Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

Disputing the Deluge

Collected 21st-Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival

Darko Suvin

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.

Defined by a Hollow

Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology

Darko Suvin

Darko Suvin explores utopian horizons in fiction & utopian/dystopian readings of historical reality since the 1970s, focusing in the United States & United Kingdom, but drawing also on French, German & Russian sources.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre

Darko Suvin

Back in print for the first time since the 1980s, this book is a touchstone for literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Alongside the 1979 text, this edition contains three additional essays by Suvin that update and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface.

Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction

Darko Suvin

Description unavailable for this volume in the current provider response.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

On the Poetics of a Literary Genre

Darko Suvin

Description unavailable for this volume in the current provider response.

Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities

An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia

Darko Suvin

Suvin’s ‘X-Ray’ of Socialist Yugoslavia offers an indispensable overview of a unique and often overlooked twentieth-century socialism. It shows that the plebeian surge of revolutionary self-determination was halted in SFR Yugoslavia by 1965; that between 1965– 72 there was a confused and hidden but still open-ended clash; and that by 1972 the oligarchy in power was closed and static, leading to failure. The underlying reasons of this failure are analysed in a melding of semiotics and political history, which points beyond Yugoslavia – including its achievements and degeneration – to show how political and economic democracy fail when pursued in isolation. The emphasis on socialist Yugoslavia is at various points embedded into a wider historical and theoretical frame, including Left debates about the party, sociological debates about classes, and Marx’s great foray against a religious State doctrine in The Jewish Question.

On Writing

Stephen King

The author shares his insights into the craft of writing and offers a humorous perspective on his own experience as a writer.

Haunted Heart

The Life and Times of Stephen King

Lisa Rogak

An unauthorized portrait of the influential pop-culture author evaluates the life experiences that shaped his literary achievements, from his disadvantaged childhood in rural Maine to his rapid fame as a writer and struggles with substance abuse.

The Language of the Night

Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin

A collection of twenty-four essays concerned with writing in general, the field of fantasy and science fiction, and with the author's own writing.

On Writing

A Memoir of the Craft

Stephen King

Stephen King reflects on how his writing has helped him through difficult times and describes various aspects of the art of writing.

Splintered Light

Logos and Language in Tolkien's World

Verlyn Flieger

J. R. R. Tolkien is perhaps best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but it is in The Silmarillion that the true depth of Tolkien's Middle-earth can be understood. The Silmarillion was written before, during, and after Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. A collection of stories, it provides information alluded to in Tolkien's better known works and, in doing so, turns The Lord of the Rings into much more than a sequel to The Hobbit, making it instead a continuation of the mythology of Middle-earth. Verlyn Flieger's expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien's fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield's linguistic theory of the fragmentation of meaning. Flieger demonstrates Tolkien's use of Barfield's concept throughout the fiction, showing how his central image of primary light splintered and refracted acts as a metaphor for the languages, peoples, and history of Middle-earth.

Ray Bradbury

A Critical Companion

Robin Anne Reid

Provides the first full-length critical treatment of Science Fiction writer Ray Bradbury with accessible analysis of 8 of his major works.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre

Darko Suvin

Back in print for the first time since the 1980s, this book is a touchstone for literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Alongside the 1979 text, this edition contains three additional essays by Suvin that update and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

On the Poetics of a Literary Genre

Darko Suvin

Description unavailable for this volume in the current provider response.

The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination

Michael Golston

How the tropes of science fiction infuse and inform avant-garde poetics and many other kindred arts This insightful, playful monograph from Golston does exactly what it advertises: modeling poetics based on how poetry (and some parallel artistic endeavors) has filtered through a century-plus of science fiction. This is not a book about science fiction in and of itself, but it is a book about the resonances of science-fiction tropes and ideas in poetic language. The germ of Golston’s project is a throwaway line in Robert Smithson’s Entropy and the New Monuments about how cinema supplanted nature as inspiration for many of his fellow artists: “The movies give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of ‘low budget’ mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance.” Golston charts how the demotic appeal of sci-fi, much like that of the B-movie, cross-pollinated into poetry and other branches of the avant garde. Golston creates what he calls a “regular Rube Goldberg machine” of a critical apparatus, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Gilles Deleuze. He starts by acknowledging that, per the important work of Darko Suvin to situate science fiction critically, the genre is premised on cognitive estrangement. But he is not interested in the specific nuts and bolts of science fiction as it exists but rather how science fiction has created a model not only for other poets but also for musicians and landscape artists. Golston’s critical lens moves around quite a bit, but he begins with familiar enough subjects: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mina Loy, William S. Burroughs. From there he moves into more “alien” terrain: Ed Dorn’s long poem Gunslinger, the discombobulated work of Clark Coolidge. Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Jimi Hendrix all come under consideration. The result of Golston’s restless, rich scholarship is the first substantial monograph on science fiction and avant-garde poetics, using Russian Formalism, Frankfurt School dialectics, and Deleuzian theory to show how the avant-garde inherently follows the parameters of sci fi, in both theme and form.

Towards Posthumanist Poems. Characteristics of Contemporary Science Fiction Poetry

Henning Heske

Scientific Essay from the year 2026 in the subject Literature, , language: English, abstract: This study examines the development of contemporary science fiction poetry through selected works by German-language examples. It starts from the observation that literary scholarship has largely approached science fiction as a narrative genre, while poetic forms of sf have remained comparatively underexplored. The study argues that, particularly since the 2010s, a new generation of experimental poetry has emerged that combines speculative future imaginaries with innovative poetic forms and intermedial aesthetics. The paper demonstrates that these texts redefine science fiction not only thematically but also formally. Digital navigation structures, fragmented syntax, intermedial techniques, and hybrid linguistic forms transform poetry into an experimental laboratory of the future. Science fiction poetry thus emerges not as a marginal phenomenon, but as an aesthetically innovative mode of contemporary literature that responds to ecological, technological, and social transformations through new poetic strategies towards posthumanist poetry.

A Poetic History of the Oceans

Literature and Maritime Modernity

Søren Frank

What is the ocean’s role in human and planetary history? How have writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to answer these questions, Søren Frank covers an impressive range of material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and Biblical texts, an Icelandic Saga, Shakespearean drama, Jens Munk’s logbook, 19th century-writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Jonas Lie, and Joseph Conrad as well as their 20th and 21st century-heirs like J. G. Ballard, Jens Bjørneboe, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen. A Poetic History of the Oceans promotes what Frank labels an amphibian comparative literature and mobilises recent theoretical concepts and methodological developments in Blue Humanities, Blue Ecology, and New Materialism to shed new light on well-known texts and introduce readers to important, but lesser-known Scandinavian literary engagements with the sea.

H.G. Wells and All Things Russian

Galya Diment

H. G. Wells and All Things Russian is a fertile terrain for research and this volume will be the first to devote itself entirely to the theme. Wells was an astute student of Russian literature, culture and history, and the Russians, in turn, became eager students of Wells’s views and works. During the Soviet years, in fact, no significant foreign author was safer for Soviet critics to praise than H. G. Wells. The reason was obvious. He had met – and largely approved of – Lenin, was a close friend of the Soviet literary giant Maxim Gorky and, in general, expressed much respect for Russia’s evolving Communist experiment, even after it fell into Stalin’s hands. While Wells’s attitude towards the Soviet Union was, nevertheless, often ambivalent, there is definitely nothing ambiguous about the tremendous influence his works had on Russian literary and cultural life.