2405 – SOVIET SCIENCE FICTION 1956 – 1974: A BIBLIOGRAPHY by Darko Suvin (article 1976)

CHECK HERE

Darko Suvin needs no introduction probably. Altough SF authors and writers in general (no intention of dissing them as a group) tend to ignore the theory of SF studies, Darko Suvin, an ex-Yugoslav who emigrated in 1967 has been probably the single most important person responsible for getting Science Fiction recognized in Academia. After he started teaching at McGill University in Canada – others like Frederic Jameson also started taking a vivid theoretical interest in a previously disdained and minor literature (in Deleuze’s sense), so much so that the entire academic field of Utopia Studies and SF was more or less shaped by these two important Marxist critics and theoreticians. I appreciate Professor Darko Suvin’s position since he is straddling both Western and Eastern Marxist traditions in a way and also because Yugoslavia was such a special case being actually open to various directions of thought. In a sense this valuable bibliography of Soviet SF, of cosmicity starting with the post-Stalinist era and ending with the onset of the long decline and disenchantment of the 1970s and 1980s is a twilight full of starry sky and extra-planetary possibilities. Maybe even the possibility that the most precious things such as communism or socialism might be temporary, exceptional moments and that all that was more fragile than its capitalist opponents presupposed, a transient system that in our part of the world gave way to today’s “contemporary political subject is plunged into a miserable combination of neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neo-nationalism (not to say neofascism)” in the words of philosopher Max Penzin, and maybe “able to produce both a calming and an invigorating effect” like Evald Ilyenkov’s speculative cosmology. Some are probably not yet translated but I hope they will find a way to future readers.

There is a sense in which we are still catching up to the various deletions – schools of critical thinking and what used to be Eastern European Marxism (from the former East bloc, especially the particularly neglected array of SF authors from the former Soviet Union, that would help us explore other venues taken than the usual liberal Western canon (see the emergence of an alternative epistemology).

2395 – In Defense of Disney’s Strange Solarpunk World (2023)

There is several solarpunk manifestos:

* From the short – https://www.solarpunkstudio.com/manifesto

*easy to remember – https://www.re-des.org/es/a-solarpunk-manifesto/

* To the bright – https://www.solarpunkstories.com/our-manifesto

* To the metamodern (post-postmodern?) – https://www.joelightfoot.org/post/the-metamodern-solarpunk-m…

* To the Italian (in English) – https://solarpunk.it/what-is-solarpunk-a-manifesto/

2130 – Monk and Robot book series by Becky Chambers (2021 – 2022)

spacetime coordinates: centuries in the future after robots of Panga gained self-awareness laid down their tools, and wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.

read here an article about hopepunk and the works of Becky Chambers in Wired from 2021

There should always be room for works that inspire a glimmer of hope in dark times and also philosophical works that work out an important distance from the usual collapsology that radically compresses everything into an endless present.

That said, there is nothing more obnoxious than the constant appeals to some overrated kind of ‘hope’ as a panacea for all the world’s troublesor the on the thing that saves the day. The recent Star Wars movies have been constantly bombarding everything with ‘keeping up the hope’ and keeping hopeful no matter what. The inverse of suffering under this imposed hopefulness (Laurent Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’) is also allowing the thought that things might go awfully wrong. Being hopeless is almost like a double blow – it stigmatizes and blames those that do not jump or do not give full support in the name of cause (any cause) plus they get labeled as hopeless themselves. Your no hope is responsible for your own ensuing failures – according to a logic that also blames the poor for being poor. Relentless and required hope animates much of ‘positive thinking’ mind over matter dualism in the US. Initially, a very important movement of the 19th and 20th century that was associated with many other good ideas actionist, a motivational credo (without the toxic baggage of today) is meant self-improvment, self-determination, the example, propaganda of the deed, women’s rights, the self-education of workers clubs into the new natural sciences and a new body and new health consciousness and imminent liberation. Some of these visions also came pre-packaged with fears of a ‘degenerationist’ Western imaginary that somehow railed under the ills of civilisation and the fear of assertive others, mostly of non-white, non-European, formerly subjugated or colonial. This belief in a hopeful, more humane world was not reserved or limited to the Western world in any sense. The voluntaristic strain of the 20th c took many forms and we could even include the mid- century Maoist momentum during the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. A history that is not over. Even if some of the Maoist excess took the form of a so-called war on nature – with disastrous effects, while it persecuted and killed many and while have horrific experiences – even in its failures it mediated a a re-calibrated China, it was historically shaped its aversions, debates and future gradual te ‘opening’ towards.

