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Defined by A Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology By Darko Suvin (Peter Lang, 2010, 582 pp, £42.00) Reviewed by Andy Sawyer
Defined by a Hollow is a collection of essays and poems presented in more or less chronological order from 1973 - 2007/8, extracted (and sometimes revised) from various sources throughout his career.
Much of it (perhaps most of it) is not primarily, even secondarily, sf criticism. Suvin's interests in SF, which are deep - he is probably the most influential single critic in the field; his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) created a radical Formalist vocabulary for the field which we all quote from even if to argue with it - are subordinate to his utopian and political studies, but "subordinate" in the sense that the part is vital to the whole. It is in SF, as he has famously said in Metamorphoses and repeats in the reprint of that section here (p. 43), that utopian studies displays its meaning: "utopia is the socio-political subgenre of SF." Even in those essays in which political epistemology or activism are most closely at the heart of things, Suvin will sometimes refer to those sf writers he sees as exemplifying the exploration he wants the form to take part in: "utopia is the socio-political subgenre of SF", but it's the SF of Suvin's definition, which can lead to circularities which have become less helpful since 1979 (and which f Suvin has himself addressed in his partial revisioning of the possibilities of fantasy as a radical mode of fiction in "Considering the Sense of 'Fantasy' or Fantastic Fiction' (2000).
And so the first chapter, "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia" (Chapter 3 of Metamorphoses) is typical, with Suvin ranging far beyond most of what we read in even the best SF criticism. He examines utopia as a literary construction, but also wrangles with the knotty question of the adjectives used in so many definitions of utopia - "idealist"; "perfect" : idealistic and perfect for whom? It is here where there is an interesting unpicking of Myth, Folktale, Fantasy, etc. (p. 36-39) as (or rather as not) literatures of utopian desire which, however, is only a partial reiteration of what was said in the previous...