'A truly kick-arse spaceship' — pip adam launches Nova by Tim Corballis
On Tuesday 9 June 2026, we gathered at Unity Books Wellington to launch Nova by Tim Corballis. Here is pip adam's brilliant launch speech from the night:
Tēnā koutou,
i’m thrilled to be here tonight and to be able to talk about Tim Corballis’ amazing new book Nova.
Nova is an incredibly rewarding read. This is a book about language in the most fundamental way. It makes me think about post-painterly abstraction. The way a Rothko is about paint, Nova is about words. What it is to have words. What it is to use words. What it is to be only voice. This is a book in many ways trying to outrun conventional narrative form and in doing so creates a new and exciting way of telling a wildly compelling story. On a sentence level this is an endlessly thrilling work. There is a degree of surrender the language of this book requires which is absolutely body-filling. Oddly for a book that is about the heights of technology it offers this antidote to the overwhelm of phones and notifications and information. Whether it’s an out-loud laugh or a deep sense of our body’s place in the universe—reading Nova is an all of body experience. Tim has—for a long time—been one of my favourite stylists. i love the way a Tim Corballis novel feels in my head and Nova feels like an extension of everything i love about Tim’s work. Free of the earth and in the amazing project of creating Nova’s singular plural narrator there is this amazingly satisfying stretch in Tim’s words and work. It is both the culmination and natural evolution of all of Tim’s incredible books and in way is an invitation to revisit them. The atmosphere of Our Future is in the Air, the formal lay of R.H.I. the deep humanism that reaches right back to Below. Everything you love about Corbarllis is in Nova. What an incredible journey from tight, small caves to a miniature earth in infinite space.
Nova is a consummate tour-de-force of science fiction storytelling. Using the form of the novel, as Tim so often does to turn the mirror back on the time and politics of its readers.
At the centre and all around this engaging story is Nova—a truly kick-arse spaceship. My god. Nova! It might be my favourite spacecraft of all time. And Tim uses it to such good effect.
In 2015, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an essay called ‘Our Generation Ships Will Sink’. The main thesis of the essay is that there is no ‘Planet B’ and if there is one we won’t get there. He includes a list of the reasons generational space travel is impossible. Robinson places these insurmountable barriers in the categories of: physical, biological, ecological, sociological, and psychological. Tim understands these constraints fully and imagines thrilling workarounds to all of them that—like the best solutions in science fiction—cause unintended and other problems. What is stunning about Nova is that Tim invents a spacecraft in which many of the things that could go wrong are going wrong and instead of disaster this slowly sinking technology offers revolutionary possibility. Tim describes a population—pushed to the human limit of these impossible conditions—creating something new. Becoming something new. As Alice Miller says in her cover quote, this makes Nova a ‘strangely joyful book’.
Like, Ursula K LeGuin’s work suggests, the science in science fiction which is often the mostr compelling is not physics but sociology. Tim creates a whole new structure for personal and political human relations in Nova which become a driving narrative force in the book. Robinson, in ‘Our Generation Ships Will Sink’, imagines only one politics that meets a requirement for the social control necessary for safe thousand-year space travel: ‘whatever their political organization,’ he writes, ‘whether it be military or anarchic, hierarchical or democratic, the situation itself can be called totalitarian.’ As much through language choices and voice as through imagination, Tim, creates a counter to this idea. There is no doubt that as a species we are not suited for our generation ships but what Tim suggests is that, once free of this planet, we might become suited. And of course, this means that when i inevitably and joyfully arrived at the end of this book and so back on this planet, i, like the crew of Nova, had been altered in a way that made it possible for me to see the fine cracks in the stories we are told by powerful people: Nothing can change, things are here for good, someone needs to be in charge of us and its not us. Although Nova is a work of fiction in this way it brings to mind the television documentary works of filmmaker Adam Curtis. Like an argument in the best essay, the mood and the weight and the stakes of Nova build to create the possibility of something strikingly new.
Tim has created something exceptional in Nova. It stands out in the literary canon of Aotearoa. This book couldn’t have been written anywhere else in the world by any other writer at any other time. This is a book that speaks loudly back to our current situation—in a lot of ways it is a last call at a smokey bar. i’m so incredibly grateful that if i have to live in these tough, stupid times i get to do it with a copy of Nova in my hand. You are all going to love this book. i’m jealous of those of you who get to read it for the first time. i can’t wait to talk to you all about Nova. Thank you and congratulations Tim.
