What the Novum Means for SF and History

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum.

In Zac’s words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency.

In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang.

The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF.

Zac’s book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure.

The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

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