Darko Suvin

Darko Ronald Suvin (born Darko Šlesinger) is a Canadian academic, writer, critic, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He was born in Zagreb, which at the time was in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now the capital of Croatia. After teaching at the Department for Comparative Literature at Zagreb University, and writing his first books and poems (in Croatian), he left Yugoslavia in 1967 and started teaching at McGill University in 1968.

He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction. He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies from 1973 to 1980. Since his retirement from McGill in 1999, he has lived in Lucca, Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

In 2009, he received the Croatian SFERA Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction. He is also a member of the Croatian Writers Society (HDP).

In 2016, Suvin published a series of memoirs in the Croatian cultural journal Gordogan on his youth as a member of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation of Croatia and Yugoslavia and the first years of Josip Tito's Yugoslavia. His 2016 book Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (published in translation as Samo jednom se ljubi: radiografija SFR Jugoslavije in Belgrade in 2014), an attempt at a dialectical history of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is widely cited in the field of post-Yugoslav studies.

Biography

Early life

Suvin was born in Zagreb, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, on July 19, 1930, to Miroslav and Truda (née Weiser) Šlesinger, a Croatian Jewish couple. In Zagreb he attended the Jewish elementary school on Palmotićeva Street. In 1939 his family changed their surname from Šlesinger to Suvin due to the political situation and antisemitic Nazi propaganda. In the early 1940s, before the end of World War II, a Nazi bomb exploded close to Suvin, an event that piqued his interest in science fiction when he realized that in even a slightly alternative world, he might have been killed then. Many members of his family died during The Holocaust, including his paternal grandparents Lavoslav and Josipa Šlesinger. Soon after, he published his first article, a brief overview of the science fiction genre. He continued to earn a living by translating a wide variety of science fiction books into Croatian, including The Seedling Stars and The Day of the Triffids.

In Yugoslavia during the early 1960s, Suvin published his first book, a historical introduction and general overview of the science fiction genre. In it, he discusses in detail the works of Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and others and analyzes several science fiction books. The book also includes the results of his first article initially published in 1957. Utopian Studies Society Distinguished Service Award, 2019.

Philosophy

Science fiction

According to Suvin, works of science fiction begin with the idea of framing a hypothesis – the novum, a Latin coinage meaning "a new strange newness" that he introduced in the 1972 essay "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre" in College English. The most common of these hypotheses is likely time travel, although there are many distinct alternate realities used in books and movies that do not utilize time travel as a hypothesis. It is Suvin's opinion that some of the most commercially successful works of science fiction have only used this idea of framing a hypothesis as an ornament, and are therefore not truly SF at heart – they simply are taking advantage of the special effects and uniqueness that go along with the genre.

Cognitive estrangement

In Suvin's opinion, the focus of science fiction lies in encouraging new ways of thinking about human society, or inspiring those who are oppressed to resist. Suvin has labeled this idea of subversive thinking as "cognitive estrangement". Those works of science fiction that could be characterized as using cognitive estrangement rely on no single specific hypothesis, but instead on the cognitive presentation of alternative realities that directly contradict the status quo.