Nova Explosion

Ok, so a bit of click-bait in the title (and the one before for that matter).

I'm in this weird mood where I'm starting to return to the books I read in my very early 20s.  I read a huge amount back then (just a bit under 100 books/year), but, not surprisingly, I don't remember a lot of details of most of the books.  One of my major accomplishments of 1993 was reading through all the novels of Saul Bellow, Graham Green and Barbara Pym.  In the case of Bellow and Green, there are just a small number of novels that I expect to reread, though I will probably reread most of Pym (although it may be a while before I actually get started).

I recall that during that period I read many of Craig Nova's novels and thought they were quite good, though that's about all I can recall.  I probably even owned a fair number of these at one point, but I don't believe I own any Nova any longer.  Unlike the other authors mentioned above, he has written a fair bit since the mid 1990s, so I have a fair bit of virgin territory to cover, as it were.  It actually looks like he has drifted into science fiction a bit (Wetware) and crime novels (Cruisers), whereas I read far more science fiction in my teens and early 20s and hardly do at all any more.

From the list below, I am fairly sure I read Incandescence through Tornado Alley (and maybe Trombone), though I certainly wouldn't swear to it.

• Turkey Hash (1972)
• The Geek (1975)
• Incandescence (1979)
• The Good Son (1982)
• The Congressman's Daughter (1986)
• Tornado Alley (1989)
• Trombone (1992)
• The Book of Dreams (1994)
• The Universal Donor (1997)
• Wetware (2002)
• Cruisers (2004)
• The Informer (2010)
• The Constant Heart (2012)
• All The Dead Yale Men (2013)

While I have far too many other things to do to just devote my time to rereading Nova, I might alternate between reading a book I think I've read before and one that is clearly new.  However, I do think I'm going to skip Cruisers as it just doesn't sound remotely appealing to me (not up my Alley, as it were).*  Also, the set-up of The Universal Donor sounds so absurd that I think I will also give this a pass.  One of the Goodreads reviewers said it had an unearned happy ending, and from what little I have gleaned, it sounds like it has many of the weaknesses of McEwan's Saturday, which I really didn't care for, regardless of all the hype surrounding it.

I had no idea that Nova lived in North Carolina and taught at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where my father worked.  Had I known, I might have tried to get an autographed copy of one or more of his books.


* I did get about 50 pages into Wetware when I finally gave up on it.  It was a combination of the glacial pace of the first few chapters combined with the fact that I didn't care at all about any of the human characters.  I'm sure it didn't help that the main plot seemed like a ripoff of much more interesting books about androids with human emotions, and also that the "science" bits were so absurdly far-fetched like being able to develop artificial molecules/genes to generate specific emotional responses in the androids.