PETER GRAARUP WESTERGAARD

Interested in understanding Italian Science Fiction? You should read this insightful interview with Italian sci-fi writer, Sacha Rosel. She gives her account of the state of the art in Italy, as well as introduces us to her sci-fi novella Pandora, Ricordanza (2024)

– Feminism has also become a relevant issue within Italian sci-fi, and a new generation of women authors has come to the forefront, says Sacha Rosel.

She is an accomplished Italian sci-fi and speculative author writing both in Italian and in English, using Sacha Rosel as her pen name. Her work includes a lyrical dystopian sci-fi novella combining mystical Daoism and post-structuralist feminist theories, Pandora, Ricordanza from 2024 in Italian, and dark mythic fantasy, My Heart is The Tempest in English, which is a reimagining of witch Sycorax in a land of ice and snow inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She has worked as a bookshop assistant, as an English-to-Italian fiction translator (titles translated include the War of Warcraft-The War of the Ancients trilogyby Richard Knaak) and as an English teacher.

Pandora, Ricordanza

PGW: Thank you for agreeing to participate in the interview about Italian Science Fiction. I noticed you have written a science fiction novella “Pandora, Ricordanza” in Italian. Could you tell me about your sci-fi novella?

– Pandora, Ricordanza is set in the imaginary world of Sibilla, a self-proclaimed autonomous region which previously seceded from a bigger country and whose political system is a televisual dictatorship reifying women, depriving them of the right to speak in public. The novella opens with a scene of her escaping from school, a place where girls are taught how to undress to be selected for one of the endless TV programs created by Devius. Thanks to her ability to become invisible, Pandoramanages to flee from the school building and finally reaches a forest in the mountains, where women create an independent community called A Forest of Meanings, says Sacha Rosel.

– In A Forest of Meanings, she will come to learn how to make a different world possible, a world where women are free to think, talk and get together. Moving from one timeline to another and including several flashbacks, the story slowly uncovers the events from the past, explaining how women have come to reject Devius’s dictatorshipand the control over their bodies and then found shelter in the forest, what they were up against and the kind of life they managed to create thanks to Daoist cultivation and immortality techniques, feminist practices, taijiquan and armed resistance. Pandora, Ricordanza is part of a bigger project, a novel called La foresta delle idee (A forest of meanings), says Sacha Rosel.

Primo Levi and Italo Calvino

PGW: I would also like to ask you about the literary history of Italian Science fiction. I’ve read some myself, especially Primo Levi and Italo Calvino. In my experience, several of their works display significant sci-fi features. What is the current reception of these two writers and their distinct sci-fi qualities?

– I know this may come as a shock, but neither Primo Levi nor Italo Calvino are generally known for their sci-fi books in Italy. The general reader tends to associate them with what they were taught at school, which is usually limited to a very narrow range of titles. Although they are both popular choices in schools, and they’ve been part of the school syllabus for decades now, teachers and publishers tend to stick to the same, monodimensional pattern: Primo Levi is marketed as the narrator of the Holocaust par excellence, so his literary profile tends to be confined to such books as Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) and La tregua (The Truce), without ever mentioning his sci-fi book, Storie naturali (Natural Histories), says Sacha Rosel.

– The same happens with Italo Calvino: everybody remembers him for his realistic fiction, most notably Marcovaldo, Il sentiero dei nodi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders) and La giornata di uno scrutatore (The Watcher). As developing imagination is considered to be one of the pillars of education, more “creative” teachers tend to widen the choice of Calvino’s titles also including the fantastic trilogy Our Ancestors, namely Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees), Il Visconte trimezzato (The Cloven Discount) and Il cavaliere inesistente (The Non-existent Knight). Consequently, as it happens with Primo Levi, nobody knows about Italo Calvino’s sci-fi writing, be it Ti con zero (Time and the Hunter) or Le cosmicomiche (The Cosmicomics), tells Sacha Rosel.

Women and the Fantastic Genre

That Italian sci-fi has been overlooked came into being–Sacha Rosel explains–because Italian literary critics and historians, that is those who established the literary canon, defined science fiction as “lesser literature”, something to be shunned by readers and to be ashamed of by writers. This created a bias that in time has condemned their sci-fi books to oblivion.

