Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List For 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.

Suvin's 'X-Ray' of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; that between 1965- 72 there was a confused and hidden but still open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political history, which points beyond Yugoslavia - including its achievements and degeneration - to show how political and economic democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party, sociological debates about classes, and Marx's great foray against a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Featured on the 2021 Locus Recommended Reading List For 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.

In eleven incisive, biting essays, Marxist philosopher Darko Suvin suggests that "capitalism (and all of us in Leviathan's belly) stands today in the presence of Yeats's rough beast advancing toward Bethlehem, that finance capitalism is not simply a stage but a recurrent 'Autumn' signal of transition from one world regime of accumulation and domination to another; it signals the destruction of the old regime and creation of a 'new' one." And to bolster his argument, Suvin points to the economic and social chaos creeping and growing through western society, bank failures, riots, unrest, loss of private capital, loss of middle-class jobs, increase in drug and alcohol abuse, proliferation of guns and other weapons in society, failure of our school systems, inability of police to provide security, and political revolution in less-developed states. The author stresses the need to provide "universal guaranteed income sufficient to modestly live on for all adults working 35 hours a week, and a stress on providing decent] education and health." And to fund these simple measures: "Just pay trillions to people instead of banks and the military." Suvin's intelligent analysis and commentary will open many eyes that have been prejudiced against socialist thought by the rise of right-wing politicians, and demonstrate quite clearly to the modern reader that there IS another perspective worth considering.

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is now recognized as a philosopher and cultural critic of the greatest importance, his subtle and profound developments of utopian Marxism as influential for the student New Left of the 1960s and 1970s as they were for the leftist movements of the twenties. Today, in the United States and Britain, his enormous body of work is attracting new generations of readers: more translations are appearing, and his utopian thought is finding a new resonance in many different contexts. Several of the authors here address the centrality of a radically unconventional concept of utopia to Bloch's thought; others write on the question of memory and pedagogical theory. There is a Blochian reading of crime fiction, illuminating overviews of Bloch's work and an exploration of the stylistics of hope in Bloch's Spuren, as well as a translation of excerpts from that extraordinary book. The essays gathered here are intended, above all, to recommend Bloch's work as a challenge to older models of historical materialism and utopian emancipation, and to give specific examples of how that work can contribute to current debates about utopia, nationalism and collective memory, the liberatory content of popular cultural forms, and the complex relationship between ideology and everyday life. Together they provide a timely introduction to one of the most untimely and inspiring thinkers of the twentieth century.