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matt_christopherson's review
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
rosagigantea's review against another edition
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
It's not one that's gonna stick with me or that made me emotional, but it's a solid well done story.
infinispace's review against another edition
4.0
Review: http://infinispace.net/2013/04/review-nova-by-samuel-r-delany/
zimb0's review
5.0
Just a fantastic novel through and through. Masterful in its gaze and thought out in its shadow. Delany out classes all when it comes to science heavy, scifi that's more readable than your monthly Oprah Club book.
hagbard_celine's review
5.0
WHAT DID I JUST READ? I don't have a great grip on what just happened, but it was wonderful.
There's so much going on in here. Tarot and spaceflight and empire and economics and alienation and... and... THE HOLY GRAIL. And it's also a book about writing a book (the book).
I'm gonna have to come back to this one. There's way more for me here.
There's so much going on in here. Tarot and spaceflight and empire and economics and alienation and... and... THE HOLY GRAIL. And it's also a book about writing a book (the book).
I'm gonna have to come back to this one. There's way more for me here.
ninjalawyer's review against another edition
3.0
This is an odd one to review - it's sometimes beautifully written, but the overall plot is frequently dull, with some characters getting shorted on character development. The twins in particularly get short shrift, with their defining character traits being a desire to see their off-screen brother, and to consume all of the space-heroin.
It's also 1960s sci-fi, so it has the preoccupation with the supernatural. Tarot cards in this case, with one character getting a reading that seems to go on endlessly. It's a bit funny that one character is skeptical of the tarot cards, but the others treat this as idiotic, given the advanced state of 32nd century science.
It's also 1960s sci-fi, so it has the preoccupation with the supernatural. Tarot cards in this case, with one character getting a reading that seems to go on endlessly. It's a bit funny that one character is skeptical of the tarot cards, but the others treat this as idiotic, given the advanced state of 32nd century science.
kynan's review
3.0
TL;DR: A fun little space-opera with a lot of literary allusions, some cool ideas (including the birth of cyberpunk?) but some questionable "plotting".
TL: I picked up Nova because Alastair Reynolds indicated, in the Afterword of [b:Galactic North|89188|Galactic North|Alastair Reynolds|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1171150277l/89188._SY75_.jpg|1113882], that "[his] fascination with cyborg spacers (and the baroque trappings of space opera in general) stem from early exposure to [Nova]". I love Reynolds' work, and since I spent a significant portion of this year working through the Revelation Space reading list, I figured I'd like to see where it was born!
Nova is...something. It's a story I guess, but it's an oddly disjoint kind of affair! It's set in the far, far future (31st century - the year 3172 to be precise) and humanity has taken to the stars and, as might be expected, is squabbling there. Earth is a remembered, but no longer pivotal planet in the "Draco" faction which is constituted of at least our local solar system and perhaps some other systems too? Draco is pitted (that's overly strong) against the "Pleiades Federation" which, as you might expect, is made up of the planets/moons orbiting the stars in the Pleiades cluster.
In order to have any kind of real antagonistic relationship across star systems, obviously you need Faster-than-Light travel and so we do, powered by the extra-heavy-element "Illyrion", which is also the pivotal plot element (hah!). I'm not entirely sure where Draco starts and ends, nor the Pleiades Federation for that matter - interstellar travel is commonplace and fast thanks to Illyrion, and that's all we need to know about the matter.
The story opens in a divey space bar on Triton (one of Neptune's moons) with Mouse, one of the main protagonists, having a beverage and being distracted by a local vagrant named Dan. Dan barges into the bar and proceeds to regale/harass poor Mouse with aggressive tales of Dan's previous space travel adventures that resulted in him being sensorially crippled (blind, no sense of smell, limited hearing and tactile feedback) after diving into a supernova...and surviving. Mouse doesn't take confrontation too well and escapes the bar, after Dan violently ejects himself, and runs into a musing, self-important academic (who's quite sure he's got the universe all worked out) named Katin. From there, some local drama results in a rather odd meeting with Captain Lorq Von Ray who carries out the most slipshod method of crew acquisition since press gangs were a thing!
From here, the story really begins and our intrepid crew sets out on a journey most dangerous, interspersed with flashbacks of Mouse's early life as a gypsy on Earth, Von Ray's early life as a child of rich parents on the planet Ark (in the Pleiades) and some of the story from both of them regarding how they got to where they were at the beginning of Nova.
Interspersed with all of the character building are snippets of exactly how human civilisation has expanded and changed over the years and the way that the "world" works. A lot of this is very interesting, but this is kind of why I classified this book as "something". There's a lot of allusion and reference to "classics" of literature and art from our times (this was published in 1968) and from extrapolated classics from humanities future. There's a lot of really cool stuff including some physics that I suspect doesn't really make sense but is definitely based on sound theoretical physics, there's some rather throwaway comments about medical science that either imply an almost infinite ability to reconstruct/repair almost any damage, almost immediately and that bacteria have been universally eradicated (the latter might be wrong, maybe it's just really, really easy to fix stuff?). Also, you can literally see cyberpunk being born here with the introduction of "studs" that allow people to directly interface with mechanical objects. the world-building is really cool, quite expansive and one of the big draws of Delaney's writing in general.
