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Finished a reread of Samuel R. Delany's Nova for my reading group. I'll post a longer review later, but for now...

Nova is considered by some critics as the last of Delany's early period, "lesser" novels. I think it is the first of his masterpieces insofar as he fully embraces what will become a trademark in the next several---Dhalgren, Trouble On Triton, and all the Neveryon books, ending with Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, namely the full use of metafiction. Many mainstream literary novelists employed it in roughly the same time period---Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Fowles, even Vonnegut, and certain Atwood, Murdoch, Peircy, and Lessing---but one rarely encountered it in science fiction. Certainly it was never used to such effect until much later. In Nova we find it's first full deployment.

On the surface, this is a space opera-style adventure, a feud between two great families across the galaxy, high politics and finance, and a race for a treasure. It has all the classic tropes---an independently-owned starship, a motley crew, wild and vividly described planets, and at times nail-biting pacing---but it also steps back from itself to comment on what is happening in terms of history and myth, mostly via the character of Katin, a more or less aimless young man with an immense store of academic training and a finely-honed sense of process who has been taking notes for years on a novel he intends to write, which in this far flung time is a lost art. He joins the crew of the Roc almost by accident and quickly becomes invested in their quest as much for the relationships he makes among the varied members of the crew as for all the resonances he sees in the captain's self-imposed quest. It is a grail quest, it is a hunt for a white whale, it is spy-craft, and it is fate all rolled into one mission to an exploding star. Delany offers up the points of mythic resonance throughout for anyone who cares to find out more, tying the adventure to literary and cultural archetypes spanning millennia.

This raises the novel well above the level of simple adventure. Hints as to the nature of the crew---who is Jason, who is Argos, who is Medea, who is Ahab?---are sprinkled throughout.

As well, this book gives us a foretaste of the kind of evocative language Delany will hone in the next several novels.

As metafiction, Delany's novels are master classes on how science fiction is constructed and why the subtext connects so strongly to what on the surface appears to be a mere entertainment. He is as interested in how culture works as in what his characters go through. Nothing in a Delany novel happens in isolation from all of history and myth.