Italo Calvino and Science Fiction: A Little Explored Reading

Chapter Three

Italo Calvino and Science Fiction: A Little Explored Reading

Elio Baldi

Italo Calvino’s Le cosmicomiche, published in 1965, is often thought to herald a new creative impetus in his

writing career, which Calvino scholars tend to divide into two periods (McLaughlin 1989, 263). The first, which ends

with the publication of the cosmicomic tales is considered his more “realist” period, while in the second he drifts more

and more towards geometrical and hyper-literary games (Jansen 2002, 280). This reading (necessarily reductive as it

is) establishes the Cosmicomiche as a pivotal moment in Calvino’s writing career and therefore the sources of this shift

are potentially very interesting. Calvino himself, as always, provided a list of inspirations for the cosmicomic project

and critics have done extensive research on these connections, which range from cartoons to Giacomo Leopardi

(Calvino 1997a, 238). A little explored reading, however, is that of the possible connections between Calvino’s tales

and different strands of science fiction.

This article intends to suggest parallels between Calvino’s work and a variety of science fictional creations.

Instead of viewing Calvino as intrinsically belonging to a different type of literature, the argument is that Calvino

probably took direct or indirect inspiration from science fiction in various ways as a means of renewing his style of

writing. Calvino’s often highly abstract narratives shape time and space in a way that can even be called paradigmatic

for the creative process of writing science fiction. To claim that Calvino’s stories are science fiction would be

untenable. Some Italian critics have lamented a reading that so obviously oversimplifies his work, sometimes

attributing such a blatant misreading to “la ricezione in America” (itself an unveiled oversimplification) (Cazzato

1999, 171). Nevertheless, the opposite is also true: a categorical denial of any connections between Calvino’s

Cosmicomiche and science fiction closes off many potentially interesting readings of one of the most singular works in

Calvino’s literary production. For reasons of concision, this article will examine almost exclusively the cosmicomic

project (which spanned more than twenty years of his writing career), even if suggestions of ties between Calvino and

science fiction could also be extended to other books by the Ligurian writer1. Similarly, the focus will be on Anglo-

Saxon science fiction, even if the French and Italian science fiction scene could also provide fruitful material for

comparison. Furthermore, although I will present theoretical and narratological constants of science fiction, I will

mainly consider the cosmicomic project in its historical context, focusing less on anachronistic comparisons with

contemporary science fiction, and instead taking into account Calvino’s precursors and contemporaries.

The critical negotiation of the Cosmicomiche

Considering the year of publication, it was not strange to read the Cosmicomiche as inspired by the space race

between the United States and Russia, and, indirectly, as part of the bulk of literature that had set out to explore space

even before the rockets were sent out to probe. However, science fiction was not firmly anchored in the Italian literary

canon and met with considerable resistance from literary critics (Zolla 1959, 58-59; Solmi 1971, 70). Calvino, who

was only midway on his path to securing a place in the Italian literary pantheon, shared this critical attitude towards a

genre of which he nonetheless claimed to be an “appassionato lettore” (Calvino 1997a, vi). Eugenio Montale, in his

review of the Cosmicomiche, introduced the critically productive term “fantascienza alla rovescia”, which – until this

day – has been embraced by many critics who claim that Calvino’s work is not science fiction (Montale 1965; Messina

2011, 1011, 1020). Calvino confirmed this authoritative reading of his stories a couple of years later, in his 1968

preface to the new cosmicomic volume, La memoria del mondo e altre cosmicomiche, where he writes “che la

«science-fiction» tratta del futuro, mentre ognuno dei miei racconti si rifà a un remoto passato, ha l’aria di fare il verso

d’un «mito delle origini»” (Calvino 1997a).