It is essential that many important critics and theoreticians of capital – such as Ernst Bloch have carefully elaborated all their lives around concepts of utopia, of the not-yet-here, of the unfinished, the still-to-be-achieved emancipatory reality. This is because in some fundamental way – in the major works of Marx and Engels there is no detailed description (other than classless society). Some of the most important theoreticians of science fiction (Frederic Jameson and Darko Suvin) always returned to Utopia in their theorizations of this genre, and how that is bound to a liveable and better world. Others have taken other paths (such a as Guy Lardreau which I am currently reading).

One should consider Becky Chamber and the hopepunk subgenre as an interesting and important addition to this continuing dialogue that builds on an already existing utopian corpus, one that is not just about technophile visions and ‘rapture of the nerds‘ (as Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross put it). At the same time as good friend Otaku Bogdan told me – there is Kogonada’s film After Yang (adapted from a story by A Weinstein) about technobeings and cloning, and and its subtle way of embedding ‘beauty’ everywhere and even a hint of techno-fascism. In complete contrast with how Terminator movies imagined our future, the fact is that today’s techno-capitalism does not show its horrific face but is bending, mutating oppression with a streamlined smooth ‘smart’ wireless coating. At the same time – in spite of this eternal present IKEA anti-utopia (it can never get better than this), one should understand that every age and every culture on the planet had its dreams of a better world, and that includes the world of plenty in Neolithic peasant utopias, or the religious schismatic and urban philosophical utopias and eventually the social utopias. So it is no wonder Becky Chamber dwelves with great care into the Zen tradition and particularly the highly developed and ritualized tea ceremony as this also speaks to a certain way about today’s cracked and fragile world (she is also a lover of all sorts of teas from what I understand and this is reflected in her books). I also appreciate the fact that she published her work with no DRM restrictions.

2106 – The Dispossessed (1974 novel)

spacetime coordinates: the novel occurs some time in the future, according to an elaborate chronology worked out by science fiction author Ian Watson in 1975: “the baseline date of AD 2300 for The Dispossessed is taken from the description of Earth in that book (§11) as having passed through an ecological and social collapse with a population peak of 9 billion to a low-population but highly centralized recovery economy.” In the same article, Watson assigns a date of AD 4870 to The Left Hand of Darkness; both dates are problematic — as Watson says himself, they are contradicted by “Genly Ai’s statement that Terrans ‘were ignorant until about three thousand years ago of the uses of zero'”.

The Dispossessed is set on Anarres and Urras, the twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti.

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Urras is divided into several states, but is dominated by its two rival superpowers, A-Io and Thu. While on Urras, the main character spends most of his time in A-Io, a state with a capitalist economy and a patriarchal system. The state of Thu is never actually visited, but is said to have an authoritarian system that claims to rule in the name of the proletariat. A-Io has dissent in its borders, including a few different oppositional left-wing parties, one of which is closely linked to the rival society of Thu. When a revolution is sparked in Benbili, the third major, yet undeveloped, area of Urras, A-Io invades the Thu-supported revolutionary area, generating a proxy war.

The moon, Anarres, represents a more idealist ideological structure: anarcho-syndicalism. The Anarresti, who call themselves Odonians after the founder of their political philosophy, arrived on Anarres from Urras around 200 years ago. In order to forestall an anarcho-syndicalist rebellion, the major Urrasti states gave the revolutionaries the right to live on Anarres, along with a guarantee of non-interference (the story is told in Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution“). Before this, Anarres had had no permanent settlements, apart from some mining facilities.

The Dispossessed (in later printings titled The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia) is a 1974 anarchist utopian science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (<<), set in the fictional universe of the seven novels of the Hainish Cycle (e.g., The Left Hand of Darkness).

It won the Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel in 1975. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism (on a satellite planet called Anarres) and revolutionary societies, capitalism, and individualism and collectivism. (wiki)

goodreads

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On October 5, 2021, it was announced that 1212 Entertainment and Anonymous Content would adapt the novel into a limited series.