Nova Is a Heartbreaking Space Age Coming-of-Age Story
Margaret Fortune’s debut novel Nova is like a lot of formative science fiction: it follows a young person through an extreme situation, with the inscrutable movements of empire and the queasy ethics of genetic engineering, but does so on the ground, through a life that is real and lived. Ender Wiggin in Ender’s Game passes a test, and ends up in a cold, friendless training school. The students in Tunnel in the Sky are left behind on an alien planet, and must make their way through a hostile environment. These are kids who are doing the best they can with imperfect knowledge, in unfamiliar if not antagonistic spaces, and the extremity of their situations provides a good metaphor for the bone-deep horror of the existential questions we begin to grapple with in adolescence: what is the difference between talent and purpose? Is the common good more important than individual freedom? Why am I here? What am I? These are questions that hound us throughout our lives, but they’re so bright and stark when we’re 16. So lethal.
Nova (Spectre War Series #1)
Hardcover $24.95
Nova (Spectre War Series #1)
Hardcover $24.95
Lia Johansen can’t remember her life before the transport ship, which is taking her from the internment camp on Aurora to the New Sol space station. She is one of 500 detainees who will repatriated as a goodwill gesture during a ceasefire between interplanetary empires: the Celestial Expanse and the Tellurians. She repeats her backstory over and over to herself: My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war. Once she’s through security, the countdown timer activates in her head. She’s got 36 hours until she goes Nova. She isn’t really Lia Johansen; she is a genetically engineered bomb.
Lia’s first day on the station is foggy. She’s given a cot and some clothing, access to the cafeterias. She floats through this station she will soon destroy with an almost longing for her end. Because she was made to be a bomb, she wants to be a bomb, wants to fulfill her purpose. Two things complicate this. First, she runs into Michael, a childhood friend of the real Lia, who moved from Aurora before the invasion. Because she’s been implanted with some of Lia’s memories, she’s able to fake her way through their conversation, but it still fills her with disquiet. Here she is, this ersatz Lia, designed to kill her friends, her fellow refugees. But then the real complication happens: her countdown timer stops.
So now Lia is at loose ends, without purpose, trying to live as the real Lia to avoid being taken in by the authorities. She spends time with Michael and his family—a sister and a grandmother—learning the station’s nooks and crannies. The counter in her head loses time now and then, a second here and there, and she realizes it’s not a matter of if, but when. The surety of her purpose begins to recede: for what reason was she made? Is she only a purpose, a means to an end, or does she have agency beyond the clock timer? If she has the memories and automatic responses of Lia, does that make her Lia? Much of the book is concerned with the philosophy of the mind, where we get our selfdom, and how we know what we are. This is adolescence in extremis.
Nova is on a certain register of science fiction, which reads something like young adult fiction, but for the final, brutal choices to be made. In many ways, the first half deals with Lia as a teenager, reacquainting herself with childhood friends, managing a jealous younger sister, figuring out what to do with an adulthood that feels more like a mirage than anything. She might blow up tomorrow, but until then, she might as well walk through the gardens of a space station, wonder at the incalculable majesty of the universe just beyond the fragile glass. There’s something intensely satisfying in the way she finally sees her place in the world, that irrevocable shift from adolescent to adult, from formative to completed. Nova is to be the first of five novels in this world, and it’s fitting that this one deals with childhood’s end.
My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.
Lia Johansen can’t remember her life before the transport ship, which is taking her from the internment camp on Aurora to the New Sol space station. She is one of 500 detainees who will repatriated as a goodwill gesture during a ceasefire between interplanetary empires: the Celestial Expanse and the Tellurians. She repeats her backstory over and over to herself: My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war. Once she’s through security, the countdown timer activates in her head. She’s got 36 hours until she goes Nova. She isn’t really Lia Johansen; she is a genetically engineered bomb.
Lia’s first day on the station is foggy. She’s given a cot and some clothing, access to the cafeterias. She floats through this station she will soon destroy with an almost longing for her end. Because she was made to be a bomb, she wants to be a bomb, wants to fulfill her purpose. Two things complicate this. First, she runs into Michael, a childhood friend of the real Lia, who moved from Aurora before the invasion. Because she’s been implanted with some of Lia’s memories, she’s able to fake her way through their conversation, but it still fills her with disquiet. Here she is, this ersatz Lia, designed to kill her friends, her fellow refugees. But then the real complication happens: her countdown timer stops.
So now Lia is at loose ends, without purpose, trying to live as the real Lia to avoid being taken in by the authorities. She spends time with Michael and his family—a sister and a grandmother—learning the station’s nooks and crannies. The counter in her head loses time now and then, a second here and there, and she realizes it’s not a matter of if, but when. The surety of her purpose begins to recede: for what reason was she made? Is she only a purpose, a means to an end, or does she have agency beyond the clock timer? If she has the memories and automatic responses of Lia, does that make her Lia? Much of the book is concerned with the philosophy of the mind, where we get our selfdom, and how we know what we are. This is adolescence in extremis.
Nova is on a certain register of science fiction, which reads something like young adult fiction, but for the final, brutal choices to be made. In many ways, the first half deals with Lia as a teenager, reacquainting herself with childhood friends, managing a jealous younger sister, figuring out what to do with an adulthood that feels more like a mirage than anything. She might blow up tomorrow, but until then, she might as well walk through the gardens of a space station, wonder at the incalculable majesty of the universe just beyond the fragile glass. There’s something intensely satisfying in the way she finally sees her place in the world, that irrevocable shift from adolescent to adult, from formative to completed. Nova is to be the first of five novels in this world, and it’s fitting that this one deals with childhood’s end.
My name is Lia Johansen, and I was a prisoner of war.