Disputing the Deluge with Darko Suvin joined by Editor Hugh O’Connell and special guests

Collected 21st-Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival by DARKO SUVIN
with Editor HUGH O’CONNELL
with guests Marc Angenot, Gerry Canavan, Patricia McManus, & Eric D. Smith

“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)

For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of science fiction 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 science fiction and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 29 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 science fiction 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 2008economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis,COVID19, 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.

Darko 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. Darko has authored 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, and a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review (2019; with David M. Higgins).

Marc Angenot, FRSC, a professor in McGill’s French Language and Literature Department for over forty years, has been awarded the Prix du Québec Léon-Gérin for his outstanding contributions to the social sciences. He is world-renowned for his research and is widely considered the founder of Social Discourse Theory. His vast body of work encompasses intellectual history, linguistics, politics, semiotics, rhetoric and informal logic, as well as literary theory. Among his critically acclaimed works are Le Marxisme dans les grands récits (Paris, 2005) and Dialogues de sourds (Paris, 2008). In 2004, The Yale Journal of Criticism published a special issue titled “Marc Angenot and the Scandals of History”.  Gerry Canavan is co-editor of special issues of American Literature and Polygraph on “speculative fiction” and “ecology and ideology,” respectively and has edited (with Kim Stanley Robinson) the critical anthology, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, 2014 and The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (co-edited with Eric Carl Link, 2015. Dr, Patricia McManus is a senior lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Brighton. She is the founder of the Dystopia Project. Her research interests are the novel —in particular the problems involved in understanding genre as a productive force in literary history — and Marxism as a methodology for utopianism. Eric D. Smith. is professor of modern and contemporary British and Anglophone literature at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is the author of Globalization, Utopia, and Postcolonial Science Fiction: New Maps of Hope (Pagrave, 2012) and editor of Darko Suvin’s career-spanning collection Parables of Freedom and Narrative Logics: Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction and Utopianism in the Ralahine Utopian Studies Series (Peter Lang, 2021).