NOVA

Nobody is very used to organising a world.

From the author of Our Future Is in the Air and R.H.I., NOVA is a genre-defying novel that imagines a future in which people and their worlds talk to each other.

Set on NOVA, a self-contained world launched into deep time, the novel unfolds through conversations between Kalla, a former councillor uneasy with consensus and ceremony, and System, the voice of all NOVA’s mechanisms and processes. System is curious and anxious – and seems to know about every aspect of life on NOVA, but in some ways knows nothing at all. Kalla is sceptical, smart and increasingly troubled by what can and can’t be measured. Together, System and Kalla circle around questions of democracy, labour, memory, entropy and love.

As it moves between scenes of work, public ritual and speculative reflections on systems theory and time, and as NOVA itself coasts, rotates and persists in its unknowable form, the novel asks disarming questions: what might it mean to have on-demand access to the voice of the world? What would we do with that knowledge? And is it possible for a world to be meaningfully organised at all?

‘This novel is such a wise, far-reaching, and funny reflection of organised societies and the relationship between humans and machines. What an ambitious, enlightening, and strangely joyful book.’ —Alice Miller

Tim Corballis is the author of the novels Below, Measurement, The Fossil Pits, Our Future Is in the Air and R.H.I.; and a substantial body of short fiction, essays and art writing. In 2015, he was Writer in Residence at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. He lives in Wellington with his partner and their twin daughters, and teaches in the School of Science in Society at Te Herenga Waka.

Cover design: Todd Atticus