Darko Suvin Book order

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.

Focusing on critical reflections, this comprehensive two-volume collection showcases Darko Suvin's insights into science fiction and utopia spanning from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. It excludes his key monographs, emphasizing his evolving thoughts and analyses on the genre's relationship with societal and cultural themes over several decades.

Suvin's 'X-Ray' of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism

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.

Darko Suvin presents a critical analysis of capitalism through eleven essays, arguing that current financial turmoil signals a transition to a new regime of accumulation. He highlights the societal chaos marked by economic instability, social unrest, and systemic failures in education and security. Emphasizing the need for universal guaranteed income and improved public services, Suvin advocates for reallocating funds from banks and military expenditures to support these initiatives. His thought-provoking commentary challenges prejudices against socialist ideas, offering an alternative perspective for contemporary readers.

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.