Review
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“[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!” —Roger
Sale, Time Magazine
“Here are (at least some of) the ways you can read Nova: As
fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; as archetypal
mystical/mythical allegory (in which the Tarot and the Grail both
figure prominently); as modern myth told in the SF idiom . . .
The reader observes, recollect, or participates in a range of
personal human experience including violent pain and
disfigurement, sensory deprivation and overload, man-machine
communion, the drug experience, the creative experience—and
interpersonal relationships which include incest and
assassination, her-son, leader-follower, human-pet, and lots
more.” —Judith Merrill, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction
“Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science
fiction writing in English today.” —Gerald Jonas, New York Times
Book Review
“Samuel R. Delany, right now, as of this book, Nova, not as of
some future book or some accumulated body of work, is the best
science-fiction writer in the world, at a time when competition
for that status is intense. I don’t see how a science fiction
writer can do more than wring your heart while explaining how it
works. No writer can. The special thing that science fiction does
is to first credibly place the heart in an unconventional
environment. A particular thing that recent science fiction has
been doing is to make that unconventional environment a
technological one. Another has been to make it a romantic one,
sometimes calling it an intensely humanistic one . . . All of
these things are accomplished in Nova.” —A.J. Budrys, Galaxy
Magazine
“One of the most complete and fully realized pictures of an
interstellar society that I have ever read.” —Norman Spinrad,
Science Fiction Times
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From the Inside Flap
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he suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years
from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of
transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century.
And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel,
Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a
recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The
potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty
cobbling together an alluring crew that includes a gypsy musician
and a moon-obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of
writing a novel. What the crew doesnt know, though, is that
Lorqs quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming
that hell stop at nothing to achieve it. In the grandest manner
of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that
casts a fascinating new light on some of humanitys oldest truths
and enduring myths.
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From the Back Cover
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“One of the most complete and fully realized
pictures of an interstellar society that I have ever read.”
--Science Fiction Times
“As of this book [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction
writer in the world.” --Galaxy
“A fast-action farflung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal
mystical/mythical allegory; [a] modern myth told in the S-F
idiomÉand lots more.” --Fantasy and Science Fiction
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About the Author
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Samuel R. Delany lives in Harlem, New York.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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chapter one
"Hey, Mouse! Play us something," one of the mechanics called from
the bar.
"Didn't get signed on no ship yet?" chided the other. "Your
spinal socket'll rust up. Come on, give us a number."
The Mouse stopped running his finger around the rim of his glass.
Wanting to say "no" he began a "yes." Then he frowned.
The mechanics frowned too:
He was an old man.
He was a strong man.
As the Mouse pulled his hand to the edge of the table, the
derelict lurched forward. Hip banged the counter. Long toes
struck a chair leg: the chair danced on the s.
Old. Strong. The third thing the Mouse saw: Blind.
He swayed before the Mouse's table. His hand swung up; yellow
nails hit the Mouse's cheek. (Spider's feet?) "You, boy . . ."
The Mouse stared at the pearls behind rough, blinking lids.
"You, boy. Do you know what it was like?"
Must be blind, the Mouse thought. Moves like blind. Head sits
forward so on his neck. And his eyes--
The codger flapped out his hand, caught a chair, and yanked it to
him. It rasped as he fell on the seat. "Do you know what it
looked like, felt like, smelt like--do you?"
The Mouse shook his head; the fingers tapped his cheek.
"We were moving out, boy, with the three hundred suns of the
Pleiades glittering like a puddle of jeweled milk on our left,
and all blackness wrapped around our right. The ship was me; I
was the ship. With these sockets--" he tapped the insets in his
wrists against the table: click "--I was plugged into my
vane-projector. Then--" the stubble on his jaw rose and fell with
the words "--centered on the dark, a light! It reached out,
grabbed our eyes as we lay in the projection chambers and
wouldn't let them go. It was like the universe was torn and all
day raging through. I wouldn't go off sensory input. I wouldn't
look away. All the colors you could think of were there, blotting
the night. And finally the shock waves: the walls sang! Magnetic
inductance oscillated over our ship, nearly rattled us apart. But
then it was too late. I was blind." He sat back in his chair.
"I'm blind, boy. But with a funny kind of blindness: I can see
you. I'm deaf. But if you talked to me, I could understand most
of what you said. Olfactory nerves mostly shorted out at the
brain end. Same with the taste buds over my tongue." His hand
went flat on the Mouse's cheek. "I can't feel the texture of your
face. Most of the tactile nerve endings were killed too. Are you
smooth--or are you bristly and gristly as I am?" He laughed on
yellow teeth in red, red gums. "Old Dan is blind in a funny way."
His hand slipped down the Mouse's vest, catching the laces. "A
funny way, yes. Most people go blind in blackness. I have a fire
in my eyes. I have that whole collapsing sun in my head, my
visual tectum shorted wide open, jumping, leaping, sparking. It's
as though the light lashed the rods and cones of my retina to
constant stimulation, balled up a rainbow and stuffed each socket
full. That's what I'm seeing now. Then you, outlined here,
highlighted there, a solarized ghost across hell from me. Who are
you?"
