Nova

Nova is a science fiction novel by the American writer Samuel R. Delany, published in 1968. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969.

The book is nominally a space opera. It is set in the year 3172, when most human beings belong to one of two factions: the Earth-based Draco and the Pleiades Federation. The most important family in the Pleiades is the Von Rays, and the most important family in Draco is the Reds, who own Red-shift Limited, a company that makes interstellar drives. Starship travel depends on Illyrion, a rare and valuable power source.

The plot concerns the spaceship captain Lorq Von Ray's search for a nova, which will produce Illyrion, and his vendetta with the Red family, who are trying to kill him. He recruits a crew of passers-by on Triton for the voyage, among them a young drifter called the Mouse, who plays an instrument known as a sensory syrynx, a machine that produces sound, images and scents; Katin, an intellectual who wants to write a novel; the brothers Lynceos and Idas, whose third brother is an indentured Illyrion miner; and Sebastian and his companion Tyÿ, a tarot reader.

The novel explores the politics and culture of a future in which cyborg technology is universal, yet in which major decisions can still involve a reading of the tarot cards, and it has strong mythological overtones, relating both to the quest for the Grail and to Jason's search for the Golden Fleece. In 1984 David Pringle listed it as one of the hundred best science fiction novels written since 1949.