An Adorno for Our Time‪.‬

An Adorno for Our Time. Darko Suvin. Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang. 2010. 582 + xxxiii pp. ISBN 9783039114030. $68.95 pbk. * It is obvious enough that Darko Suvin remains the world's premier critic of science fiction, with his sometime antagonist Samuel Delany his only genuine peer in the field. Yet Suvin's ground-breaking work in sf criticism is only one part--though certainly an important and integral part--of his overall achievement. He is also one of the most important theorists of Utopia since Ernst Bloch, the supreme Utopian thinker, whose work has influenced Suvin deeply--more deeply, perhaps, than any other predecessor except Marx. In addition, Suvin is an important political philosopher, with a profound economic literacy and a keen sense for both the current moment and the long historical perspective. He is a prize-winning poet of more than routine interest. And he is a literary and cultural critic--and a literary scholar of many different linguistic and national traditions--whose interests extend well beyond the borders of science fiction (for instance, he is among our greatest living students of Brecht, another of his crucial precursors).