“SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.”

These oft-repeated words, first delivered as a lecture in 1968 and published famously in 1979, launched the academic study of science fiction (abbreviated here as SF). They are the work of still-operating scholar of sf Darko Suvin, who has been widely considered one of the “fathers” of science fiction as a field. This definition sounds official, elegant; even today, it’s often used as a jumping-off point for academic studies on sf. As someone whose dissertation project has Suvin as its beating heart, I have repeated this definition more times than I can count.

...the problem is, it’s super jargon-y and difficult to understand at first blush.

So let’s understand it together, shall we?

Estrangement and Cognition

At the core of Suvin’s definition are the concepts of estrangement and cognition. These words describe particular experiences that Suvin believes a reader has when they encounter an sf text.

Estrangement is a feeling of strangeness or unfamiliarity; in an sf text, we experience estrangement when we encounter something that reminds us that this fictional world we’ve entered into is different in significant ways from our own. You might feel estrangement in a text on a small scale if characters use slang language that does not exist in the present, or make use of fictional technologies or inventions; for example, in Ted Chiang’s short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” characters refer to “calli,” a slang term for “calliagnosia” - a specific variety of face-blindness that can be safely, reversibly, surgically induced in patients to make them “unable to see beauty” - a new technology and accompanying slang that reminds us we are not in our own world. You might experience estrangement on a larger scale if you realize that this fictional world operates via very different natural and physical laws than our world; Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy is a masterclass in this, bombarding the reader with commonly-used methods for warping time and space that will absolutely cook your noodle.

Cognition, on the other hand, is a feeling of recognition and familiarity; in an sf text, we experience cognition when we encounter something that reminds us that this fictional world we’ve entered into is similar in significant ways to our own. You might feel cognition in a text on a small scale if you, for example, see through the strangeness of some kind of technology and recognize it as a version of something that already exists - the holographic communication watches worn by Wakandans may seem out of this world, but in practice they serve the same social and cultural function as Skype, if not 1980s-era videophones. You might also experience cognition on a larger scale if you realize that a set of events in the text parallels some period of real-world history, like the parallels that exist between A Song of Ice and Fire and the Wars of the Roses.

According to Darko Suvin, what defines sf is an experience of constantly, rapidly shuttling back and forth between the sensation of estrangement and the sensation of cognition - between feelings of unfamiliarity and feelings of recognition. This definition helps us account for the phenomenon of sf often feeling like it both is and isn’t about the present, even when it’s set in the future. Is that dark dystopia a warning about a future we may still be able to prevent, or a commentary on a present that has already arrived? Both, says Suvin - estrangement makes it feel like it’s yet to come, while cognition makes it feel like key elements of it are already here.

The Novum

Another frequently-cited portion of Suvin’s landmark definition is the idea of a “novum,” or “new thing.” For an sf world, a novum is a kind of catalyst - something new which causes drastic, far-reaching changes to the world it appears in.

Imagine this: you’re staring at your reflection in a basin of water. Reaching over your shoulder, someone drops an object into the basin. Despite the distortion caused by the dropped object, eventually you manage to relocate at least some part of your reflection - perhaps a glimpse of an eye, or a snifter of a nose - in the roiled water.

In this situation, the dropped object is the novum - the new thing suddenly introduced into an otherwise familiar world (the calm basin of water with your reflection in it). The ripples that spread outwards from the dropped object are waves of estrangement - distortions and differences in the surface of the water that make your face reflected there seem strange and unfamiliar. The experience of catching glimpses of your reflection again - even just a sliver of the face you remember - is the experience of cognition. 

Most obviously, the novum in an sf story can be a new invention or piece of technology that changes the basics of how life is lived. Whether it’s a time machine, a flying car, or a way to live forever, life just wouldn’t be the same after we discovered these things, and we can imagine what those changes might be somewhat easily because we’ve already experienced technological novums in our own world, from the invention of the printing press to the establishment of the internet. But the novum can be more than just technology; it can be anything - an event, a person, an idea - that, when introduced, drastically changes the way our lives are conducted. 

For example, in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, we might be tempted to assume the novum is the eponymous time machine - clearly an invention that didn’t exist in the late Victorian period. But the time machine actually doesn’t produce any change in the world of the novel - only the main character uses it, only a few other people know about it, and it disappears before ever creating any drastic ripples of difference in the present. Instead, the novum of The Time Machine is something like the Industrial Revolution itself: a set of ideas, inventions, and social structures which create two distinct groups of people - the working class, physical laborers forever hunched over machines in the dark, and the idle rich, frail and effete, lazily reaping the benefits of that labor - that divergently evolve into the Morlocks and the Eloi.

Can there be more than one novum? I hear no one in particular ask. It’s a good question, one that comes up almost immediately when you start trying to apply Suvin’s framework to your favorite sf movies; is the novum of Star Wars the Force? the faster-than-light spaceships? the ideology that creates the Empire? For reasons we’ll have to return to in a later post, Darko Suvin is very invested in the idea that, in truly great sf, there’s only one novum, and every piece of estrangement - everything that seems strange and new about a fictional world - should be logically traceable back to that single novum. In short, Suvin thinks that this produces a kind of tidiness and intentionality that makes the world feel artfully built. If you just throw in a bunch of random future-slang to make your world feel “futuristic” and different, that can be effective, up to a point; but it feels so much more real and impactful when it makes logical sense that that new slang would have arisen, not just because language changes gradually over time, but because it has changed in order to express new concepts related to a new event, idea, or invention (as with “calli” in “Liking What You See”).

But it’s important to note that not everyone agrees with Suvin on this point - there have been many defenses of sf works with multiple novums, and worldbuilding that does not necessarily follow these rules. In fact, there have been a lot of disagreements about Suvin over the years, as might be expected with such a key figure. Various folks (myself included!) have taken issue with or had diverging ideas about the motivations that inspired Suvin to create this model of sf when he did, and whether it remains a useful model in the present, even if it served a key purpose in the past…

...but we’ll have to dive into that in our next post! So stay tuned for what’s not to love about this definition of sf - a set of questions and ideas that are at the core of my dissertation.

In the meanwhile, if you want to get a better idea of how a Suvinian novum can be used to create a whole sf world, complete with characters and conflicts, I recommend you check out Shock!: Social Science Fiction. It’s a pen-and-paper roleplaying game in which several players work together to create a science fiction world by thinking through the various ripple-effect changes that would result from the introduction of a particular “Shock” (novum). I’ve both played a couple games of it as a player and helped run it as part of a lecture class on science fiction in order to teach students about the concept of the novum in a more hands-on way. If you do check it out, let me know how your game went!