What's Left of Culture

Nova presents us with a world in human cultures are so enmeshed as to make a universe without culture at all. Culture has both disintegrated as humanity has expanded, and also been trivialized as it has lost its importance. Rather than being part of human life, cultures originating from Earth are appreciated for their historical relevance, and used, through their music and art, to liven parties or flaunt one’s know-how. As a result of mass transportation between planets and people, culture is both absent and without meaning: “There’s no reservoir of national, or world solidarity….This pseudo-planetary society that has replaced any real tradition, while very attractive, is totally hollow…” (46)

Earth, the very origin of human culture, is known as culturally inferior to that of other planets’: life on Earth is seen as inferior, more difficult, and generally more ignorant than human life elsewhere. Unlike humans in other parts of space, not all Earth inhabitants are physically suited to the demands of the book’s modern day. There still exist tribes of gypsies and others without sockets, for which to plug into modern technology, who are left with little to no work or use in a universe that depends entirely on a human’s ability to connect to machinery. Thus already on the fringe of humanity, such Earth-goers have furthermore inhabited a kind of cultural defiance to the culture that has formed outside of Earth. Not only do some Earth inhabitants not fully believe in concepts that have been taken for granted elsewhere in the universe like Tarot cards and socket technology, life on Earth seems to be more chaotic, violent, and even primitive to outsiders. In response to Mouse’s accounts of violence he has witnessed on Earth, Katin, in horror, muses, “Those of us who weren’t born [on Earth] probably will never be able to figure it completely. Even in the rest of Draco, we lead much simpler lives, I think.” (126) Humanity seems to have evolved emotionally, or in its own control of itself, by branching out from its home planet: the majority of humanity, or those who have grown up off of Earth like Katin and Loq look at Earth with some scorn at its life of sectarian and senseless violence, which is the custom of Earth in both the book’s time frame and that of the modern 21^st century. Katin discusses the time period “from the great stellar migrations” (122) as a defining point in human enlightenment, showing that man’s jump from Earth lifted him from many of his mental limits. Ironically, this book shows us a future in which all the cultures we, as readers, know of have become somewhat inferior to a greater and more civil culture. The cross-cultural mesh of the universe can be seen as the killing of individual cultures, but it can also be seen as an step in human evolution furthering us from reasons for societal division. Without culture, or with culture as a something to appreciate as a historical artifact, humans have less to appreciate in its differences, but also less to fight over.