Learning from Other Worlds Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia

A collection of new essays on science fiction and utopian literature honouring the work of Darko Suvin, the scholar and literary theorist who co-founded the journal Science-Fiction Studies in 1973. The title of this volume attempts to convey the essence of ‘cognitive estrangement’ in relation to SF and utopia: that by imagining strange worlds we learn to see our own world in a new perspective. The contributors have all been influenced by Darko Suvin’s belief that the double movement of estrangement and cognition reflects deep structures of human storytelling. Learning from otherness is as natural and inevitable a process as the instinct for imitation and representation that Aristotle described in his Poetics. Though written from varying perspectives, the essays in Learning from Other Worlds pay tribute to the intellectual and personal inspiration of Darko Suvin to whom the essays are dedicated.