Nova

by Samuel R. Delany

The gills had been hooked around the lower jaws so that each fish had a crimson flower at its head.

The author saw this first hand while tracking in Greece in 1965-66, while working on The Einstein Intersection

Katin

Katin is at once Ishmael and Melville..

“I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”

“Katin, I do understand what you’re doing. You want to make something beautiful. But it don’t work that way. Sure, I had to practice a long time to be able to play this thing. But if you’re going to make something like that, it’s got to make people feel and thrill to the life around them, even if it’s only that one guy who goes looking for it in the Alkane’s cellar. It won’t make it if you don’t understand some of that feeling yourself.”

“I am confounded,” Katin admitted to his jeweled box, “nevertheless. The mirror of my observation turns and what first seemed gratuitous I see enough times to realize it is a habit. What I suspected as habit now seems part of a great design. While what I originally took as purpose explodes into gratuitousness. The mirror turns again, and the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only a habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless; while those actions I construed as gratuitous now reveal a most demonic end.”

Ashton Clark pointed out how psychologically damaging this was to humanity. The entire sense of self-control and self-responsibility that man acquired during the Neolithic Revolution when he’d first learned to plant grain and domesticate animals and live in one spot of his own choosing was seriously threatened. The threat had been coming since the Industrial Revolution and many people had pointed it out before Ashton Clark. But Ashton Clark went one step further. If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man’s work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren’t there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile.

who returned humanity to the working man.

You can babble about cultural solidity on your own time.”

This book is Moby Dick that knows it's a metaphor and refers to itself.

“We were drifting, Mouse, you and I, the twins, Tyÿ and Sebastian, good people all of us—but aimless. Then an obsessed man snatches us up and carries us out here to the edge of everything. And we arrive to find his obsession has imposed order on our aimlessness—or perhaps a more meaningful chaos. What worries me is that I’m so thankful to him. I should be rebelling, trying to assert my own order. But I’m not. I want him to win his infernal race. I want him to win, and until he wins or loses, I can’t seriously want anything else for myself.”

Ahab and HIS crew.

“Mouse?”

Mouse as Orpheus (though weakly)

This last voyage of the Roc? I’m too aware of all the archetypical patterns it follows. I can see myself now, turning it into some allegorical Grail quest.