Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics: Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction and Utopianism

by Darko Suvin, Eric Smith (Editor)

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

695 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 5, 2021

About the author

Darko Ronald Suvin (born Darko Šlesinger) is a Canadian academic, writer and critic who became a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He was born in Zagreb, which at the time was in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now the capital of Croatia. After teaching at the Department for Comparative Literature at the Zagreb University, and writing his first books and poems in his native language (i.e., in the standardized Croatian variety of Serbo-Croatian), he left Yugoslavia in 1967, and started teaching at McGill University in 1968.

He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction. He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies from 1973 to 1980. Since his retirement from McGill in 1999, he has lived in Lucca, Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences).

In 2009, he received Croatian SFera Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction. He is also a member of the Croatian Writers Society (HDP)

In 2016, Suvin published a series of memoirs in the Croatian cultural journal Gordogan on his youth as a member of the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation of Croatia and Yugoslavia and the first years of Josip Tito's Yugoslavia.

His 2016 book Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (published in translation as Samo jednom se ljubi: radiografija SFR Jugoslavije in Belgrade in 2014, in two printings), an attempt at a dialectical history of socialist Yugoslavia, is widely quoted in most recent books and articles in the emerging field of "post-Yugoslav studies"