"Pontichos," the Mouse offered. His voice sounded like wool with
sand, grinding. "Pontichos Provechi."
Dan's face twisted. "Your name is . . . What did you say? It's
shaking my head apart. There's a choir crouched in my ears,
shouting down into my skull twenty-six hours a day. The brain-end
synapses, they're sending out static, the death rattle that sun's
been dying ever since. Over that, I can just hear your voice,
like an echo of something shouted a hundred yards off." Dan
ed and sat back, hard. "Where are you from?" He wiped his
mouth.
"Here in Draco," the Mouse said. "Earth."
"Earth? Where? America? You come from a little white house on a
tree-lined street, with a bicycle in the garage?"
Oh yes, the Mouse thought. Blind, and deaf too. The Mouse's
speech was good, but he'd never even tried to correct his accent.
"Me. I'm from Australia. From a white house. I lived just outside
Melbourne. Trees. I had a bicycle. But that was a long time ago.
A long time, wasn't it, boy? You know Australia, on Earth?"
"Been through." The Mouse squirmed in his chair and wondered how
to get away.
"Yes. That's how it was. But you don't know, boy! You can't know
what it's like to stagger through the rest of your life with a
nova dug into your brain, remembering Melbourne, remembering the
bicycle. What did you say your name was?"
The Mouse looked left at the window, right at the door.
"I can't remember it. The sound of that sun blots out
everything."
The mechanics, who had been listening till now, turned to the
bar.
"Can't remember a thing any more!"
At another table a black-haired woman fell back to her card game
with her blond companion.
"Oh, I've been sent to doctors! They say if they cut out the
nerves, optic and aural, slice them off at the brain, the
roaring, the light--it might stop! Might?" He raised his hands to
his face. "And the shadows of the world that come in, they'd stop
too. Your name? What's your name?"
The Mouse got the words ready in his mouth, along with, excuse
me, huh? I gotta go.
But old Dan ed, clutched at his ears.
"Ahhh! That was a pig trip, a dog trip, a trip for flies! The
ship was the Roc and I was a cyborg stud for Captain Lorq Von
Ray. He took us"--Dan leaned across the table--"this close"--his
thumb brushed his forefinger--"this close to hell. And brought us
back. You can damn him, and damn Illyrion for that, boy, whoever
you are. Wherever you're from!" Dan barked, flung back his head;
his hands jumped on the table.
The bartender glanced over. Somebody signaled for a drink. The
bartender's lips tightened, but he turned off, shaking his head.
"Pain--" Dan's chin came down--"after you've lived with it long
enough, isn't pain anymore. It's something else. Lorq Von Ray is
mad! He took us as near the edge of dying as he could. Now he's
abandoned me, nine-tenths a corpse, here at the rim of the Solar
System. And where's he gone--" Dan breathed hard. Something
flapped in his lungs. "Where's blind Dan going to go now?"
Suddenly he grabbed the sides of the table.
"Where is Dan going to go!"
The Mouse's glass tumbled, smashed on the stone.
"You tell me!"
He shook the table again.
The bartender was coming over.
Dan stood, overturning his chair, and rubbed his knuckles on his
eyes. He took two staggering steps through the sunburst that
rayed the floor. Two more. The last left long maroon prints.
The black-haired woman caught her breath. The blond man closed
the cards.
One mechanic started forward, but the other touched his arm.
Dan's fists struck the swinging doors. He was gone.
The Mouse looked around. Glass on stone again, but softer. The
bartender had plugged the sweeper into his wrist and the machine
hissed over dirt and bloody fragments. "You want another drink?"
"No," the Mouse's voice whispered from his ruined larynx. "No. I
was finished. Who was that?"
"Used to be a cyborg stud on the Roc. He's been making trouble
around here for a week. Lots of places throw him out soon as he
comes in the door. How come you been having such a hard time
getting signed on?"
"I've never been on a star-run before," came the Mouse's rough
whisper. "I just got my certificate two years back. Since then
I've been plugged in with a small freight company working around
inside the Solar System on the triangle run."
"I could give you all kinds of advice." The bartender unplugged
the sweeper from the socket on his wrist. "But I'll restrain
myself. Ashton Clark go with you." He grinned and went back
behind the bar.
The Mouse felt uncomfortable. He hooked a dark thumb beneath the
leather strap over his shoulder, got up and started for the door.
"Eh, Mouse, come on. Play something for--"
The door closed behind him.
The shrunken sun lay jagged gold on the ains. Neptune, huge
in the sky, dropped mottled light on the plain. The starships
hulked in the repair pits half a mile away.
The Mouse started down the strip of bars, cheap hotels, and
eating places. Unemployed and despondent, he had bummed in most
of them, playing for board, ing in the corner of somebody's
room when he was pulled in to entertain at an all-night party.
That wasn't what his certificate said he should be doing. That
wasn't what he wanted.
He turned down the boardwalk that edged Hell3.
