Disputing the Deluge

Reviews / Votes

An excellent reminder of how and why [Suvin] gained...the well-earned reputation as the field's premier Marxist critic and historian can be found in the 24 pieces that make up Disputing the Deluge... It is a reminder that, for all his reputation as a fiercely rigorous (and sometimes rigid) theorist, Suvin has never been less than an activist, and never less than passionate. * Science Fiction Studies * Everything in here is of note, from the essays early in this century on fascism and on fantasy to the most recent pieces on the enduring importance of communism; the growing danger of anti-utopian discourse; and especially the totalizing environmental, economic, political, and cultural terror and destruction brought on by the systemic operations of the Capitalocene. * Tom Moylan, Glucksman Professor Emeritus at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and author of Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (Bloomsbury, 2020) * Darko Suvin is an erudite and an insightful scholar of the stories and narrative forms of utopia but he is also a utopian writer, a stylist of such brio and finesse that he can balance anger and insight in the most delicate and yet the most piercing of interpretations. The openness and the energy, critical always but never prescriptive, are the features of a stylistic practice which insists on cognizing the forces which constitute anti-utopia, and of yielding them their due in analytic rigour and seriousness yet never yielding to them the entirety of the intellectual ground. This collection of essays, stretching from 2000 to the naming of our own 'Coronisation Times,' is both a great addition to existing volumes of Suvin's work, and a contribution to a reinterpretation of some of the core concepts and arguments of that previous work, a repurposing of them so as to sharpen how they can help us catch the historical continuities and discontinuities which mark the 21st century. The essays by Suvin dramatize in detail both a mode of argumentation as well as the riches that mode can generate. It is a mode we all need--a Suvian mode--if we are to recognize and overcome the antiutopian imperatives which constitute our current deluge. * Patricia McManus, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Brighton, UK * 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. * Phillip E. Wegner, Professor and Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar, University of Florida, USA, and author of Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (2020) *