is able to do this due to his power and economic station. The economy and money itself, then, begin to function as technologies that expand the human body’s capacity to control and dominate others.
Mouse’s sensory syrynx, on the other hand, imagines the type of artistic creations and expressions that would come from a society constantly expanding its sensory capacities through interactions with technology. Interestingly, even the syrynx is eventually used as a weapon in the book, blasting tremendous sounds and lights to temporarily blind and deafen a rampaging Prince Red. Even an instrument can be violent and deadly when turned to “full volume,” as it were. Every expansion pushes against our limits.
The Tarot, which is shown throughout the novel to hold some very real predictive power, functions as a kind of technology, extending the human capacity to predict the future.
Finally, the quest itself centers around transportation, extending the human body’s capacity for motion, its legs. The characters quest for Illyrion, the material which allows humanity to travel through the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds. To attain it, they must literally drive through a Nova, a task so sensorily risky, that it may kill them all. There always seems to be a tension, in Nova, between the desire and push for expansion, and the strain that puts on social and psychological systems.
In Nova, as technology expands our capacity for sensation, it pushes against the very limits of the human mind and body. How we balance that is a central question of the novel, and like all good literary questions, the text doesn’t feel the need to fully answer it for us.
It’s a bit of a cliche to say that every writer is always, to some degree, writing about writing. But I’m going to end my thoughts on Nova saying that anyways! In my defense, the novel features a character who spends most of their time thinking about how and why to write a novel, so it’s not like I’m pulling this all from the aether. I read Delany’s exploration of technology in Nova as a powerful metaphorization of the project of writing. When one writes, especially on the level Delany does, one attempts to expand the human psyche past its current limits. We imagine new, impossible things, new social structures, new genders, new roles, new ideas, new philosophies, new myths. What do we do with this expansion? Do we expand our minds to meet it, or do we shatter against the tension, destorying ourselves and others?
I’ll leave my thoughts here. Join me next week for my thoughts on The Einstein Intersection.
Oh! It’s worth saying, of course, that Samuel Delany is an extraordinary writer. I highly recommend Nova, and this novel has only made me more excited for my Summer of Samuel.
