Novum is as novum does

Darko Suvin

pp. 3-22

in: Karen Sayer, John Moore (eds), Science fiction, critical frontiers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

If there is a fundamental presupposition to all I have said in the last forty years about sf, it is that the flow of here-and-nows is what we usually call history, that whatever encyclopedia is being referred to is specific to a sociohistorical class, that whatever very significant constants can be found in sf from Wells or the Shelleys or Thomas More on, they are in practice only apprehended in concrete socially determined points of reading. Now the sauce for the gander: Can the critic, however interested in long duration, be outside history, a simulacrum of the monotheistic God judging if not his then other Creations? Maybe so in slower and more confident times. But not today. If our value-horizon, however battered, does not have to change — I hope mine hasn't changed overmuch during my lifetime, I don't like convert-renegades — he who does not learn in and from history is dead. Our speaking voice is necessarily modified in its registers in a different atmosphere, now thoroughly intermixed with fumes of pollution. The voices sound tinny and squeak, unless they sound hoarse from ranting against the tinniness: their pitch has to be adjusted. Also their yaw, in the noosphere where bellowing instead of argumentation has become the carefully patented and profitable trademark of Post-Modernism, from born-again Christians and Moslems through the various mutually murderous separatisms and ethnicisms to the terrorism of atopia, and where I don't know who I am speaking to (though I still know what I"m speaking for).