Year: 1979
Author: Darko Suvin
Genre: literary criticism, monograph
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300023758
English language
Format: DjVu
Interactive table of contents: Yes
Number of Pages: 335

"Over the past few years, science fiction has attracted to itself a number of apologists, critics, and historians, but there has not been a substantial work that attempted to provide a philosophical basis of this literary genre. Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is such an attempt, and this work gives a foundation to a range of fiction that is at once varied in subject matter and uneven in quality.
Professor Suvin has contributed extensively to the corpus of criticism of science fiction both in his native Yugoslavian and in English; his interests range from Russian speculative fiction to American Utopias; he has, moreover, an unusual command of the disparate threads that make up the historic tapestry of speculative and science fiction".
William Prouty
"This is the most serious, learned, and energetic work yet written on the history of science fiction".
Robert Scholes

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
I. POETICS
1 Estrangement and Cognition
2 SF and the Genological Jungle
3 Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea
4 SF and the Novum
II. HISTORY
Introduction to Older SF History
5 The Alternative Island
6 The Shift to Anticipation: Radical Rhapsody and Romantic Recoil
7 Liberalism Mutes the Anticipation: The Space- Binding Machines
8 Anticipating the Sunburst: Dream, Vision—or Nightmare?
Introduction to Newer SF History
9 Wells as the Turning Point of the SF Tradition
10 The Time Machine versus Utopia as Structural Models for SF
11 Russian SF and Its Utopian Tradition
12 Karel Capek, Or the Aliens Amongst Us
Bibliography
Index of Names

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