That's all good, but a lot of this novel also felt like the author really pushing things that he felt were interesting/exciting/etc. This happens in two ways: there's a kind of implicit "smugness" to the various allusion, and if that were all, maybe it would be OK, but Katin takes it to explicit and overt, almost fourth-wall-breaking levels with his talk of wanting to write a novel (an artistic exploit lost to time) and references to grail plots and what not. I think that there's an element of tongue-in-cheek mockery here, and I did like the way that chapters were seemingly arbitrarily inserted into the narrative, and the way the book actually ends, but the whole thing came off a little too heavy-handed in the end. The other thing that really threw me was the really heavy leaning on the Tarot! It's not critical to the story, but Katin, who spends a lot of time monologuing his way through various scientific and philosophical themes also spends a non-trival amount of time "offhandedly" referring to the scientific validity of Tarot, returning to the theme several times - this strikes me as another of the author's "you simply MUST understand this" points, and given that his perspective at the time was that of a 20-something at the height of the US's hippie/psychedelic culture and whilst Delaney was in the midst of significant international wanderings, it kinda makes sense
TL: I picked up Nova because Alastair Reynolds indicated, in the Afterword of [b:Galactic North|89188|Galactic North|Alastair Reynolds|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1171150277l/89188._SY75_.jpg|1113882], that "[his] fascination with cyborg spacers (and the baroque trappings of space opera in general) stem from early exposure to [Nova]". I love Reynolds' work, and since I spent a significant portion of this year working through the Revelation Space reading list, I figured I'd like to see where it was born!
Nova is...something. It's a story I guess, but it's an oddly disjoint kind of affair! It's set in the far, far future (31st century - the year 3172 to be precise) and humanity has taken to the stars and, as might be expected, is squabbling there. Earth is a remembered, but no longer pivotal planet in the "Draco" faction which is constituted of at least our local solar system and perhaps some other systems too? Draco is pitted (that's overly strong) against the "Pleiades Federation" which, as you might expect, is made up of the planets/moons orbiting the stars in the Pleiades cluster.
In order to have any kind of real antagonistic relationship across star systems, obviously you need Faster-than-Light travel and so we do, powered by the extra-heavy-element "Illyrion", which is also the pivotal plot element (hah!). I'm not entirely sure where Draco starts and ends, nor the Pleiades Federation for that matter - interstellar travel is commonplace and fast thanks to Illyrion, and that's all we need to know about the matter.
The story opens in a divey space bar on Triton (one of Neptune's moons) with Mouse, one of the main protagonists, having a beverage and being distracted by a local vagrant named Dan. Dan barges into the bar and proceeds to regale/harass poor Mouse with aggressive tales of Dan's previous space travel adventures that resulted in him being sensorially crippled (blind, no sense of smell, limited hearing and tactile feedback) after diving into a supernova...and surviving. Mouse doesn't take confrontation too well and escapes the bar, after Dan violently ejects himself, and runs into a musing, self-important academic (who's quite sure he's got the universe all worked out) named Katin. From there, some local drama results in a rather odd meeting with Captain Lorq Von Ray who carries out the most slipshod method of crew acquisition since press gangs were a thing!
From here, the story really begins and our intrepid crew sets out on a journey most dangerous, interspersed with flashbacks of Mouse's early life as a gypsy on Earth, Von Ray's early life as a child of rich parents on the planet Ark (in the Pleiades) and some of the story from both of them regarding how they got to where they were at the beginning of Nova.
Interspersed with all of the character building are snippets of exactly how human civilisation has expanded and changed over the years and the way that the "world" works. A lot of this is very interesting, but this is kind of why I classified this book as "something". There's a lot of allusion and reference to "classics" of literature and art from our times (this was published in 1968) and from extrapolated classics from humanities future. There's a lot of really cool stuff including some physics that I suspect doesn't really make sense but is definitely based on sound theoretical physics, there's some rather throwaway comments about medical science that either imply an almost infinite ability to reconstruct/repair almost any damage, almost immediately and that bacteria have been universally eradicated (the latter might be wrong, maybe it's just really, really easy to fix stuff?). Also, you can literally see cyberpunk being born here with the introduction of "studs" that allow people to directly interface with mechanical objects. the world-building is really cool, quite expansive and one of the big draws of Delaney's writing in general.
That's all good, but a lot of this novel also felt like the author really pushing things that he felt were interesting/exciting/etc. This happens in two ways: there's a kind of implicit "smugness" to the various allusion, and if that were all, maybe it would be OK, but Katin takes it to explicit and overt, almost fourth-wall-breaking levels with his talk of wanting to write a novel (an artistic exploit lost to time) and references to grail plots and what not. I think that there's an element of tongue-in-cheek mockery here, and I did like the way that chapters were seemingly arbitrarily inserted into the narrative, and the way the book actually ends, but the whole thing came off a little too heavy-handed in the end. The other thing that really threw me was the really heavy leaning on the Tarot! It's not critical to the story, but Katin, who spends a lot of time monologuing his way through various scientific and philosophical themes also spends a non-trival amount of time "offhandedly" referring to the scientific validity of Tarot, returning to the theme several times - this strikes me as another of the author's "you simply MUST understand this" points, and given that his perspective at the time was that of a 20-something at the height of the US's hippie/psychedelic culture and whilst Delaney was in the midst of significant international wanderings, it kinda makes sense
duriangray's review
adventurous
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
hazelwood's review
4.0
Eh. Not the most exciting sci fi novel ever. Kind of a mix between The Great Gatsby and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, with the same amount of wealthy parties and voyages. The total action in the book could probably be boiled down to about 10-15 pages.