The Stars My Destination
Perennially voted among the greatest SF novels ever; Gibson, Moorcock and Delany all cite it as ground zero.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Nova about?
Lorq Von Ray, scarred captain and heir to one of the galaxy's great fortunes, races his patrician enemies Prince and Ruby Red to scoop seven tons of the reality-warping element Illyrion from the heart of an exploding star — a grail quest with cyborg jacks in every wrist, a novelist aboard theorising the book you're reading, and Tarot readings treated as sound engineering. Delany loads the space opera with grail mythology, economics and sensory syntax until the form glows like its nova. Written at twenty-five, and the genre took years to catch up.
Why it matters
The bridge between classic space opera and cyberpunk — Gibson's 'cyberspace jack' is Delany's plug socket renamed — and a fixture of best-SF lists since publication.
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Nebula winner (1966).