NOVA

Meh. Not really gripping to me. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

A perfectly realized rehabilitation of the hoary space opera, Samuel R. Delany’s Nova is still as forward-looking and peerless today as at its birth, when it catapulted its twenty-five-year-old author to the top of the science fiction scene. The contending Shakespearean dynasties; the quirky, deeply inhabited characters; the poetic language (rococo, yet somehow still limpid); the portrait of a future radically estranged from ours, where our era is mythic to theirs, while they are myths-to-come for us; the layered symbolism—all these aspects are drawn from past masters, yet are fused into an organic whole whose likes had never before been seen. Most novas burn out to cinders, but this one—vital, prescient, affecting, a genuine work of art—blazes as brightly as ever.