Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction

by Darko Suvin

In this major survey of theoretical aspects and contemporary authors of science fiction, one of its foremost investigators argues for a radically new approach. For Darko Suvin, science fiction writings are neither prophecy nor the folklore of technology, but at their best parables for our times. Suvin lays the foundations for understanding their narrative logic and ideological horizons, and then examines a crucial group of modern authors. These comprise the diverging stances of Asimov, Le Guin, and Dick in the USA, Yefremov and the Strugatskys in the USSR, and Lem and the Brauns in Central Europe. The book culminates in a discussion of science fiction as metaphor, applied to a text by Cordwainer Smith as the bad conscience of Reaganism.

Genres: Science Fiction, Theory

228 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1988

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"

Reviews

[Nebogipfel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of several of Suvin's essays, some of which can now be found online. I admit I skimmed through this one often. There are overlaps between chapters/essays which I think could have been avoided. There are interesting observations here and there but I just didn't find this book as relevant as Metamorphoses. Not an essential read.

[Tom Calvard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slightly difficult to follow for me in parts, with literary terms and theory, but Darko Suvin is a classic writer on the SF genre and his enthusiasm for the cognitive and moral value of meaningful SF left me with a lot to think about.