Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

Darko Suvin, scholar, critic and poet, was born in Yugoslavia, studied at the universities of Zagreb, Bristol, the Sorbonne and Yale and has taught in Europe and North America. He is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of numerous books and articles on literature and dramaturgy, culture, utopian and science fiction and political epistemology, as well as three volumes of poetry. In recent years he has been writing mainly about SFR Yugoslavia and communism.Gerry Canavan is Assistant Professor of English at Marquette University, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. His research focuses on the relationship between science fiction and the political and cultural history of the post-war period, with special emphasis on ecology and the environment. He is an editor at Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, as well as the author of Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Octavia E. Butler (2016).

"This book marked the beginning of theoretically sophisticated science fiction criticism; it changed the whole field, and remains a startling introduction to a discussion that has not ended since its first appearance." (Kim Stanley Robinson, author of 2312 and Aurora) "Suvin's classic book is not only a fundamental history of science fiction which deprovincializes our rather narrow and English-language view of the canon; it is also a powerful theoretical intervention in the criticism and theory of the genre, which reunited it with the traditions of utopia as a genre. Not only did this paradigm shift transform our relationship to the latter, it also restored a political and social content to science fiction itself, making of the latter an implicit or explicit Brechtian estrangement-effect. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is thereby an indispensable companion to the study of both genres, which durably integrates them into literary history and theory as such." (Fredric Jameson, Knut Schmidt Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University)

• Contents: Estrangement and Cognition – SF and the Genological Jungle – Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea – SF and the Novum – The Alternative Island – The Shift to Anticipation: Radical Rhapsody and Romantic Recoil – Liberalism Mutes the Anticipation: The Space-Binding Machines – Anticipating the Sunburst: Dream, Vision – or Nightmare? – Wells as the Turning Point of the SF Tradition – The Time Machine versus Utopia as Structural Models for SF – Russian SF and Its Utopian Tradition – Karel Čapek, or the Aliens Amongst Us – Science Fiction, Metaphor, Parable, and Chronotope (with the Bad Conscience of Reaganism) – Considering the Sense of «Fantasy» or «Fantastic Fiction»: An Effusion* – Circumstances and Stances: A Retrospect.