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List of contents
Acknowledgments
Editor’s Preface: There Is No Alternative: Non-Reading Suvin, Anti-Antiutopianism, Science Fiction, and Communism
Author’s Introduction: Words, Shapes, and Our Common World
1. Kick-Off: An Introduction to Narrative Genres, with a View to SF (2007, 2020)
2. Fantasy as Critique and Cognition: Marx’s Black Metamorphoses of Living Labour (1999-2003)
3. A Note on Fascism as Well-Meaning Utopia (2000)
4. Considering the Sense of "Fantasy" or "Fantastic Fiction": On Ahistorical Alternate Worlds (1999-2001)
5. Going into a New Century: Sociopolitical Prospects for Utopia (2000)
6. A Colloquium with Darko Suvin: Interview with Science Fiction Magazine, Australia (2000-02)
7. Poems of Old Age I (2000-04)
8. Circumstances and Stances: A Retrospect (2004)
9. Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in US Science Fiction (An Overview) (2005)
10. To Remember Stanislaw Lem (2006)
11. On U.K. Le Guin’s "Second Earthsea Trilogy" and Its Cognitions: A Commentary (2006)
12. Poems of Old Age II (2006-10)
13. Literature, Politics, Brecht, Science Fiction vs. Fantasy: Interview with Maria Xilouri (2008)
14. Darwinism, Left and Right: And Some S-F Probes (2010)
15. Ideologies and Criticism: An Interview with Andrés Lomeña (2011)
16. On Climbing the Mountain of Life (2011)
17. Some Grateful Memories of Fred Pohl (2014)
18. A Note on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Declaration of the Arts’ Independence from Capitalism (2015)
19. Cognition Is the Esthetic Measure of Estranged Genres: An Interview with Zorica Ðergovic-Joksimovic (2016)
20. On Splitting Notions: Communism, Science Fiction (The Blagoevgrad Theses, 2018)
21. Poems of Old Age III (2014-20)
22. Orwell and 1984 Today: Genius and Tunnel Vision (2019)
23. Utopia or Bust: Capitalocene and Our Existential Antiutopia (2019)
24. Antiutopia in Coronisation Times: Capitalocene and Death (2020)
Appendix: D. Suvin: Publications after 2000 on SF and Utopia/nism
Index
About the author
Dark Suvin is Emeritus Professor of English at McGill University, Canada, and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, since 1986. He is author of 25 books, including the foundational study in science fiction Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (1979, 2016), Victorian Science Fiction in the U. K.: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power (1983), Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988), and In Leviathan’s Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time (2012).Hugh C. O'Connell is Assistant Professor of English at University of Massachusetts-Boston, USA. He is editor of Legacies of Blade Runner, special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television (2020; with Sarah Hamblin); Speculative Finance/Speculative Fiction, special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review (2019; with David M. Higgins); and The British SF Boom, special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review (2013).
Summary
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.
Additional text
With so many scales of crisis simultaneously unfolding around us, we need today more than ever militant, engaged, and hopeful scholarship that brushes against the grain of the 'new modesties' in critical thought and provides signposts for navigating the increasingly perilous terrain of contemporary planetary life. A disputation in the truest sense of the word--a refusal of the complacencies of the status quo and a willingness to seek truth wherever it may lead--this scintillating collection of Darko Suvin’s most significant interventions published in the first two decades of our millennium offers an exemplary case of just such a necessary scholarship. This timely collection should be of tremendous import not only to students of science fiction and Utopian studies, but to anyone interested in a sobering and clear-eyed assessment of our contemporary 'dark times' and an inspiring call-to-arms for developing the strategies necessary if we are to 'emerge from the flood' of our once again grim but still hope-filled present.
