The Dark Thing

One of the things that struck me most about Nova was that while the characters weren't particularly racialized, there was a pervasive dark presence throughout the novel. Lorq is essentially mixed, as we learn when his parents ancestry is described. "He knew that his mother's parents were on Earth, in a country called Senegal. His father's great-grandparents were also from Earth, from Norway" (43). Not only is he mixed in the current, racial sense, but in the futuristic sense of home planets. The other characters' race, and physical appearance in general, is barely mentioned, except in the case of Ruby, where her pale skin serves to accentuate the numerous differences between her and von Ray. The twins also have race explicitly stated, but they are still considered identical. They are mirror images of each other, from appearance to speech patterns. They are rather the representation of two parts of a whole, one with race and one lacking. While this distinction is interesting and certainly worthy of discussion, the language used is not particularly polarizing in this instance. They are described in terms of factual evidence and thus do not carry all the connotations that blackness can represent.

In contrast, every description of Sebastion's pets uses highly connotative language. For example, the initial description of the pets says, "Moist wings crinkled, stretched, like onyx, like isinglass. The man reached up to where black claws made an epaulet on his knotted shoulder and caressed the grappling pads with a spatulate thumb" (22). Later on the same page von Ray calls the creature a "devil" and the narrator describes it as a "beast". Throughout the book, every description of the animal is dark and mysterious. The reader never gets a clear sense of what it looks like other than that it is black and perhaps something like a bat (a creature of the night and with its own store of connotations). Even as it saves Lorq from Ruby in the fog (which also carries its own weight in symbolism) we don't get a clear picture of it. Again referred to as it, the narrator says, "It darted, dark and flapping, between the walls" (172). And shortly after, "The dark thing flapped about him now" (173). The only way the reader knows what is being described is the key word "dark". The creature's identity is wholly determined by its darkness rather than any other trait. This strikes me as disconcerting, that anything should be so reduced to a single trait. This is the inherent problem of literary racism, that it limits characters to a single trait and prevents them from being fully developed.