NOVA

Book club edition, issued by the SFBC. Originally issued by Doubleday in a trade hardcover edition; the first edition was edited; the text is restored here (see note by the author below). Jacket illustration by Russell Fitzgerald. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket. Regarding the Text of NOVA: It was originally published in hardcover by Doubleday, when the SF department was under the direction of Larry Ashmead; the in-house editing was done by Mark Haefele. That edition was missing a little over a page, late in the book. By the time the Doubleday Bookclub edition was released, also in hardcover, with the same Russell FitzGerald pink and green cover, it had been restored. All the subsequent Bantam paperback editions are the full text. The reason the page was missing was because a mentor of mine, Dick Entin, told me the scene was just too "over the top," and he found it unbelievable. It explained the fate of one character named Brian. Algis Budrys, in his otherwise very laudatory review in *Galaxy Magazine,* mentioned the lack of resolution for Brian, and so I returned it to the text in time for the Bookclub edition. Budrys eventually wrote the introduction to the Greg Press edition, in which he said I was two years older than I actually was when I wrote it. But I indeed signed the contracts for the completed novel in February of 1966 and turned it in in March of that year, days before my 26th birthday. I had assumed that the paperback would appear in Terry Carr's line of Ace Specials, for which he paid $3,000.00 at the time. Someone at Bantam Books, however, offered 10k for it, so of course my agent, Henry Morrison, accepted that offer. I believe it was in 1974 that the SFWA audited Ace Books and found that A. A. Wynn had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from its writers-they owed me 23k. (John Brunner was possibly owed as much as 300k, which as far as I know, Ace was unable to cough up. It's quite possible he might have lived a few years, or at least months, longer had they paid him on time.) Henry, however, sold my entire corpus to Bantam Books, and the rights to *Equinox* and *Hogg* for 5k each. (Both of them languished, unpublished, for the next twenty years.) Now a Bantam writer, I began to work on Return to Nevèrÿon . . . -Samuel R, Delany, January 20, 2024.…