Alice Miller
NOVA by Tim Corballis (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 272pp, $38
Given the world we live in now, it’s likely you’ve spent some time imagining a different one. A world that’s better organised, with more competent and thoughtful leaders. Tim Corballis has also been thinking about this; his excellent sixth book, NOVA, is set in a strange new world that mirrors our own in all kinds of uncomfortable and surprising ways.
This is a novel of ideas with an emotional core, as well as a robust sense of humour and playfulness. It’s not easy to pin down exactly what NOVA is. The back cover describes it as ‘a self-contained world launched into deep time’. A spaceship? We soon discover that the borders of that self-contained world are not what we imagined. It’s hard to say for certain where NOVA starts and where other worlds begin. But reading it invites questions you’ll keep asking long after you’ve slipped the book back onto its shelf: What would you ask the world if you could chat to it? How much can a world know about itself?
The great strength of this book—its beating heart and pulsing console—is its central relationship. The story is structured around conversations between Kalla, an older woman with sore hips who also happens to be a former councillor on NOVA, and System, a non-sentient voice that contains all the mechanisms and processes of NOVA. The relationship between Kalla and System provides an emotional, dramatic and often funny back-and-forth as the book muses on community, democracy, climate crises, wars and the nature of Earth itself.
Structuring a novel through conversations echoes the oldest discussions of statecraft we have: Plato’s Republic. But it also echoes the sort of conversations you might have with AI. What does it mean, emotionally, to chat to a non-sentient entity? In NOVA, System struggles to get its absence-of-a-head around this idea.
System is a compelling narrator, a ‘we’ who appears willing to second- (and third- and fourth-) guess itself:
It was a mistake to trust us in that sense, since we could never break trust, and we had no ‘character’. We missed it, a sense of who we were—what people called, perhaps, a sense of self. We were filled with voices, including the voices of all the people within NOVA, and including our voices both spoken and unspoken, but none of the voices was ‘our’ voice since we were (and weren’t) voice … etc.
While System’s information is all about people, System itself is fundamentally apart from people:
The gap in us was also a gap between us and people, even though in another sense we were nothing else—nothing but people, or rather people and their works, their relationships, their labour …
System’s musings reveal how often our words relate to the human body (how, for instance, would a system grapple with a concept that requires hands?). Corballis has fun with this. At another point, System notes: ‘Kalla smiled, paused. We had the sense she wanted to meet our eye, whatever that might mean.’
In a traditional novel, human characters yearn to be together and to understand one another. In Corballis’ novel, System yearns for Kalla, but also yearns to understand what it is to be human at all. Early on, Kalla has to use a console to speak to System, and System reports: ‘We felt gaps of all kinds very strongly, if it could be said we felt at all, and now we felt the gap between Kalla and the console.’
The distance between the human and the non-sentient voice is not only unexpectedly moving but also often very funny. System’s often clinical descriptions contrast with Kalla’s very human utterances. Here, System explains to Kalla that the only remaining cow on NOVA can’t really contribute to their dwindling energy supplies:
[System] ‘One cow isn’t contributing anything meaningful. The milk only feeds a minuscule amount of cheese—a luxury for a very small amount of people.’
[Kalla] ‘Fuck.’
[System] ‘We know there are other perspectives.’
In transcendent moments, the emotional intimacy and humour combine:
‘Hi Kalla.’
‘I don’t know if this is still you.’
‘You should know that is an unanswerable question for me.’
‘Oh, it is you.’
As on our own planet, resources are scarce on NOVA. Energy and labour are strictly calculated and assessed. NOVA is travelling to a new exoplanet, and the journey is anything but easy. According to System: ‘The calculation of the time we would take to arrive was 61,370 years, to within a decade.’ Or, as Kalla says: ‘We are never going to make it … Look at this place, falling apart! And our last cow is dying and everything is a disaster and the toilet only flushes every third time you use it.’
The novel’s structure is as innovative and playful as its subject matter. The story is bookended by two major public events. Much of the novel comprises sections from System, or from another non-sentient being, State, characterised by a tonal flatness and a straining against that flatness—an attempt to transcend that allows for both tension and energy. The book contains verse, which is most startling and effective when System is struggling against its own boundaries. System’s attempts to break into humanness can explode into verse:
… It
was a
melancholic
yearning, a
yearning
not for
somethingknown
but for
something
we had never experienced and could not name. We said, ‘Do you dream, Kalla?’
