Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun See novem.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete A game at dice, properly called novem quinque (L., nine five), the two principal throws being nine and five.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A new feature.
  • noun obsolete A game of dice, properly called novem quinque, the two principal throws being nine and five.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin

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Examples

  • A future tense narrative creates a special case: the limits of known science do not apply to what “will happen”, so the novum is not impossible and the alethic modality remains “could happen”.

    Archive 2009-06-01 Hal Duncan 2009

  • A future tense narrative creates a special case: the limits of known science do not apply to what “will happen”, so the novum is not impossible and the alethic modality remains “could happen”.

    Notes Toward a Theory of Narrative Modality Hal Duncan 2009

  • The plausibility of the novum is crucial in this type of SF because the argument being made in these narratives is that the ruling paradigm, the accepted nomology in which the events of the narrative "could not have happened", is false, and that the hypothetical nomology, the alternative paradigm in which the events "could have happened", is in a very real sense, a truth of temporal possibilities.

    Narrative Grammars Hal Duncan 2008

  • The plausibility of the novum is crucial in this type of SF because the argument being made in these narratives is that the ruling paradigm, the accepted nomology in which the events of the narrative "could not have happened", is false, and that the hypothetical nomology, the alternative paradigm in which the events "could have happened", is in a very real sense, a truth of temporal possibilities.

    Archive 2008-01-01 Hal Duncan 2008

  • Even when a novum is constructed in a fiction which plays with existing tropes, familiarity is of less import than the estrangement, the peculiar novelty it capitalises on.

    Strange Fiction 6 Hal Duncan 2006

  • This novum is not the same thing as a genre trope, not at all -- though most novum will eventually be recycled by later writers, and a set of tropes derived from the process of conventionalisation, symbolic formulation.

    Strange Fiction 6 Hal Duncan 2006

  • Even when a novum is constructed in a fiction which plays with existing tropes, familiarity is of less import than the estrangement, the peculiar novelty it capitalises on.

    Archive 2006-07-01 Hal Duncan 2006

  • Comparing blood quantum to a diagram on genre that speculativizes any writing with a teeny bit of novum is specious.

    More on Map of Spec Fic 2006

  • This novum is not the same thing as a genre trope, not at all -- though most novum will eventually be recycled by later writers, and a set of tropes derived from the process of conventionalisation, symbolic formulation.

    Archive 2006-07-01 Hal Duncan 2006

  • Comparing blood quantum to a diagram on genre that speculativizes any writing with a teeny bit of novum is specious.

    SeeLight: 2006

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