– However, some scholars, like Giuliana Misserville, author of Donne e fantastico (Women and the Fantastic Genre), an academic study on six women Italian authors of fantastic literature (including sci-fi too), claim that the popularity of dystopian and speculative TV series on major streaming platforms has been having an impact on Italian literature in the last twenty years. In Giuliana Misserville’s view, there’s a growing demand for stories which may echo what viewers see on TV series, and Italian readers are more willing to discover stories set in Italy which may explore speculative themes. In this sense, writers like Laura Pugno or Viola Di Grado are good examples of talented authors able to create speculative fiction praised by the Italian audience while having a universal appeal too, Sirene (Sirens) and Bambini di ferro (Iron Children) are good examples, says Sacha Rosel.

Italian Sci-fi Writers

PGW: What about other significant sci-fi Italian writers? Are there any that a world audience should know and read extensively?

– Some of the most renowned Italian sci-fi writers of the recent past tend to have something in common: they have all been recipients of the most prestigious national award for sci-fi novels, called Premio Urania, which has been running since 1989 and allows many debut authors to have their work published by one of the biggest publishers of the country, Mondadori. Notable examples of sci-fi authors from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s are Vittorio Catani, Valerio Evangelisti and Nicoletta Vallorani, the third currently being among the most important authors of contemporary Italian sci-fi, as well as the first woman author to be awarded the Urania Prize, says Sacha Rosel.

– Other relevant authors who were popular before the prize was created are Lino Aldani and Daniela Piegai. The latter is considered to be the Italian equivalent to Ursula Le Guin, yet despite being one of the most pre-eminent authors of sci-fi in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as her work was deemed to be too “feminine” (meaning devoid of warmonger characters or plots involving battle scenes), she gradually decided to stop pitching her works altogether, because of the unfair treatment received from the main publishers of the time, says Sacha Rosel.

– Now, thanks to Delos Digital, one of the main Italian publishers specializing in sci-fi today, her whole catalogue is currently being rediscovered and thus reissued or even published for the first time. Classics worth mentioning include Il mondo non è nostro (The World Does not Belong to Us) by Daniela Piegai, combining anti-authoritarianism with a critique on progress as the main cause of destruction on the planet(s); Le fortezze dell’alba (The Dawn Fortresses) by Daniela Piegai, on the possibility of overthrowing the system without using any violence; the Eymerich saga by Valerio Evangelisti, a monumental work combining noir, adventure, horror, historical fiction, gothic, fantastic, and of course science fiction, which in time has come to include thirteen books published between 1994 and 2018. Centred on the real figure of Inquisition judge Nicolas Eymerich, the saga includes sequences set either in the 1300s, during World War Two or in the year 3000, says Sacha Rosel.

According to Sacha Rosel, Italian sci-fi was around before the 1980s, and before the Urania Prize was created in 1989. Women authors were there too and now, thanks to researcher Laura Coci, author of the book Fantascienza. Un genere (femminile) – Science fiction. A (feminine) genre – many talented writers who used to be overlooked in the past are currently being studied again, and perhaps new issues of their major works might be available in the future thanks to Coci’s work. For instance, Nora de Siebert’s Umanità immortale (Immortal humanity), centred on a female cyborg character destined to save humanity from death, and Roberta Rambelli’s Il ministero della felicità (The Ministry of Happiness), delving into such themes as brainwashing and gender stereotypes, are both examples of interesting novels published between the late 1950s and the late 1970s. Yet there were also women authors usually associated with mainstream literature who, like Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, experimented with sci-fi: Anna Banti’s Je vous écris d’un pays lointain (I’m writing from a faraway land) and Luce D’Eramo’s Partiranno (They are going to leave). The former is a collection of four stories centred on the space-time travels of a woman in different historical periods – future included – to highlight violence as a constant presence in human life, while the latter focuses on the possible friendship between different species as well as on the cosmic confusion deriving from meeting the Other and embracing their difference as one’s own.

