In the Shadow of No Whales: Rewriting Moby-Dick in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova

Samuel R. Delany’s 1968 novel Nova is a conscious rewriting of MobyDick that plays at the intersection of science fiction, African American, and gay literature.¹ Within science-fiction circles, Nova was immediately acclaimed a breakthrough text, giving (among other things) critical visibility to the now iconic cyborg. Most elements of Moby-Dick are present in Nova, albeit estranged and altered: captain, crew, artist-figure as narrator, ocean, quest, polyphony, cultural encyclopedism, even the doubloon (in the shape of tarot cards). Only the whale is transmuted into an elusive substance, an ambiguously all-significant absence, comparable to Melville’s “whiteness of the whale.” More than any other recent work of science fiction, Delany’s novel achieves a kind of epic of cosmopolitanism, combining race, sexuality, and politics, that grasps at the totality of Melville’s Moby-Dick. Delany’s versions of Ahab and Ishmael will serve as my central focus.

Fantastic Cetologies

Since the 1950s, science fiction has exhibited an enduring fascination with Moby-Dick, ranging from naïve sequels to sophisticated revisions. Repeatedly, in U.S. fiction, film, television, and comics, Ishmael-figures have recounted the fate of obsessive crew-leaders traveling through boundless outer space, pursuing revenge, and seeking redress against real or imaginary leviathans.²

Among more simplistic examples is Philip José Farmer’s 1971 The Wind Whales of Ishmael, which leads Melville’s character into a light-hearted, pulp-style adventure. Other texts focus on cetaceans as emergent forms of intelligence allied with new forms of humanity, such as T.J. Bass’s 1974 The Godwhale and, with an additional stress on gender, Vonda N. McIntyre’s 1983 Superluminal. The numerous highly self-conscious postmodern pastiches of Moby-Dick include the metafictional Chinese boxes of scholar John Kessel’s 1982 novella “Another Orphan.”³ Non-Anglophone writers have also contributed science fiction adaptations, as in the case of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris—the only novel to rewrite Melville’s cetological chapters, which brilliantly collapses the role of the whale into the ocean itself. Indeed, Lem’s strategy is typical in the rewriting of Moby-Dick: one iconic feature of the novel (ocean) is re-encoded over one or more of the others (whales). This strategy is also evident in Delany’s Nova.

Delany’s career, as both a writer and a critic, now spans genres. An influential—at times controversial—science-fiction scholar, he has contributed work in reader-response and post-structuralist criticism, stressing the distinctive rhetorical strategies and practices of the genre. As attention to his writing has grown, critics have come to see all of his works (science fiction, fantasy, realism, autobiography, theory) as a unified endeavor in which the discourse of race, by way of its complex crossings with gender, genre, and language, provides an opening for a new universalism.⁴ Jeffrey Tucker’s wide-ranging study on Delany’s oeuvre, A Sense of Wonder (2004), builds on Ross Posnock’s approach in his 1998 Color and Culture, which places Delany in a tradition of African American “democratic cosmopolitanism” (Posnock 294) that begins with w. e. b. Du Bois and his notion of double-consciousness as an attempt to reject prescriptive models of African American culture. As with the development of Melville’s own reception, the critical trajectory for Delany has been a recent re-politicizing of once purely aestheticizing readings that figured Delany as mainly a bard of the 1960s bohemianism. In this vein, I use Delany’s connection to Moby-Dick and epic to highlight Nova’s political undercurrents.

To my knowledge, Delany has not written about the connection between his novel and Melville’s (which even a quick Google search reveals to be a common assumption), and among critics only George Slusser (54) has gone beyond a cursory acknowledgment of it. Nevertheless, Delany has perceptively spoken about Melville’s work on different occasions. Besides reminiscing in his autobiography about his first readings of the novel as a young, gay, African American intellectual in-the-making (Motion 173, 343), Delany briefly touches in his 1996 Longer Views on Moby...