Nova Express is part of the Space Age trilogy including The Soft Machine (1961) and The Ticket That Exploded 3002 (1962). The three books overlap in various ways, and were rewritten between editions so that the British edition of The Soft Machine (1968) is more like an extension of The Ticket That Exploded, which had separate endings in the British and American editions.

The French critic Philippe Mikriammos who described the three books as a "false trilogy" suggests that the entire grouping should be seen as a single entity in three versions. In Nova Express, however, although material from The Ticket That Exploded is recapitulated and extended, the conflict between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police is presented much more clearly and directly, as if Burroughs had a more definite sense of how he wanted to present his ideas.