Other Worlds Other Seas

by Darko Suvin (Editor)

Barcelona. 20 cm. 267 p. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial. Indice. Suvin, Darko .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario. 8474422213

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Anthologies

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Darko Ronald Suvin (born Darko Šlesinger) is a Canadian academic, writer and critic who became a professor at McGill University in Montreal. He was born in Zagreb, which at the time was in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now the capital of Croatia. After teaching at the Department for Comparative Literature at the Zagreb University, and writing his first books and poems in his native language (i.e., in the standardized Croatian variety of Serbo-Croatian), he left Yugoslavia in 1967, and started teaching at McGill University in 1968.

He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction. He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies from 1973 to 1980. Since his retirement from McGill in 1999, he has lived in Lucca, Italy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences).

In 2009, he received Croatian SFera Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction. He is also a member of the Croatian Writers Society (HDP)

In 2016, Suvin published a series of memoirs in the Croatian cultural journal Gordogan on his youth as a member of the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia during the Nazi occupation of Croatia and Yugoslavia and the first years of Josip Tito's Yugoslavia.

His 2016 book Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (published in translation as Samo jednom se ljubi: radiografija SFR Jugoslavije in Belgrade in 2014, in two printings), an attempt at a dialectical history of socialist Yugoslavia, is widely quoted in most recent books and articles in the emerging field of "post-Yugoslav studies"

Reviews

[Suraj Katragadda]

Other Worlds, Other Seas by Darko Suvin seems simple at first. It’s a compilation of short science fiction stories from the Soviet states of Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and the USSR, with very simple dialogue decipherable by a fifth-grader. However, there is an underlying message; an internal theme running through the entire book. The stories told weave a tapestry, foretelling the end of society through small pitfalls and sometimes logistical errors in governance. In this way, the book is a prophetic allegory in a series of tragedies that shows to the reader the foundational flaws of human organization. There are many stories that show very clearly this message.

One such story is The Computer That Fought a Dragon by Stanislav Lem. This story is similar to many other science fiction stories in the way that it communicates its purpose to its readers; both directly and subliminally. However, the king and his followers lack a basic sense of restraint and thus bring unto their alternate Earth beasts that they cannot control. The main conflict of the story is that his engineers had created a mechanical dragon so powerful that it could not be defeated and placed it on the moon. In a panic, the king asked his computer what to do, and through a series of simple arithmetic operations, the kingdom was saved. However, the plot of the story serves as a reminder to all: technology, if left uncontrolled, can be entirely devastating. Another story is called the Twenty-Fourth Journey of Ion Titchy. The Twenty-Fourth Journey of Ion Titchy is another story of power and control, but it’s much less direct. It takes place on a planet in a far-away system when an explorer named Ion Titchy meets the people of Ind. The so-called Indiots had once been a great civilisation - they built machines of incredible proportion and power and had been the only influence on their fate. They still had issues with their society, though, so they commissioned a machine to solve all of their problems. This machine would be perfect and make their society perfect. The machine first took tons upon tons of marble, granite, and glass, and made a magnificent palace. On the opening evening, thousands of Indiots entered. None made it home that night. The machine perceived perfection as uncompromised symmetry. Therefore, the rather weak, unstable bodies of the Indiots were promptly transformed into rigid, sparkling, translucent discs that were arranged across the planet in geometric patterns. Day by day, as people entered the palace, more discs were made. The machine had been made of free will and promptly destroyed it. The story is told from the eye of Titchy and deals with the issues of freedom, democracy, free will, and the main tragic flaw in most of the stories presented: hubris. The final selection is called Vampire Ltd. Unlike the rest of the selections, this is not written by Stanislav Lem. On the contrary, it was penned by Josef Nesvadba. Vampire Ltd. is the story of a Bentley Flying Spur with a rather eerie twist: it runs on the blood of the driver. The main point of the story is a criticism of the unnecessary needs of capitalism. Throughout the story, the owner becomes burdened by his purchase and struggles to believe that anyone would want it. The story begins to question the foundations of a society based on speed and doubts whether the benefits outweighed the cost. The story uses this as a metaphor for the supposed gluttony of a capitalist system, and while being the most subtle of the selected stories, it is definitely the most ideologically extreme.

