Science Fiction has always been about exploring the outer reaches of our reality. And while space operas – with their many planets, diverse cultures and complex political struggles – provide an intriguing window into the future, their dominance in the genre has lead to a mess of nonsense names and information overload. While there are very few exceptions ( The Dune Series and Original Star Wars Trilogy having creators who drew on real world societies or religions and stretched them to their logical conclusions) , it’s hard to distinguish any grey, brutalist, starship colony from one another. Pulp Sci-Fi gets around this problem by bringing space to our own backyard or specialising in a certain science. It does this through what’s called the “Novum”.
Novum, or “new thing” in Latin is the element in a science fiction story that changes everything. More precisely, it is the one changes that, as a consequence, changes everything else around it. For Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), it could be as simple as aliens coming to earth. Yet aliens have been a staple of Sci-Fi well before author Ted Chiang decided to put pen to paper. So his “new thing” is instead considered to be their language – one which destroys the very concept of past and present. For the far older Planet of the Apes (1968), it was simple as, what if monkeys were sentient instead of humans.
It’s this narrowing of focus that allows the story to be engaging, as protagonists are often forced into discovering what makes the Novum tick, and as a consequence entice danger and leave the audience intrigued about how they’ll solve the mystery. H.G Wells was the master of this form of storytelling. His inventor from The Time Machine and biologist from The Island of Doctor Moreau are stricken mad by their adventures before the story even starts, but it only excites us more for what horrors await when they finally have the courage to recount their tales. This is because their discoveries of time travel and animal people are the one substantial change that creates every other consequence.
New writers often struggle to create a believable Sci-Fi world because everything has to be “new”. New flying cars for new, modified people to drive to their new job as new testers for a new drug that makes you see a new virtual reality. Everything in their world has to have a seperate explanation for each new thing added, so their future becomes a tangled mess of generic ideas, because in an effort to unique, they struggle to balance all these new ideas in first drafts, leading to the next one being derivative so that its easier to keep track of everything.
Novum stories don’t have that problem because every future thing branches out from that one concept. Replicants in Blade Runner are robots virtually identical to humans. That one sentence leaves behind questions: What are they used for? Who created them? Who repairs them? If they think and act like humans how do we tell them apart, and if so, can they feel like us too?
Answer enough of these questions in a satisfying way, and you not only have a world, characters and gadgets, but their ramifications create a clear conflict within the story. As a result, they allow science fiction to be as simple or complex as the author desires – as long as it still has that central idea, people will not only follow along, but they’ll have a fun time doing it.
But it’s still a feet to pull all this off successfully. Because despite what J.J Abrams’ might tell you, you still need to have answers that are not only satisfying enough, but also open enough to have audience members create their own conclusions.
That’s why I think Alex Garland’s adaptation of Annihilation , and I assume Jeff VanderMeer’s original novel, is the pinnacle of a modern-day Novum story (or at least tied for first with Arrival).
A meteor crashes into a lighthouse. Over the course of several months it emanates a oil coloured border around the surrounding area nicknamed “The Shimmer”. Designated as “The Southern Reach”, the American Government decides to study what this strange phenomenon is exactly. However, the personnel who enter disappearing, and the border soon encroaching onto to the mainland, the pursuit to discover quickly turns into an effort to destroy, as it’s existence could mean the end of life as we know it.
When we first meet Lena (Natalie Portman), she’s already done the impossible and returned from The Shimmer alive. But surrounded by hazmat suited officials, we learn that she was the only one of her crew to make it. Her survival raises more questions than answers, and it’s only then that we learn what happened. After her husband and fellow army squad-mate, Kane (Oscar) reappears from a year long mission in which he was presumed to be dead, Lena is kidnapped by Area X, the government branch in charge of studying The Southern Reach, when Kane is rushed to the hospital for “radiation poisoning”. We may not know what The Shimmer is, but thanks to Garland and VanderMeer asking the right questions, we have the protagonist goal (find a way to save her husband from the effects of the shimmer), the antagonist (Area X and The Shimmer itself), as well as what awaits her if she fails (radiation sickness and the death of her and her husband).
When it comes time for Lena and her crew to cross over to The Southern Reach, Garland borrows another of Well’s tools: the embedded narrative. When they discover an abandoned mess hall, Lena realises Kane was here before her. And when their leader, Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), finds an SD Card left behind by Kane and his own crew, everyone learns that the shimmer is not emitting radiation but is fundamentally changing the environment, animals and even people around them.
Lena’s interrogation may embed the film’s story, but Kane’s story is the second layer that foreshadows what will happen to Lena’s crew. This is only possible because The Shimmer blocks contact from the outside world and those who have a story to tell are trapped inside. All of this, mind you is links back to the one element: The Shimmer and it’s so-called radiation. Radiation is able to explain everything so far, the bodily destruction of cells, the shifting of DNA to create mutations, but what it doesn’t explain is what “the one thing” is, as we already have plenty of radiation on earth, and no mutation is rapid or severe enough to cause animals, plants and humans to merge. That’s why when astrophysicist Josie (Josie Radek) figures out what it actually is, the Novum also becomes a satisfying twist in and of itself.
The Shimmer is refraction. Not just of light waves, but of everything, sound, time, cells and “all DNA”. It’s not radiation waves that are altering their DNA, but DNA itself refracting against its surroundings.
It’s easy to see then why the simple notion of “what if everything could refract” spawns a million different possibilities and existential horrors. It still takes a genius to come up with questions and answers for everyone, but by focusing on one thing helps writers like Garland and Vandermere become curious and stretch their imaginations beyond what they thought was possible.
Ironically, a Novum is powerful because it brings fiction writing down to an exact science.