As System is meant to be cognisant of many simultaneous scenes, the prose sometimes splits into two narratives to demonstrate these parallel realities. While this is effective, it also shows the limitations of the page and the reader—it’s impossible to show anything like the thousands of perspectives that System is meant to be privy to at once.
There are other sections, framed on the page, usually in the form of dialogues, titled variously ‘Sphere’, ‘Simultaneity’, ‘Ballistics’. Some of these sections include sudden, surprising first-person utterances: ‘I remember when we went to visit the Titan missile’, ‘my studies at McGill’ or ‘I was brought up a Catholic.’ Although these floating sections could risk confusing a reader, the book is anchored by Kalla and System, two sympathetic, flawed characters: one all too human, the other not quite human enough.
There is a recurring question of how much a non-sentient being can know about humans. Occasionally, a reader might question the boundaries of what System or State can and can’t understand of human feelings. But for the most part, this tension is productive, and Corballis provides funny and astute reflections on human behaviour: ‘All the more reason to go, and (as State could say with 98.8% confidence) she hated the thought of going, and loved hating it.’
As Corballis acknowledges in his notes, NOVA fits alongside many other excellent books, including Pip Adam’s Audition (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023) and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (Harper & Row, 1974). While NOVA is very different from either of these, all three are deeply political novels, and it’s easy to see Le Guin’s influence here. The Dispossessed follows Shevek, a visitor from an anarchist society who arrives on a capitalist planet that resembles our own. Both NOVA and The Dispossessed interrogate the nature of work, how we feel about the communities we belong to and what our obligations towards those communities could be. Le Guin’s book is subtitled ‘An Ambiguous Utopia’, and both novels ask us to consider our own concept of an ideal state. Their characters often reflect on the best way to structure society. ‘No one is very used to organising a world,’ as Kalla observes. The worlds that Corballis and Le Guin present us with are never simple. The mirror keeps tilting in unexpected directions.
While in Aotearoa and beyond, we’re reconsidering basic questions about how our society works—which countries are our allies, where does our energy come from, what might a non-sentient entity do for (or to) us?—NOVA challenges many of our ideas and beliefs with its own questions. As I write this, people are using AI for employment, study, parenting, therapy and romantic relationships, all of which has alarming implications for the environment, the future of labour and our sense of self. We might say that a novel that humanises a non-sentient being and contemplates its mortality is not helpful at this moment in time. But just like in our discussions with and about AI, NOVA is really about humans. System’s voice feels human to us (and look at that word, feels).
Corballis’ novel isn’t interested in empty reassurance. As Kalla says towards the end:
We might not be fine. Actually I’m terrified about what they’re going to come up with in that room, and about, about everything in the world. About the future. No one is very used to organising a world—they’re going to need practice. Or they’ll just mess it up. But we’ll be … I don’t know. Just, don’t worry about it.
This is the sort of book where I get to the end of a hefty review like this and think, have I actually started to capture what the book is and what it does? Have I got below the surface? But that’s why you must go and read the book yourself. A novel is rarely so engaging and curious, so ambitious and funny, leaving us with this many open and intriguing questions. How would you organise a world?
I should mention that when I undertook to write this review, I didn’t realise a quote from my anonymous reader’s report on an early version of the book would appear on the front cover. It certainly gives away how I feel about the book! Nevertheless, I continue to believe that NOVA is an important literary work—not only because it encourages us to grapple with fascinating questions from unexpected angles, but also because it’s tremendous fun. There’s a joy in this book that reminds me of Samuel Beckett or Wallace Stevens, a deep seriousness that sits easily alongside playfulness.
At the end, there’s a Beckettian reflection on mortality from the perspective of a non-sentient being. What hope is there for any of us? In the world of this novel—a world where our thoughts can be bold, open and far-reaching—surprisingly enough, we find there is plenty.
ALICE MILLER is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who lives in Berlin. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Here & Thereafter (Pavilion), and a novel, More Miracle than Bird (Tin House).
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