Darko Suvin – författare

Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading ListFor over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms "political epistemology." Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin’s work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin’s most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O’Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here--each a brilliant example of engaged thought--highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin’s interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin’s essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading ListFor over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms "political epistemology." Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin’s work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin’s most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O’Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here--each a brilliant example of engaged thought--highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin’s interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin’s essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was created in a surge of revolutionary self-determination that rejected both the free-market-Capitalism of Europe, and the bureaucratic-Socialism of the Soviet Union. Yet this early experimentation and dynamism ultimately gave way to the same sclerotic state-system its creators were trying to avoid. In this engaging treatise, Suvin seeks out the source of this failure.

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.

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.

Returning to print for the first time since the 1980s, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is the origin point for decades of literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Darko Suvin’s paradigm-setting definition of SF as «the literature of cognitive estrangement» established a robust theory of the genre that continues to spark fierce debate, as well as inspiring myriad intellectual descendants and disciples. Suvin’s centuries-spanning history of the genre links SF to a long tradition of utopian and satirical literatures crying out for a better world than this one, showing how SF and the imagination of utopia are now forever intertwined. In addition to the 1979 text of the book, this edition contains three additional essays from Suvin that update, expand and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface that situate the book in the context of the decades of SF studies that have followed in its wake.

This volume incorporates Darko Suvin’s thinking on utopian horizons in fiction and on eutopian and dystopian readings of historical reality since the 1970s. While the focus is on the United States and the United Kingdom, the essays also draw on French, German and Russian sources. The book is composed of eighteen chapters, including four sets of poems. The chapters include heretic reflections on utopian fiction, science fiction and utopian studies, explorations of dystopias, and epistemological examinations of political standpoint. Throughout, plebeian history is the stance from which all the author’s value judgements are made. The essays and poems engage with the empirical world and identify areas of hope. In a dark dystopian time, they reaffirm eutopia, the radically better place to be striven for in every here and now.