Calvino’s The Distance From The Moon in Charming Animation

Italo Calvino's "The Distance From the Moon" gets a charming animation treatment in this short film from Israel created by Shulamit Serfaty.

Weird Fiction Review profiles Luigi Ugolini

Over at Weird Fiction Review, Brendan Connell profiles Italian writer Luigi Ugolini: Luigi Ugolini (1891 – 1980) was an Italian writer who garnered an international reputation for his short stories. Early on, Ugolini wrote articles and tales for newspapers. Later he dedicated himself almost exclusively to fiction for young people, which included works of historical biography and a sequel...

Flying Saucers Would Never Land in Lucca: The Fiction of Italian Science Fiction

Arielle Saiber, who is Associate Professor of Italian at Bowdoin College in the States, has an excellent and in-depth article on Italian science fiction, available in its entirety online at escholarship.org. We highly recommend you check it out! It was published in Californian Italian Studies in 2011. Worse, perhaps, than calling Italian science fiction “derivative”—as has often...

Italian Steampunk!

The Traveler's Steampunk Blog has posted an interview with Luca Cerlini, director of the Italian steampunk movie The Technician. How did you come up with the idea for The Technician, is there a particular work or works that inspired you? The idea for The Technician wasn’t mine, at least not the core idea, which came...

Interview with Italian author Alberto Cola

The Portal interview Italian science fiction author Alberto Cola, winner of the Premio Urania award. Alberto Cola, born in 1967, as Italian science fiction author, has just been awarded the latest Premio Urania for his new novel Lazarus, now published by Mondadori in Italy. FT: Hello Alberto, and welcome to The Portal. Your third novel, Lazarus, has recently...

Italy: a leftist anthology of short stories to help build a better country

In a very harrowing historical and political period for Italy, well known Italian SF authors, along with beginners, offer their literary contribution to a legitimate longing for the freedom that seems to be missing in everyday life in this country. Ambigue utopie: 19 racconti di fantaresistenza (loosely translated Ambiguous Utopia: 19 science-fiction resistance short stories)...

Monday Original Content: On the Italian anthology “Ambiguous Utopias” with editors Gian Filippo Pizzo and Walter Catalano

In our latest original feature, Francesco Troccoli interviews Gian Filippo Pizzo and Walter Catalano on their new anthology, "Ambigue utopie: 19 racconti di fantaresistenza” (Ambiguous Utopias: 19 science-fiction resistance short stories”), a collection of 19 political alternative history stories Italian, published by Edizioni Bietti. Is science-fiction pure escapism or should it also convey a social...

British Science Fiction Association Awards shortlist announced

The nominees for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award have just been announced. The complete list is available at Torque Control. There are a few international nominees, listed below: Short story category - Roberto Quaglia (with Ian Watson), for The Beloved Time of Their Lives (Italy) Non-fiction category - Deepa D for I Didn't...

Report from Eurocon 2009

Jim Walker over at Concatenation reports from Eurocon 2009 in Italy. Eurocon was running in parallel with Italcon, the Italian national SF convention, and Deepcon, the Italian national media convention. There were 270 attendees, more than the previous year, and more than twenty countries represented. - read the report.

Classic Science Fiction Art Showcase: Italian Artist Franco Grignani

Penguin are showcasing the works of Italian artist Franco Grignani, who created a set of 16 cover illustrations for Penguin's SF series in 1969-70 (for books by Bradbury, Harrison, Leiber Brunner and others).