Novum! (#8)

To be completely honest, when I began to write this blog on the “novum”, I decided to backtrack in the class.  The directions for the blog didn’t say that it had to be on a story from that specific week, and I felt like using either one of those would be very repetitive (for me at least, given the blogs I already did on “Baby, You Were Great” and on Marxism (in my opinion, “Dead Space for the Unexpected” was more of a demonstration on Marxism than the novum; I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, I’m simply stating that I think I could expand more upon the idea using “Flowers for Algernon”)).  So for that reason, and to try and use a fresh story, “Flowers” is what I went with.

As I think I’ve mentioned previously in more than one of my blogs, I consider the concept of the novum to be the coolest one we learned during the whole semester.

Yes, your description of the novum as the “shiny new thing” of the story is really its most basic definition.  But technically, isn’t that what really demonstrates a creative writer’s capabilities?  I won’t claim that writing a piece of informative literature, nonfiction literature, or even a fiction story with a simple realistic plot is easy.  It still takes talent to write anything that people will desire to read.  But to come up with something that hasn’t yet come into existence, and especially to take that something and be able to build a story around it, I feel like that is a unique talent all its own.

Besides being the shiny new thing, the novum can really become the main part of the story.  For example, when it comes to “Flowers for Algernon”, without the novum the story simply wouldn’t exist.  The entire plot is based on new medicine that has not been found, and that certainly hadn’t been around at the time the story was written.  Daniel Keyes could have been trying to portray one of any number of things, from the idea that ignorance is bliss, to the pain from losing something you once had, or even the notion that modern medicine is getting too experimental.  In this way, the novum allowed a story to be written that could creatively demonstrate the theme.

In my opinion, the novum is truly what makes science fiction.  It is what allows settings and characters that do not exist in any other works of literature, who could have problems that have never before been imagined.  For example, I had actually read “Flowers for Algernon” once before, (and though admittedly I never had that much of a grasp on the idea of science fiction before this class), I hadn’t really thought of the story as being science fiction.  After taking a look at the medicine as the novum, it became impossible for me to miss the fact that it was indeed, science fiction.