Nova

Delany, Samuel R. Nova. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968. Rpt. with textual corrections Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [S. F.] Book Club Edition, 1969 (Currey); and New York: Bantam, 1969.

Suggests the possibility of the reduction or elimination of the alienation from labor in technological societies by a "Man-Machine Symbiosis." Discussed by Warrick 176-78.[[1]] See under Literary Criticism the TMG essay by A. Gordon, "Human, More or Less: Man-Machine Communion in Samuel R. Delany's Nova and Other Science Fiction Stories".[[2]]

John J. Pierce quotes as a crucial passage:

All major industrial work began to be broken down into jobs that could be machined ‘directly’ by man. There had been factories run by a single man before, an uninvolved character who turned a switch on in the morning, slept half the day, checked a few dials at lunchtime, then turned things off before he left in the evening. Now a man went to a factory, plugged himself in, and he could push the raw materials into the factory with his left foot, shape thousands on thousands of precise parts with one hand, assemble them with the other, and shove out a line of finished products, having inspected them all with his own eyes. (1969 edn. p. 196)

Cf. and contrast factories in Vonnegut's Player Piano, Dick's "Autofac", Russ's The Female Man, and READY PLAYER ONE as novel and film.

RDE, with thanks to JJP, updated 28June20