Exploring the Curious Life and Times of Italian Science Fiction

This short article is a panel report on a double science fiction (sf) session organized by Giulia Iannuzzi at the The 2014 Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies held in Zurich. The first session, “The Genre In and Outside the Canon,” opened with a paper by Elio Baldi entitled “Science Fiction and Canon: The Case of Italo Calvino.” Calvino’s reception is an excellent example not only of the difficult relationship between Italian literary criticism and sf, but also of the striking differences between Italian studies in Italy and Italian studies abroad (especially in the US). The paper by Umberto Rossi that followed, entitled “Italian Slipstream: La ragazza di Vajont by Tullio Avoledo,” contextualized Avoledo’s work within a complex set of cultural phenomena and tendencies from slipstream to postmodernism and within the difficulties of the contemporary Italian publishing market. The second session, “From Rome to Mars: Geographies on the Screen,” featured Silvia Caserta on the presence and use of science-fiction imagery in two Italian films: Totò nella Luna (1958) and Fascisti su Marte (2006). The fact that the two films are comedies is indicative of Italy’s difficult relationship with the technoscientific imaginary. Despite using different frames and narrative strategies, Cavalli argued, both films convey an affectionate image of the Italian people as fundamentally incapable of using technologies. The second paper, by Giulia Iannuzzi, was entitled “Fortunes of American Science Fiction in Italy from the 1950s to the 1960s: Translations and Adaptations between Text and Screen” and closed the second session with some thoughts on the widespread practice of translating science fiction from English into Italian after WWII. The dialogue between panelists was helped along by Domenico Gallo, editor and contributor to many Italian magazines and collections, who did a fine job of focusing attention on the key issues: the presence and meaning of sf imagery in “canonical” Italian authors such as Calvino and Primo Levi; the controversial relationship between Italian literary criticism sf, seen in the broader context of the uneasy relationship between Italian cultural elites and hard sciences, which tend to be regarded as an “inferior” form of knowledge; the contemporary publishing market and its division between small, specialized sf initiatives and the important sf works published as mainstream fiction.