Lorq von Ray is a maverick and very wealthy space captain driven by an all-consuming obsession. It is the 31st century and the most precious substance in the known universe is the astonishingly rare element Illyrion, fuel for faster-than-light travel. Von Ray dreams of finding a new source of Illyrion, and thus altering the balance of power within the universe, but his quest demands that his ship plummet into the very heart of an imploding star. Gathering together a motley crew of adventurers and space drifters with little to lose, he prepares for the journey of a lifetime. Only his long-time enemies, former childhood friends Prince and Ruby Red, stand in the way of his close encounter with a nova.

In Nova, a book written when he was 25 years old and at his most exuberantly inventive, Delany took the tradition of the space opera and turned it on its head, giving what had always  seemed a staid and conservative subgenre of SF the freedom to move into territory where no other writer had allowed it to stray. The result is a novel in which a thousand and one influences and ideas come together to create a rich vision of man roaming the star systems of the future. Echoes of sixties psychedelia share the page with reminders of the grail tradition in literature; tarot cards play a central role in revealing character and plot in the book. Delany's generous and optimistic portrait of a 31st century in which man and machine work in harmony (virtually everyone is a cyborg able to plug into any machine) and of the offbeat characters who people it (perhaps the most appealing is Mouse, gypsy maestro on a strange, multi-sensory instrument called the syrinx) shows why Algis Budrys once called him 'the best science fiction writer in the world'.

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