Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction ed. by Sherryl Vint and Sümeyra Buran (review)

dramatically underline one of Suvin’s persistent and most important themes: that we cannot separate our cultural productions, even our favorite genres, from the historical and economic circumstances of their origins. Like most of the other essays, it is supplemented by extensive notes and a detailed bibliography. If Disputing the Deluge seems in part a mixed bag of the personal, the critical, and the broadly theoretical, at times reminiscent of the 2011 special issue of Paradoxa, Darko Suvin: A Life in Letters, the overall tone is anything but valedictory. There are indeed some ave atque vale moments; one of his more recent poems includes the lines “Once life was adventure, knowledge, glory/Now it’s anxiety, a wandering recollection, /Disappointment, protest, and reflection ... ”(259-60). But as Hugh O’Connell points out in his introduction, the final words of the book, deliberately re-appropriated and repurposed from Margaret Thatcher, are “There Is No Alternative!” (343), a phrase resonant with major themes throughout the book, from war to the capitalocene to utopia/antiutopia to climate change and pandemics. It is a reminder that, for all his reputation as a fiercely rigorous (and sometimes rigid) theorist, Suvin has never been less than an activist, and never less than passionate.—Gary Wolfe, Locus Foundation