*Boy, it's tough to historicize stuff when you've become an old man. Especially an old man from the Balkans, where they've got so much history that they have to export it to other people.
Intelligent planning, or, well, not so you would notice in the long run
(...)
Writing my book, I found out that the centerpiece of SFR Yugoslavia was an attempt at workers’ control over production and similar ways of organizing in the cultural sphere. It was a half-hearted attempt and did not seek full control. Still, it produced remarkable enthusiasm and economic results up to about the mid-1960s, and it was certainly in all respects better for the great majority of working people than what they have today. Thence all the suppressions and damnations of memory!
BB: In his famous essay on freedom of the press, young Marx compared freedom to the solar system: each of its worlds, while turning on its own axis, revolves around the central sun of freedom (die Zentralsonne der Freiheit). As a young Marxist in what was then Tito’s Yugoslavia, you turned your intellectual interests towards the Universe—by discovering and exploring the imaginary worlds of science fiction (SF). Was it the central sun of freedom that you were searching for?
DS: Of course it was: freedom and its twin, knowledge, understanding, or cognition. As Giordano Bruno told us (which got him burned at the stake), innumerable worlds exist and are possible. Somebody in the 1950s optimistically called SF “a general staff of mankind, planning on paper its future battles.” Maybe the metaphor is too militaristic, but only intelligent planning can save us all. We must understand not only the most disparate potentialities of people—or intelligent species, SF calls them “psychozoa,” which I rather like—living together that slumber in our bosoms, but also, most importantly, the price each of these potentialities demands in human suffering. Thus all good SF unavoidably fuses the sweet hope of utopia (the good place) with the bitter but salvific draught of dystopia (the bad place, so near to the tendencies we see everyday): in the past it was Wells, Zamyatin, and Stapledon who wrote such stories; in the Golden Age of 1940–74 it was the generation of Heinlein, Simak, and so on, to that of Le Guin and the Strugatskys; and today it is writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson....