This argument has taken root in literary criticism, even if some critics, most notably Francesca Bernardini

Napoletano and Francis Cromphout, have argued against such a simplification that equates science fiction and the

future (Bernardini Napoletano 1977, 70-71; Cromphout 1989, 165-167; Bouissy 1980, 649). The list of science fiction

writers that write about an (alternative) past or unspecified moment in time is long, ranging from L. Sprague de Camp

to Philip K. Dick. As Edward James writes in his study about science fiction in the twentieth century: “SF is usually as

much about history as it is about science. Sf writers have to construct new histories of our world or of others in order

to set their novum […] in context and discuss its […] impact upon individuals and society as a whole” (Hills 2009,

437). Calvino’s argument can thus easily be proved wrong or at least very imprecise. A concrete example is the topos

of the Neanderthal man that recurs in many science fiction narratives. When Calvino “interviews” a Neanderthal for

the “interviste impossibili” of the RAI, he does something that L. Sprague de Camp had already done in his story “The

Gnarly Man” of 1939, which has been emulated by Philip José Farmer as “The Alley Man” in 1959. The tale of the

surviving dinosaur, the last of his species, in the cosmicomic “I dinosauri”, is based on the same principle. Nonetheless

Chapter Three

the cliché that science fiction is about the future seems to have effectively kept critics from investigating possible

connections of the cosmicomic project with science fiction.

After the publication of the first volume of the Cosmicomiche, Calvino did not reveal all of his conscious

inspirations, let alone the indirect ones. This can be inferred from the fact that he only mentioned the important

Giorgio de Santillana in 1984 (Scarpa 2012). A similar source that Calvino never revealed may be Sergio Solmi’s Le

meraviglie del possibile, an anthology of science fiction that was published in 1959 by Einaudi at a time when Calvino

played a pivotal role within the publishing house. The anthology constituted an attempt at an “interpretazione colta

della fantascienza, ricercandone e sottolineandone gli aspetti di raffinatezza e gioco intellettuale piuttosto che quelli

sensazionalistici (o pseudo-pedagogici) e recuperando la short story come genere testuale ideale all’interno del quale

declinare la tematica fantascientifica” (Iannuzzi 2014, 58-59). This must certainly have appealed to Calvino, who in

those years repeatedly expressed in his letters the wish to found (or see founded) a literary movement of “letteratura

cosmica” (Calvino 2000, 679, 788). Ten years later, Calvino himself even prepared a science fiction anthology, which

he claimed would be “del tutto originale rispetto alle altre antologie” (Calvino 2000a, 983). The precise development

of this anthology is difficult to trace, but Calvino’s science fiction selection became part of a bigger anthology for

scuole medie that was published in 1969, and consisted of two stories by Ray Bradbury, two by Frederic Brown, both

introduced by Calvino, and one by Isaac Asimov in another part of the anthology (Calvino and Salinari 1969, 94-120,

132-135).

Interestingly, Sergio Solmi not only promoted science fiction in Italy, he also introduced Jorge Luis Borges to

the Italian literary scene. The parallels between Borges and Calvino have been amply researched, but the possible

connections of both writers to science fiction are rarely investigated. Borges did not embrace the label of science

fiction and grumbled about the lack of imagination of science fiction-like writers. At the same time, he reserved praise

for Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and Olaf Stapledon. Nevertheless, the lack of descriptions of the future in

Borges has, as in Calvino’s case, often been used to argue against a science fiction reading of his works (Stavans

1990). On the other hand, both Borges and Calvino are present in many anthologies of science fiction, and when Bruce

Sterling compiled the “core canon” of slipstream (the genre-crossing type of literature where fantasy, science fiction

and mainstream meet), Borges and Calvino were number 1 and 2 on his list (Sterling 2007).

Both Borges and Calvino claim to do something different from science fiction, naming their stories

respectively “ficciones” and “cosmicomiche”, to stress the originality, the non-genre-specific nature of their writing.

This does not mean, however, that their creations do not enter into a fruitful dialogue with the more “traditional” genre

literature, such as science fiction, a fact that is also recognized in the following quote from the Cambridge Companion

to Science Fiction:

To be really effective sf has to be subtle. Over the past seventy years the community of sf writers has

developed a tool kit, the absence or recreation of which is usually the hallmark of outsider sf (fiction

written by professional writers which either claims to have invented a new genre, or which

vigorously denies its categorization as science fiction) (James and Mendlesohn 2003, 5).

