SUVIN, Darko (R.)

(1932-)

   Academic, sf critic and poet, born and raised in that part of YUGOSLAVIA that is now Croatia; PhD from Zagreb University, where he taught 1959-67; since 1968 he has lived in CANADA (until 1991 he had Canadian/Yugoslav dual nationality), where he is a full professor ofEnglish at McGill University, Montreal. DS has been very closely associated with the development of academic interest in sf in the USA, having been an active member of the SCIENCE FICTION RESEARCH ASSOCIATION and a co-editor of SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES from its inception to Nov 1980 (subsequently a contributing editor), and having lectured and publishedwidely on the subject. (His other field is drama, especially the work of Bertolt Brecht.) His books about sf are Od Lukijana do Lunjika ("FromLucian to the Lunik") (1965 Yugoslavia), Russian Science Fiction 1956-1974: A Bibliography (1976 US); Pour une poetique de la science-fiction (cut and trans into French from his original English by DS 1977; longer English version as Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On thePoetics and History of a Literary Genre 1979 US), Victorian Science Fiction in the U.K.: The Discourses of Knowledge and of Power (1983 US)-perhaps his most important book, in its splendid blend of scholarly research into early sf, explication of its nature and sociological argument about its ideological setting - and Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (coll 1988 US).The last 3 books especially constitute (among other things) one of the most formidable and sustained theoreticalattempts to define sf as a genre. This was recognized when he was awarded the 1979 PILGRIM AWARD, while still very much in mid-career, for services to sf scholarship. DS's writing has been unwisely dismissed by some readers as too clotted and difficult, and it is true that his critical prose sometimes seems more convoluted than his arguments require. But part of the difficulty results from the praiseworthy scrupulousness and rigour of his complex theses, for which he has had to find a terminology (new to sf studies at least) that is very much based in European socio-formalism; he has often been described as a "Marxist" critic but, while this is not untrue, it is not especially helpful either, as modern structuralism and semiotics also play an important role in his theoretical approach. DS sees sf as a "literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment" (DEFINITIONS OF SF); it was DS who introduced the term "cognition" to sf criticism. One result of DS's approach is a contemptuous dismissal of FANTASY as lacking "cognitive believability".DS ed Other Worlds, Other Seas: Science-Fiction Stories from Socialist Countries (anth 1970 US), H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (anth 1977US), a collection of essays by various hands, and, with R.D. MULLEN, Science-Fiction Studies: Selected Articles on Science Fiction 1973-1975 (anth 1976 US) and Science-Fiction Studies, Second Series: Selected Articles on Science Fiction 1976-1977 (anth 1978 US), both from GREGG PRESS.Of marginal relevance to sf and UTOPIAS are DS's 2 vols of poems, some prize-winning: The Long March: Notes on the Way 1981-1984 (coll 1987) and Armirana Arkadija (coll 1990 Yugoslavia).

   PN

   See also: BIBLIOGRAPHIES; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; GENRE SF; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; PROTO SCIENCE FICTION; SENSE OF WONDER.