Cognitive Estrangement
A Yugoslav-born writer and professor named Darko Suvin popularized many concepts while serving as the editor of the Science Fiction Studies academic journal and through the courses he taught on sci-fi and literature more broadly in North America. But one of the most widely spread of these ideas is the concept of novum, which he gleaned from a German Marxist philosopher named Ernst Bloch.
In this context, novum, which is Latin for "new thing" refers to concepts utilized in science fiction that are plausible, often in the scientific sense but also in the social or philosophical sense, despite not being real, today.
Stories utilizing a scientifically sound, if not currently practical means of time travel, for instance, are using a novum-based approach to world-building.
In Suvin's estimation, stories with plots driven by some kind of novum are science fiction, whereas those lacking such a feature, but which have similar aesthetics to science fiction stories should actually be categorized as fantasy.
So stories like those taking place in the Star Wars universe, where there's a great deal of futuristic-seeming technology like laser weapons and spaceships, would be categorized as "fantasy," while the technologies wielded by Trisolarans in Three-Body Problem and its sequels would make these works science fiction, because despite being quite futuristic-seeming they're also layered with explanation and steeped in scientific principles: these are things that could conceivably happen and be true, even if they're still "fantastic" based on today's technological capabilities and global social trends.
There's plenty of room for debate about how we categorize anything, and the genres into which we place stories are no exception. But to Suvin the concept of novum was important not just because it allowed us to more surgically separate tales into distinct categories, but also because it pointed at another element that tended to be present in good science fiction: cognitive estrangement.
When we're presented with alternative realities, be they closely related to our own with just small differences or dramatically distinct in essentially every particular, we're forced to imagine a different existence—one that may be richly defined and depicted—which in turn plucks us from our real existence just long enough for us to view it from a slight distance, through the lens of that alternate reality.
Reading a book in which time travel is possible forces us to ask how we would behave if such a technology were actually invented.
Reading a book in which the government is run by artificial intelligences, or all fossil fuels have been replaced by renewable energy, or nations no longer exist and humanity is bumbling around the universe, helping out other species and having adventures: such stories can force us out of our current context and adjust our perception of reality, potentially forever, by planting a seed of possibility and opening our eyes to concepts we’d never considered before. And that estrangement from our norms and familiar context can in turn influence our goals, what we work toward, how we vote, and the ethics upon which we base our behaviors and beliefs and plans.
This concept was of particular interest to people like Suvin who were living and thinking about such things during the Cold War, as the ideological competition roiling the world during that period had a lot of people considering social models that riffed on the dominant capitalistic-democracy vs. communist-authoritarian options. And it's no mistake that a great many works of fiction published during this period subtly or not so subtly oriented around these concepts, as it could be dangerous to address them directly, no matter where you lived at the time.
It's interesting to consider how cognitive estrangement—being pulled from our lived existence, even for a short time—can reset and even recalibrate our sense of things, whenever and under whatever circumstances we might be living.
It’s a concept that would be difficult to test in actual research settings, and which thus currently lacks any scientific rigor.
But anecdotally I suspect many of us could identify some aspect of our hopes, dreams, expectations, and goals that connect back to something we learned (or began to suspect) might be possible because of fiction, rather than data collected from the tangible world we live in most of the time.
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