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"[citation needed].
Suvin was born in Zagreb, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, on July 19, 1930, to a Croatian Jewish family of Miroslav and Truda (née Weiser) Šlesinger.
In 1939 his family changed the surname from Šlesinger to Suvin due to political situation and antisemitism caused by Nazi propaganda.
In the early 1940s, before the end of World War Two, a Nazi controlled bomb exploded close to Suvin, an event that was ultimately responsible for piquing his interest in science fiction, not because of the technology behind the bomb, but because he realized in even a slightly alternative world, he might have been killed right then and there.
He continued to earn a living by translating a wide variety of science fiction books into his native language, including The Seedling Stars and Day of the Triffids.
In Yugoslavia during the early 1960s, Suvin published his first book, a historical introduction to, or general overview of, science fiction as a whole.
Shortly after arriving, college students in the United States were central to a counterculture energized by, among other things, the Civil Rights movement and resistance to the Vietnam War.
[9] In Suvin's opinion, the focus of the genre lies in encouraging new ways of thinking about human society, or to inspire those who are oppressed to resist.