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Defining Novum
The term novum is Latin for “new thing” and has been used by academic Darko Suvin to describe the rationally conceivable elements of a fiction narrative that differ from our present day reality. These novum are the space ships, the ray guns, and the cities under the ocean that inspire as much as they entertain audiences. Both sci-fi and fantasy are imaginative genres of fiction, but they are separated by what Suvin calls “cognitive estrangement”, where Sci-Fi’s novum have a scientifically explainable foundation to their nature; something which fantasy narratives lack. Thus, elements such as magic, fictional countries and worlds and differences where no rational explanation are offered help identify a text as belonging to the fantasy genre. This includes books and films such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and even Star Wars, with its “Force”, light sabres and unexplained faster than light travel placing it as fantasy despite its space setting. While novum such as the Artificial Intelligence in Ghost in the Shell (1995) might as well be magic with how far they are from our current means to create, they are nonetheless based on an existing understanding of technologies that one could rationally argue that our society would develop towards in the future. Cyberpunk as a sub-genre of Sci-Fi is often inundated with novum to the point that these elements become mere tropes as much as they are components of the narrative.
Science Fiction as Instructive and Predictive Media
Within the science fiction genre an informal taxonomy between soft and hard Sci-Fi developed, with hard Sci-Fi being more concerned with scientific accuracy and soft Sci-Fi more idealistic and whimsical; with both being important for the audience and the value of the text itself. Sci-Fi genre pioneer Hugo Gernsback argued that science fiction should always strive to be instructive and concepts and ideas presented by Sci-Fi over the decades have often been inspirations for real technologies and advancements as implemented by the engineers, designers and architects of our modern world. While the world progressed using technology and science, so too did science fiction as a genre. Jules Verne, controversially one of the fathers of science fiction due to the fantastical nature of his narratives, proved to be almost prophetic in his use of imagined technologies that later on became common place in society. As time went on, science rapidly provided technological solutions that far exceeded the understandings of imaginative authors, artists and creators. Rather than providing imaginative dreams of the future, science fiction became an important genre for critiquing the impacts that technology would have on not only society, but on humanity itself.
The Development of Cyberpunk Literature
In 1904, Jules Verne was writing about flying cars while living in an age where horse drawn carriages were still common place, just at the cusp of the automobile revolution. By the 1980’s things had changed. Bruce Sterling in his preface to the cyberpunk short story anthology Mirror Shades argues that science fiction authors were for the first time actually living in the technologies that inspired them and defined their narratives. These early cyberpunk authors were a loosely defined informal group who typically took a hard Sci-Fi approach and kept the time frame of their settings not particularly far off in the future. The optimism of early science fiction authors who had believed the technologies of the future would empower individuals and mankind had eroded. Authors such as William Gibson saw the reality of corporate and government-controlled technologies being used to monitor, programme and even replace humanity. The 80’s and 90’s exploded with cyberpunk media, and beyond the short stories and fringe hard Sci-Fi texts, mainstream Hollywood created films, television shows, and eventually, video games all enamoured with a dystopian narrative of our near future. Hyper-saturated technological dependency, the rampant effects of globalisation and climate change, and the escalation of unending global wars were common rationales provided to shape settings such as the post-apocalyptic wastelands seen in Hardware (1990) and the massively depopulated metropolis in Blade Runner (1982). All of these provided settings where a large number of novum could be introduced to entertain audiences with.
Mainstream Cyberpunk as a Setting
The ideas postulated in hard Sci-Fi cyberpunk literature were filtered and distilled into more commercial aesthetic tropes. While movies, television series and computer games have large budgets that demand returns, literature primarily requires a large time investment. This presents a significant issue with mainstream cyberpunk in that the instructive value of the genre is mostly lost as it is translated to more costly to produce, visual mediums. Flying cars were a novum in 1904, in 2017 they are a genre trope. An ideal example of this issue can be found in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). A number of novum are presented to the audience in this film, however the vast majority have been shown before, in its predecessor film and other influential science fiction movies. These novum include flying cars, “replicant” androids, resource scarcity and planetary depopulation caused by environmental crisis, all of which were already presented in the original 1982 film, and again in even earlier films and texts. In the context of just film, the novum of an AI mass market consumer product love interest was shown in Her (2013), and the question of artificial beings procreating was explored in Ghost in the Shell (1995). This left very few true novum presented to the audience in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), notably the brain programming that Agent K must endure to ensure his mentality has not degraded. However, this kind of technology that has evolved specifically for use by androids was covered to a degree in Blade Runner (1982) with the Voight Kampff test, and the societal implication of needing new technologies to maintain android workers in society is perhaps of limited relevance to modern cinema audiences or futurists alike. Thus, the film loses much of its potential for critiquing modern society and perhaps only provides value in stimulating interest in the cyberpunk genre for the uninitiated.
The Value of Cyberpunk in Film
Cyberpunk films are therefore inherently progressive, political and economic in how they critique the way that we use technology today. Independent of other qualities of a film, such as plot, cinematography, or pacing, cyberpunk Sci-Fi media can provide unique value in its novum that it presents its audience; even artistically poor films and other types of media can be inspiring or thought provoking in such a way.