NOVA

Tim Corballis’s first novel since Our Future Is in the Air  (2017), NOVA is an inventive, genre-defying, funny 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 story 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?