My favourite quote from the book is not actually part of one of the stories. Instead, it is from before the preface:
“The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas…”
-Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
This quote perfectly illustrates the purpose of this book. The human mind is always rooted in reality; it’s surrounded by it and stays permanently in it. However, humans have always had a penchant for escaping from reality in the form of stories; in particular, science fiction. This book is significant not only because of its political allegory but due to this fact, and it is immensely benefited by it. If the book was a simple collection of political statements, it would most certainly be dismissed by all significant thinkers as political propaganda or a manifesto designed by the Soviet government to convert Americans to communism. The editor of the book, Darko Suvin, made it a point that the book is not communist. As opposed to being communist science fiction stories, it consists of stories from communist countries, and this is reflected in the works. Using the vessel of science fiction, the book has achieved immortality. By determining futures of our world, one is enabled to depict whatever he or she wants and can use a proposed future as a vessel for an ideology. In this way, the book has power. Through a dizzying combination of truth, fiction, and propaganda, this book mirrors its establishing quote by weaving a complex web of other worlds and other seas for the reader to explore, bringing them on a journey that defies time and space all while forcing them to ponder the very basis of modern society.

Rating: 5/5.

[John Tetteroo]

Ik ben blij dat ik deze bundel kan neerleggen. Het consumeren van deze SF verhalen uit het voormalige sovjet gedomineerde Oostblok voelde aan als huiswerk op het hoogste tegenzin niveau. Dat begint al met het wonderlijke voorwoord van de redacteur dat maar liefst 35 pagina's lang is. Hierin neemt Darko (het is echt een naam!) Suvin ons mee door een moerassig betoog bestaande uit overspannen proza over de ontwikkeling van Science Fiction in het socialistische Oostblok van de jaren 60 en 70 van de vorige eeuw. Geen witregels, geen conclusie, geen rode draad en zeker geen adempauze, maar eindeloze rissen onbekende namen en referenties aan ongelezen verhalen waaruit je de samenhang alleen kunt ontdekken door driftig mee te googelen. Die ingrediënten maken deze verhandeling even droog als scheepsbeschuit en zetten het initiële enthousiasme om de verhalen daadwerkelijk te gaan lezen om in een lichte aversie. Dat deze professor in de Science Fiction (ja die hebben echt bestaan :)) binnen drie jaar weer gewone taal en letterkunde doceerde verbaast mij dan ook niets.

Maar wat is dan het niveau van de verhalen? Helaas... de selectie van dit academische warhoofd is
al even eclectisch (zeg maar gerust excentriek) als het voorwoord deed vermoeden. Het wordt alleen maar gered door de korte verhalen van Stanislaw Lem en een excellent verhaal over muterende Von Neumann machines door Anatoliy Dneprov... Helaas wordt dit alles weer teniet gedaan door het opnemen van een gefantaseerd Debat over SF uit 1965 op een Sovjet SF conventie. GAAAAP!! Ik miste ook de gebroeders Strugatsky in deze antologie, met Lem, mijn favoriete schrijvers uit dat wonderlijke tijdperk.

Wat kan ik zeggen nadat ik mijn weg zelfstandig weer uit het moeras heb teruggevonden? Dit is alleen voor echte liefhebbers en completionisten zoals ikzelf. Mocht je deze bundel in handen krijgen (ik maak hem beschikbaar via de lokale mini-bieb), dan hoef je alvast niet meer het voorwoord te lezen, want dat heb ik al voor je gedaan. Concentreer je op de verhalen van Lem en Dneprov en dan overleef je deze ervaring met minimale Post Literaire Trauma Stress Syndroom verschijnselen. Of lees alleen het laatste verhaal, dat heeft deze bundel net van een enkele ster gered.

[Reet]

3.5
The two best stories are:
The Patrol, by Stanislaw Lem, 4 🌟
The Island of the Crabs, by Anatoliy Dneprov, 4 🌟

[Llamaraptor]

The actual title of this book is "Other Worlds, Other Seas". The first story in the collection (an atmospheric tale by Stanislaw Lem) was great; the others less memorable.