Nova
by Tim Corballis

Tim Corballis’s sixth novel, NOVA, opens with two epigraphs. The first, from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, introduces a disembodied narrator trying to define itself and failing, then continuing to speak. In the second, taken from the essay ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Ursula K. Le Guin describes what she sees as the most honest type of story:

full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand.

Here, before reading Corballis’s own first word, the reader finds both the challenge and the compensation of NOVA. Corballis directs you toward the story ahead: a disembodied narrator and a plot that doesn’t seek to resolve or clarify itself for the reader.

NOVA is a place: ‘a self-contained world launched into deep time,’ according to the novel’s inside cover. It has lost contact with Earth and is ‘close to our fourth century beyond the sky’. In ‘flight from Earth’s Sun’, it is still over 60,000 years from its half-forgotten destination, an exoplanet known as both Omega and Telos. Of course, NOVA has issues: after several hundred years, much is shabby and falling apart; there is an imposed separation between the 11% of the population who make up the ‘moieties’ and the ‘people on the outside’; and, worst of all, it won’t have enough fuel to last the journey.

At first, the novel’s main narrator is a nonhuman entity called System, the voice of the moieties’ part of NOVA and the manager of its infrastructure. System, watching and communicating via consoles, is a plural: ‘we observed and reported and kept balance on NOVA, though it was not possible to keep perfect control’. The key human characters are the women in one self-selecting ‘familymates’ who share an apartment: aging and cranky Kalla, currently a council delegate but a voice of protest; her wife Teniel, who gets badly injured in an accident; Soli, who has chosen to be their daughter and is taking part in some kind of ‘schooling’; and two other women, Jude and Tamera. Revealed largely through their dialogue, their characters emerge as dry, sceptical, and often funny.

Unlike Beckett’s narrator, System isn’t trapped in the dark, but Corballis writes similar monologues from a disjointed, lost perspective. ‘We can’t know everything,’ System tells Kalla. ‘In some ways we know nothing at all’. The fragmentation and sense of loss that Beckett confines to a single trapped consciousness are here distributed outward into the world itself, and also into the structure of the text: Corballis employs techniques like stream of consciousness, fragmentation, accumulation and ellipses. On some pages the narrative is split into two columns, to suggest how System is in more than one place at one time. (When System is talking to Kalla: ‘We were also talking, in different ways, with 5380 others across NOVA’.)  In some places System’s narrative shrinks to a poetry-like centred column:

People have worlds, they
hold, we
thought, and
This perhaps is
measurable, we
thought, the
effect of
worlds, the
effect of
the collapse
of people’s
worlds, worlds
with the world.

System’s narrative voice can make the text of the early part of the novel feel flat, with an excess of explaining that complicates more than clarifies. The conversations with NOVA’s humans can also read as exposition: ‘You know, Kalla, that we don’t really know ourselves, not as a being. We are System, yes, but as voice we are only inherent in particular situations, so in that sense we are not System and so not ourselves. We are split from ourselves and split between situations’. A little later, System reiterates that ‘we were a single System, despite our multiple and split voices’ and concludes – in an abrupt shift from philosophical point to the practical  – that this ‘affected our ability to work with council, and with people in general, to assess energy futures’.

In addition to System’s narration, the novel has expository interludes presented as Q&As about issues of science, history, religion and law. (These interludes may have a metafictional dimension. In one, the speaker mentions studying at McGill University, where cognitive psychologist Michael Corballis, Tim’s late father, completed his PHD.) They expand our understanding of the world(s) of the novel, including historical attempts at self-sustained human ecosystems, and introduce philosophical debates key to the book:

—NOVA exists in a historical frame of reference that is radically different from Earth’s?
—Yes. The detachment of NOVA from Earth is a detachment from its history.
—You mean it is like a revolution?
—It is more uncertain. It can be measured differently depending on the frame of reference of the measurement.
—Does that make sense in terms of physics?
—I’m not talking about physics anymore. Historical time and historical simultaneity are more complicated.
—More complicated than the Theory of Relativity?
—Oh yes.

A second strand follows the people living in ‘the outside’, run by the State rather than System, and monitored both by consoles and guards. State narrates from a third-person perspective; it is more bureaucratic, reading more like a journal or register of facts than the searching and emotive tone of System, and the population it controls are families who need to worry about making a living.

Exactly halfway through the novel, there is a larger ‘Interlude – Eight Short Stories from Earth’. Spanning early twentieth-century America to Cold War Siberia to contemporary Hawaii, the pieces trace the real lineage of NOVA’s logic through science, war, and architecture. After Kalla persuades System to go rogue and split one part of itself into an ‘I’ instead of a ‘we’, the novel’s narrative picks up pace. System helps Kalla to go rogue herself, leaving the moieties and crossing into State to uncover a conspiracy surrounding Teniel’s injury. The political plot tightens around corruption within NOVA’s council, corporate conspiracy, betrayal and protest. Near the novel’s end there is an introduction to an alien voice that speaks of skies, and calls System itself an illusion, making NOVA’s walls – and everything inside them – feel small.

Because of the novel’s shifts between sci-fi and philosophy, as well as shifts between the main narrative and a lot of exposition and back story, it can be a difficult read; some readers will feel they are spending pages circling the same points. There are rewards here for those who make it through. NOVA’s ending is an inversion of the last lines of Beckett’s ‘The Unnamable’, taking us back to the epigraphs – with perhaps more narrative resolution than LeGuin’s words promised.