To make the satellite's surface habitable, Draco Commission had
ed Illyrion furnaces to melt the moon's core. With surface
temperature at mild autumn, atmosphere generated spontaneously
from the rocks. An artificial ionosphere kept it in. The other
manifestations of the newly molten core were Hells1 to 52,
volcanic cracks that had opened in the crust of the moon. Hell3
was almost a hundred yards wide, twice as deep (a flaming worm
broiled on its bottom), and seven miles long. The cañon
flickered and fumed under pale night.
As the Mouse walked by the abyss, hot air caressed his cheek. He
was thinking about blind Dan. He was thinking about the night
beyond Pluto, beyond the edge of the stars called Draco. And was
afraid. He fingered the leather sack against his side.
When the Mouse was ten years old, he'd stolen that sack. It held
what he was to love most.
Terrified, he'd fled from the music stalls beneath white vaults,
down between the stinking booths of suede. He clutched the sack
to his belly, jumped over a carton of meerschaum pipes that had
broken open, spilling across the dusty stone, passed under
another arch, and for twenty meters darted through the crowds
roaming the Golden Alley, where velvet display windows were alive
with light and gold. He sidestepped a boy treading the heels of
his shoes and swinging a three-handled tray of tea glasses and
coffee cups. As the Mouse dodged, the tray went up and over; tea
and coffee shook, but nothing spilled. The Mouse fled on.
Another turn took him past a ain of embroidered slippers.
Mud splattered the next time his canvas shoes hit the broken
flooring. He stopped, panting, looked up.
No vaults. Light rain drifted between the buildings. He held the
sack tighter, smeared his damp face with the back of his hand,
and started up the curving street.
Rotten, ribbed, and black, the Burnt Tower of Constantine jutted
from the parking lot. As he reached the main street, people
hurried about him, splashing in the thin slip covering the
stones. The leather had grown sweaty on his skin.
Good weather? He would have romped down the backstreet shortcut.
But this: he kept to the main way, taking some protection from
the monorail. He pushed his way among the businessmen, the
students, the porters.
A sledge rumbled on the cobbles. The Mouse took a chance and
swung up on the yellow running board. The driver
grinned--gold-flecked crescent in a brown face--and let him stay.
Ten minutes later, heart still hammering, the Mouse swung off and
ducked through the courtyard of New Mosque. In the drizzle a few
men washed their feet in the stone troughs at the wall. Two women
came from the flapping door at the entrance, retrieved their
shoes, and started down the gleaming steps, hastening in the
rain.
Once, the Mouse had asked Leo just when New Mosque had been
built. The fisherman from the Pleiades Federation--who always
walked with one foot bare--had scratched his thick blond hair as
they gazed at the smoky walls rising to the domes and spiking
minarets. "About a thousand years ago, was. But that only a guess
is."
The Mouse was looking for Leo now.
He ran out the courtyard and dodged between the trucks, cars,
dolmushes, and trollies crowding the entrance of the bridge. On
the crosswalk, under a streetlamp, he turned through an iron gate
and hurried down the steps. Small boats clacked together in the
sludge. Beyond the dinghies, the mustard water of the Golden Horn
heaved about the pilings and the hydrofoil docks. Beyond the
Horn's mouth, across the Bosphorus, the clouds had torn.
Beams slanted through and struck the wake of a ferry plowing
toward another continent. The Mouse paused on the steps to stare
over the glittering strait as more and more light fell through.
Windows in foggy Asia flashed on sand-colored walls. It was the
beginning of the effect that had caused the Greeks, two thousand
years before, to call the Asian side of the city
Chrysopolis--Gold City. Today it was Uskudar.
"Hey, Mouse!" Leo hailed him from the red, rocking deck. Leo had
built an awning over his boat, set up wooden tables, and placed
barrels around for chairs. Black oil boiled in a vat, heated by
an ancient generator caked with grease. Beside it, on a yellow
slicker, was a heap of fish. The gills had been hooked around the
lower jaws so that each fish had a crimson flower at its head.
"Hey, Mouse, what you got?"
In better weather fishermen, dockworkers, and porters lunched
here. The Mouse climbed over the rail as Leo threw in two fish.
The oil erupted yellow foam.
"I got what . . . what you were talking about. I got it . . . I
mean I think it's the thing you told me about." The words rushed,
breathy, hesitant, breathy again.
Leo, whose name, hair, and chunky body had been given him by
German grandparents (and whose speech pattern had been lent by
his childhood on a fishing coast of a world whose nights held ten
times as many stars as Earth's), looked confused. Confusion
became wonder as the Mouse held out the leather sack.
Leo took it with freckled hands. "You sure, are? Where you--"
Two workmen stepped on the boat. Leo saw alarm cross the Mouse's
face and switched from Turkish to Greek. "Where did you this
find?" The sentence pattern stayed the same in all languages.
"I stole it." Even though the words came with gushes of air
through ill-anchored vocal cords, at ten the orphaned gypsy spoke
some half dozen of the languages bordering the Mediterranean much
more facilely than people like Leo who had learned his tongues
under a hypno-teacher.
The construction men, grimy from their power shovels (and
hopefully limited to Turkish) sat down at the table, massaging
their wrists and rubbing their spinal sockets on the smalls of
their back where the great machines had been plugged into their
bodies. They called for fish.
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