The term “outsider sf” seems appropriate to describe what Calvino is doing in the Cosmicomiche. The description of

his stories as “fantascienza alla rovescia” has, however, obscured the fact that there is not only a deconstructive aspect

to his narrative enterprise: his is also a rewarding dialogue with a genre that, in escaping the delineations of the world

as it is, presents a radically different perspective with respect to the average “realist” narrative. Calvino’s tone might

be satirical, as has been amply recognized, but this does not necessarily mean that he takes an overall satirical stance

towards the genre of science fiction. His stance is more complex, born out of exclusions as well as inclusions, silences

as much as statements (Lucente 1983). The Ligurian writer uses the recognizable “grammar” of science fiction as a

new, but malleable language through which he can explore different expressive qualities. He is not only revisiting

science fiction through Leopardi, Borges, Cyrano de Bergerac and all the other sources that he has mentioned for the

Cosmicomiche, but the opposite is true as well: the relatively new genre of science fiction contributes to shedding a

new light on these precursors, writers pertaining to a different “sphere” of literature. The shift in literary studies from

attention to “influence” to emphasis on “intertextuality” has opened up myriad ways that texts can relate to each other,

which are not necessarily conscious or straightforward. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore exemplifies this

embrace of pastiche, the logic of the palimpsest that constitutes the foundation of every narrative. Samuel Delany

incisively formulates possible ways of relating to “old” material from the perspective of the writer:

Of the many ways in which an artist can be influenced by other art, the historical art-critic

overconcentrates on two: the desire to imitate excellence […] and the distaste for the mediocre, the

stultified, the inflexible […] But there are other ways to be influenced. One artist may find a work

that seems to him to have an interesting kernel, but strikes him as so badly executed that he feels he

can treat the same substance far more rewardingly. More frequently, I suspect, he finds an interesting

technique employed to decorate a vapid hollow center, and uses it to ornament his own central

concerns. (Delany 1977, 279)


Delany’s statement can be read in the light of Calvino’s use of science fiction, which may have offered him precisely

such an “interesting technique to ornament his own central concerns.” Calvino’s fascination with fairy tales in the mid-

fifties was partly due to the crystalline logic, the “ariostesque” structural effectiveness and recognizability, the

“morphology of the fairytale” that Vladimir Propp famously theorized. Formal recognizability is an essential aspect of

science fiction too, according to researchers such as Frederic Jameson, who writes: “SF is a sub-genre with a complex

and interesting formal history of its own, and with its own dynamic, which is not that of high culture, but which stands

in a complementary and dialectical relationship to high culture or modernism as such” (Jameson 2005, 283). Precisely

this formal coherence and intrinsic “otherness” of a genre like science fiction accounts for a form of creativity within

or with respect to an existing framework, of which the boundaries are progressively redrawn in a historical process that

is more evolutionary than revolutionary. This renewal and reproduction of conventions is an openly constitutive aspect

of genre literature in general, and the history of science fiction shows this very clearly (Docker 1994, 113). One might

argue that Calvino was attracted precisely by the recognizable narratological patterns and boundaries of a genre, and

less by the prepackaged whole that included the typical science fiction covers, the clichés about aliens and spaceships,

and – most of all – its status as “genre literature.” Just as the Oulipo would provide a fruitful context for Calvino

precisely because of the (arbitrary) restrictions that formed an important core of the Oulipo-philosophy and practice,

science fiction seems to have formed a stimulus just as much for the boundaries that it offered as for the new

possibilities it embodied (Motte 1999).

Calvino parodies science fiction in the Cosmicomiche, but not in a parasitical, derogatory way, but by using

parody as a tool. Parody, in Linda Hutcheon’s definition, implies copying with a difference: this difference can never

be too big or too small, otherwise the parody would be unrecognizable as such. The parodied text shines through the

transparent parody, providing the mold in which the parody can function as an “authorized” or controlled

transgression. In order for ironic inversion and counter-expectation to work, imitation has to render the parodied text

recognizable to the reader (Hutcheon 2000, 6, 32, 44, 75, 84). In this respect we could certainly consider Calvino, as

Welch Everman writes, as the

premier parodist of postmodern science fiction […] he creates tales that call the languages of both

science and fiction into question by exposing the means by which SF texts come into being. As

Calvino makes clear, the science fiction text adopts a scientific hypothesis […] and proceeds as if

this hypothesis were true (Everman 1986, 25, 27).

Everman then proceeds to name other more “literary” science fiction writers with more attention to language and a

parodic stance towards their “own” genre such as Samuel Delany, Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, Roger Zelazny,

Philip José Farmer and Kurt Vonnegut (Everman 1986, 25, 27).

