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.
Author(s): Darko Suvin
Series: Ralahine Utopian Studies
Publisher: Peter Lang
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 619
City: Bern
Contents
Dedication ix
Seven Citations from Rimbaud and Brecht xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Phillip E. Wegner
Preface: Emerging from the Flood in Which We Are Sinking: Or, Reading with Darko Suvin (Again) xv
Introduction 2008: On Hollows, or an Alarmed Door 1
Chapter 1
Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal,
and a Plea (1973) 17
Chapter 2
“Utopian” and “Scientific”: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels (1976) 49
Chapter 3
Science Fiction and the Novum (1977) 67
Chapter 4
Poems of Doubt and Hope 1983–1988 93
vi
Chapter 5
Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies (1989) 111
Chapter 6
On William Gibson and Cyberpunk SF (1989–1991) 137
Chapter 7
The Doldrums: Eight Nasty Poems of 1989–1999 157
Chapter 8
Where Are We? How Did We Get Here? Is There Any Way Out? Or, News from the Novum (1997–1998) 169
Chapter 9
Utopianism from Orientation to Agency: What Are We Intellectuals under Post-Fordism to Do?
(1997–1998) 217
Chapter 10
On Cognition as Art and Politics: Reflections for a Toolkit (1997–1999) 269
Chapter 11
What Remains of Zamyatin’s We After the Change of Leviathans? Or, Must Collectivism Be Against People? (1999–2000) 321
Chapter 12
What May the Twentieth Century Amount To: Initial Theses (1999–2000) 361
vii
Chapter 13
A Tractate on Dystopia 2001 (2001, 2006) 381
Chapter 14
Seven Poems from the Utopian Hollow: Diary Notes of 2000–2005 413
Chapter 15
Living Labour and the Labour of Living: A Tractate for Looking Forward in the Twenty-first Century
(2004) 419
Chapter 16
Inside the Whale, or etsi communismus non daretur: Reflections on How to Live When Communism Is a Necessity
but Nowhere on the Horizon (2006–2007) 473
Chapter 17
Five Farewell Fantasies of 2006–2008 503
Chapter 18
Cognition, Freedom, The Dispossessed as a Classic (2007) 509
Index of Names and Works 553
