279 pages
Published 1968
Read from May 24 to May 31
Rating: 4 out of 5
There is an article of faith among the muskier demographics of sci-fi fans that asserts the genre was “better” before it got all woke. It would take just a handful of 1960s Ace Doubles, or one issue of John W. Campbell’s Analog, to cure any reasonable reader of this notion. Who wants to read stilted boilerplate about another steely-eyed, emotionless white man punching his way to Mars and sexually harassing the one woman he finds there? How much of that did the world need? Maybe one or two books. Certainly not unremitting decades of it.
Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t any good speculative fiction from the era. Some of the very best happened to be written by a queer Black man. Sci-fi, you see, has been “woke” from the beginning.
Nova stuns from the first page, a whirlwind of sensory impressions, reality-bending ideas, and dazzling prose. It plays with the vocabulary of pulp sci-fi to spin something gargantuan, gorgeous, and strange. An obsessed captain named Von Ray is racing against other spacefaring capitalists to fill a cargo hold with fabulous elements from a star gone nova. The Mouse is a Romani musician as well as a “cyborg stud”: his spine modified with a socket to plug himself into an interstellar ship and help guide its vanes as if they were his own limbs. Von Ray’s ship requires six such studs on its perilous voyage to the heart of the nova. But the radiance of a nova has ghastly effects, as Von Ray (and his previous crew) knows from experience.
The narrative thrums through time and space and perspective, navigating economics, class, privilege, and industrial empire in deft weaves between characters’ backstories. Cities on Earth and around the galaxy are rich with movement and texture, environments filled with vivid and clever sci-fi touches (such as 3-D tarot cards, space yacht regattas, and boats that scull on ionized fog). The planets are as technicolor as anything in Star Wars; the City of Dreadful Night is one of the most memorable locales I’ve encountered in space opera. Delany’s descriptive powers are precise and poetic, leagues ahead of his already better-than-his-contemporaries prose in The Jewels of Aptor.
Not everything has aged well. Delany’s portrayal of the Romani, in particular, while sympathetic, leans into stereotypes. But I simply cannot imagine clinging to the worst midcentury dreck instead of seeking out the good stuff.
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