The State of the Art
PGW: What is the current state of Italian science fiction? Are there any common topics or philosophical themes in contemporary Italian sci-fi? 

– In the last twenty-four years, especially since the late 2000s, there has been a plethora of new authors coming out exploring specific themes and issues. Solar punk is one of the main subgenres chosen by Italian authors, thus focusing on anarchism, environmental activism and a strong criticism against capitalism. More than with philosophical issues, Italian sci-fi writers seem to be concerned with political ones, investigating possible ways to overcome injustice and build a new world based on respect. Utopia is favoured over dystopia, advocating for resistance and revolution instead of passively accepting the liberal status quo and its endless forms of oppression. Feminism has also become a relevant issue within Italian sci-fi, and a new generation of women authors has come to the forefront, showing how, as Coci says in an article, science fiction is indeed a feminine genre:

“Because women are the ones interested the most in changing the status quo in its multiple forms of subjugation, all the while envisaging different forms of future, giving them legitimacy by making them possible”.

– Then there’s also Future Fiction, which is entirely devoted to sci-fi but with an international appeal: some of their titles are available either in bilingual versions (mostly Italian and Chinese, as they also cooperate with the Fishing Fortress Science Fiction College in Chongqing, China) or also in other languages like English or French. They tend to be more ambitious in scope because they want to make sci-fi from outside the anglosphere popular. To this end, Future Fiction has a whole collection of Italian sci-fi authors available in English, called Freetaly, which is a good way to start exploring what Italian sci-fi has to offer for those who read English. Yet I’d say both Urania Mondadori and Delos Digital are the publishers with the majority of hardcore fans, with the latter being the ones investing more time and resources into discovering new Italian talents.

What to Read

PGW: Could you make a reading list for readers?

– Yes, of course, some of the most interesting contemporary books worth mentioning are:

• Elena Di Fazio’s Ucronia, an exploration of chronological hybridity and the concept of invasion.
• Giulia Abbate’s Il nostro seme inquieto (Our Wayward Seed), is a short story centred on the dangers of creating a perfect society limiting individual’s freedom.
• Romina Braggion’s Memorie di una ragazza interrotta (Memories of an Interrupted Girl) is about a mother-daughter relationship in a world where men have gone extinct.
• Francesca Cavallero’s Le ombre di Morjegrad (The Shadows of Morjegrad)focused on the metamorphosis of the cyborg as a liminal, female-centred entity fighting against an unfair male-dominated world.
• Clelia Farris’ La pesatura dell’anima (Weighing the Soul), a detective story set in an alternate, sci-fi version of Egypt with innovative use of language (Farris is known for coining new Italian words, and some have compared her style to that of Carlo Emilio Gadda).
• Francesco Verso’s Livido (Livid) is an exploration of mind-uploading as a way to do away with the body/soul dichotomy.
• Nadia Tarantini’s La diciottesima vita (The 18th Life) is focused on a world where feelings have been abolished and hibernation seems to be the solution to the enigma of living.
• Nicoletta Vallorani’s Noi siamo campo di battaglia (We are a Battlefield) is her third book of a trilogy set in a dystopian Milan where a group of students and their teacher mutate into a compost rebelling against the system.
• Andrea Viscusi’s Dimenticami, Trovami, Sognami (Forget Me, Find Me, Dream of Me) is about the possibility of moving from one dream to another to reach self-awareness.
• Alessia Principe’s Stelle Meccaniche (Mechanical Stars), on a world where the sun has died, the earth has been reduced to a small dot and humanity is on the verge of collapse.
• Franci Conforti’s Stormachine, on prisoners fighting against a world ruled by geometrical shapes.
• Enrica Zunic’s Nessuna giustificazione (No Reason to Justify) is a short story collection centred on the violation of civil rights.
• Bianca Garavelli’s Occhi Invisibili (Invisible Eyes) is a novel inspired by Dante’s Paradiso written by a scholar specialising in Dante.

Sacha Rosel also has a website (www.lunadonna.net) and her own Substack devoted to reviews, writing and reading (http://sacharosel.substack.com/).

Copyright Sacha Rosel and Peter Graarup Westergaard