novum n.
a scientific (rather than supernatural or fantastic) element in a work that demonstrates that the work takes place in a world different from our own, thus establishing that the work should be regarded as science fiction
[< Latin novum ‘new’; introduced by Darko Suvin, extended from an earlier concept developed from Ernst Bloch’s Marxist theory]
SF Encyclopedia
SF Criticism
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1972 On Poetics of SF Genre in College English Dec. 373/1
Darko Suvin
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I should like to approach such a discussion…by postulating a spectrum or spread of literary subject-matter, running from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum.
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1983 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text iii. 114
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Hence time travel in Doctor Who is a novum allowing for a variety of social interactions, each in themselves relying on the conditions of causal motivation and plausibility even if the novum itself is not.
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1995 Reading by Starlight 60
Damien Broderick
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Sf is different, being, as we have seen, at least by vocation a mode grounded in a novum.
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2001 Mapping Cyberspace 183
Cyberpunk’s novum was an estranged socio-spatial order rooted in a dystopian framework.
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2002 The Spin of a Coin, an Anthology of Souls in Interzone (#177) Mar. 17/1 (interviewed by Nick Gevers)
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Kim Stanley Robinson
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Entire populations did die in the New World, so there is precedent, though of course that was a different epidemiological situation. But whatever: that’s the novum; and it could have happened.
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2009 SF/Porn: The Case for ‘The Gas’ in Science Fiction Studies (vol. 36 part 3) Nov. 451
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Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.
The Gas begins with a big technical accident that causes everything that happens in the story…. It is a strong science-fictional novum.
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antedating 1972
Last modified 2024-11-13 20:02:27
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