Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics

This major two-volume collection presents Darko Suvin’s critical meditations on sciencefiction and utopia from the late 1960s through the early years of the new millennium,excluding only the landmark monographs Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, VictorianScience Fiction, and Defined by a Hollow. From essential programmatic statementscharting the parabolic logic of science fiction and establishing the parameters ofa theoretically supple and rigorously historical SF criticism to confrontations withboth a postmodernist abdication of politics and a “neutral” sociology of literature,these writings reflect the evolving thought of the preeminent contemporary theorist ofscience fiction. Underpinned by a method of heretical cognition and the steadfastinsistence of utopian possibility, the varied essays, interviews, poems, and polemicspresented here—encompassing four decades of sustained thought on the topic—offer up the affirmation of freedom as the truest horizon of science fiction.