Francesco Verso (Bologna, 1973) is a multiple-award Science Fiction writer and editor (3 Europe Awards, 2 Urania Awards, 2 Italy Awards, 1 Galaxy Award). He has published: e-Doll, Nexhuman, Bloodbusters and The Roamers. He also works as editor and publisher of Future Fiction, a multicultural project dedicated to publishing the best World SF in translation from 40 countries and 14 languages. He may be found at www.futurefiction.org.

Freetaly - Italian Science Fiction edited by Francesco Verso

From a Glorious Past into an Unknown Future

From the otherworldly voyage depicted in Dante's Divina Commedia and the early modern utopias by Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, up through the proto-SF of Primo Levi and the Imaginary Fiction of Tommaso Landolfi and Italo Calvino, Italy has always been a cradle of fantastic literature. This anthology highlights the works of award-winning and emerging writers of contemporary Italian science fiction and will introduce international readers to exciting stories they wouldn't otherwise be able to read. Represented here are some of the winners of the Urania Award (Italy's most prestigious SF award), authors published by major Italian publishing houses, with stories that explore a wide range of topics, including bio-ethical issues, AI, transhumanism and posthumanism, climate fiction, and environmental concerns.

Table of content
 Introduction: Contemporary Italian SF by Francesco Verso
1)Linda De Santi – Beautymark
2)Francesco Grasso – The Race of Crows
3)Andrea Viscusi – Bad parents
4)Nicoletta Vallorani – The Catalog of Virgins
5)Clelia Farris – In bloom
6)Francesco Verso – The Green Ship
7)Michele Piccolino – The Love Algorythm
8)Romina Braggion – Flower Queen
9)Roberto Quaglia and Ian Watson – The Moby Clitoris of His Beloved
10)Alessandro Fambrini e Stefano Carducci – China on the Moon
11)Alessandro Vietti – Being Oval
12)Francesca Conforti – Reward
13)Alda Teodorani – Pony and Cow

Embrace the Science Fiction Renaissance of Italian literature!

Translations from Italian by Carlotta Codebò, Sally McCorry, Micheal Colbert, Rachael Cordasco and Amanda Blee.

Cover art by Simone Alvisini

CURATOR'S NOTE

The hardest working man in World SF has put together a fantastic anthology to share the best of Italian speculative fiction with the rest of the world. What's not to love! – Lavie Tidhar

 
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

To understand the trends that have shaped Italian "fantascienza" (Science Fiction) during the last 20 years, we should take a look at the end of the last century and in particular at the creation of the Urania Award in 1989 by the editor of Urania Mondadori book series – the too-early-departed Giuseppe Lippi – and the development of the World Wide Web. During the '90s, Italian SF was in a process of recovery, after being declared dead, due to some publishing initiatives that had reinvigorated its diffusion and supported the authors to submit their works with more ease. The Urania Award in particular has helped many emerging authors to get some visibility and be acknowledged as writers, even in the niche of SF genre. Over the years, some of them managed to get a literary credibility and even got published outside the genre, like Valerio Evangelisti and Nicoletta Vallorani.

The other driving force was represented by the Web, which has contributed to close the gap in terms of access to information, books and "Science Fiction culture" with the US and UK production. During the first ten years of the New Millennium, if on the traditional Urania series many books were dealing with popular tropes like Uchronia, Cyberpunk and Space Opera, most of the stories published by mid-sized and indy presses revolved around the exploding phenomenon of Cyberpunk and its subgenre Steampunk.

In fact, if we consider the Urania Award, between 2000 and 2009, almost all winning titles could be considered Cyberpunk or Uchronia (except for Paolo Aresi's "La scala infinita" which is a Space Opera). Dealing mostly, on one side, with "alternative history" ranging from Middle-Ages, Reinassance, Risorgimento, a Roman Empire spanning over time and space or even revival of Fascism settings and, from the other side, with decadent over polluted megalopolises, mafia crimes and new drugs, the impression is that Italian SF during this period can be represented at best by investigations and action thrillers to capture the techno-criminals or to restore the threatened course of history.