Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics

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.

Darko Suvin is Professor Emeritus at McGill University and Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada. He is the author of numerous books and hundreds of essays on topics in utopianism
and science fiction, comparative literature, dramaturgy, theory of literature, theatre and cultural
theory. He is also the author of three volumes of poetry.

Eric D. Smith is Professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is the author
of Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope and many
essays on postcolonial literature, Modern British literature, and popular cinema.