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Nova does not cease telling you how clever it is. It does this with plenty of the goobledigook that can mar any narrative, sci-fi or not. First: the neologisms meant to indicate that the writer really thought through his futuristic world ("sensory-syrynx" and "psychorama" are among the plenty). These are meant to broadcast the legitimacy of his imagined world and that, yes, he took care to note that language evolves with the times. Yet the dialogue and language otherwise has timeless problems: stilted exposition, weirdly clunky, or just plain stale talk no matter how grandiose the stage. Second are assumptions about structure that are disregarded for the sake of caprice: in this case, ending the novel in the middle of a sentence in the most groaner-y fashion possible. It should not have been a surprise considering chapters begin and end in the middle of a conversation for no discernible motive other than to force a cliffhanger when one doesn't appear naturally. But it was one of those non-surprises that still yielded an "oh, come on" out loud from yours truly. Third is the author-surrogate character, the always-unwelcome Katin, a neurotic soapbox of half-baked truths about a half-baked reality. Half-baked truths about the current reality are unpalatable; imagine hearing fallacious arguments spouted at length about the state of existence in an already intangible other-world.

Let's see, what else: as a plot it's relatively paper-thin. It's, at base, a "space opera" as they call it. And the odor of triteness that comes with the territory is pungent, indeed: both the antagonist and protagonists are meant to look sympathetic not because of their actions, but because they are both marked by physical deformity. The seeds of their rivalry germinate in a childhood "traumatic event" that defines the rest of their lives. A man loves his rival's sister, or so one thinks. There's even a set of twins that finish each others' sentences. The protagonist and his rivals are identically maniacal. The book is melodramatic not just in its template, but in its "weighty" themes.

There are ways Nova is just dangling philosophical ideas from a form as tried-and-true as it can get, and in the meantime uses the form to speculate about a future universe. This means characters relay background information to one another at length. This means the writer-surrogate gets to opine at length about whatever topic fits the author's whims. And sometimes it does feel like it is "whatever topic." The various subjects covered don't cohere all that well, even with the nova metaphor of a major self-collapse leaving something behind to salvage and re-build from. Basically, when the book isn't shoehorning Delaney's viewpoints into every open nook-and-cranny, it is marching along the narrowest and thinnest of narrative arcs. Moby-Dick this is not. I am confounded by the comparison.

The sad thing is those viewpoints aren't very enlightening or provocative. Some just feel over-confident and inapplicable. There's a debate between fiction and music, music being "of the moment" and fiction being "of the past." There's a flourish about how future civilizations combat the problem of worker alienation that is fairly clever, but ultimately too romantic and hollow. So, truly, Nova is an unsuccessful balancing act between high-minded and unsuccessful ideas, and a broad-minded and unsuccessful plot-romance-template. Sure, The Brothers Karamazov was, in essence, a courtroom drama interspersed with Christian philosophy. But it was more, wasn't it? It was so much more. That mixture of form and invention leaves one with more than the sum of its parts sometimes. (This is something fiction and music can have in common.) Other times, it leaves one with less than. Nova is one of those times.