Nova by Samuel R. Delany
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I know Delany can do better. This is still Delany, so it’s still awesome sci-fi, I would never say not to read it. It’s just not up to his usual standards.
There are just a lot of things in the novel that don’t have anything to do with the story. The drugs, for instance. Why? What, in the end, did this invented drug (‘Bliss’) have to do with anything? Why the tarot? Does it affect any part of the plot? Does anybody change their mind because of a tarot reading in this? No, so why is it in there? What is it taking up pages for? Why was there a random novelist on the crew of this spaceship? What does his hobby have to do with anything?
This is a Robert Lewis Stevenson treasure hunt in space. Except he ruined the pacing with all this extraneous nonsense. Oh, and several extensive flashbacks, too.
His characters are motivated by strong cultural and economic incentives that are very important to the central conflict of the book. But does he spend pages exploring those economies and cultures? A little. Yes, Draco people talk differently from Pleiades people, but how else are they different? Anything?
Still, the book is a pleasure to read, as is all of Delany’s work. And it’s interesting to see hippie culture through his eyes. There’s a certain energy there, that makes you feel as though you’re meeting new people in college.
It’s wonderful to read a book where computers A) intelligently search galaxy-wide news reports for mentions of a particular person, B) cyborg-link with humans and C) spit out data on spools of paper.