Even though one might say that Calvino, overall, has undoubtedly more in common with “atypical” science

fiction writers (those who tend towards the postmodern, New Wave or relatively mainstream side of the spectrum),

science fiction writers and precursors of the genre have always shown a high awareness of the conventions of their

genre (Parrinder 1992). Instead of merely reproducing these conventions, often they overtly parodied the genre to

which they pertained. Parody and (certain strands of) science fiction share a similar core, that of alienating the familiar

by copying it with a difference, and therefore make excellent bedfellows. Parody need not be explicit and all

pervading, such as in the thinly veiled parodies that John Sladek wrote “in the style of” his most famous co-science

fiction authors or the earlier, famous parody of pulp science fiction by Frederic Brown (Sladek 1973; Brown 1950).

The parody can also be implicit, and the inversion of genre-bound clichés is a standard procedure in science fiction

writing, which goes from Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles to almost all of Philip K. Dick’s novels. Clichés have

proven to be excellent stimuli for creativity and renewal in science fiction (Collings 1985).

What makes Calvino’s parody different from most self-reflexive science fiction is that he does not so much

use the outward (and therefore most readily recognizable and “parodyable”), formal part of the genre, but instead he

tends to distill only the narratological and epistemological skeleton of science fiction, the logic and patterns that lie

behind its creation of “others” and other worlds. By doing so, he is closely related to a science fiction writer who,

through a curious negotiation between high and popular canon, has become more and more “mainstream,” the “Borges

for the Space Age”: Stanislaw Lem (Swirski 2015). Like Calvino, Lem has gradually become almost exclusively

associated to “singular authors”, such as Edgar Allen Poe and Jorge Luis Borges, and thus further removed from the

science fiction genre. This is partly due to the kind of science fiction that he preached:

It is precisely this slide toward easy, sensational intrigue which is a symptom of the degeneration of

this branch of literature. An idea is permitted in SF if it is packaged so that one can barely see it

through the glitter of the wrapping […] SF should be stimulated and induced to deviate from this

trend of development, namely, by involution away from the sensational pole (Lem 1974, 150).

On the whole, Calvino’s Cosmicomiche seem to respond to Lem’s wish to focus on ideas, for which science fiction

could prove (and had already proved) an excellent vehicle. Let us now examine the building blocks of that operation.

Chapter Three

Time

Time is often considered to be a crucial aspect of science fiction, and more specifically one can say that the

future is the stereotypical domain of the genre’s scenarios. However, as mentioned above, this reduction of science

fiction to the future is only true for particular strands. Science fiction is seldom straightforward anticipation or

prediction, a fact which even brings Frederic Jameson to consider the use of the future in science fiction narratives as a

mere “process of distraction and displacement, repression and lateral perceptual renewal.” This “strategy of

indirection” is what Marcel Proust was a master and prime example of, but according to Jameson science fiction’s

futures are mostly founded upon the same principle (Jameson 2005, 287). This indirect look at the present is very

congenial to Calvino, who already adopts it in his earlier books, most notably in the trilogy I nostri antenati. Viewed

from this perspective, Calvino’s science fiction is only “alla rovescia” in a fairly superficial way, in that he generally

chooses the past instead of the future to (allegorically) problematize the allegedly univocal present.

That science fiction is not bound to the future can be seen from a solid minority of science fiction texts that

talk about (alternate) pasts, or atemporal worlds, unspecified “uchroniae”2. L. Sprague de Camp’s stories for example

often bring to life, rekindle or reinvent the “Dead Past” in various ways, presenting alternate histories (Lest Darkness

Fall) or reintroducing archaic elements into present worlds. Especially the subgenre of the alternate history is very

much akin to what Calvino is doing in the Cosmicomiche. The pattern of Calvino’s stories has much in common with a

logic that underlies science fiction and alternate history, as this quote of Harry Turtledove illustrates:

Establishing the historical breakpoint… is only half of the game of writing alternate history. The

other half […] is imagining what would spring from the proposed change. It is in that second half of

the game that science fiction and alternate history come together. Both seek to extrapolate logically a

change in the world as we know it. […] The technique is the same in both cases, the difference lies

in where in time it is applied (Duncan 2003, 211).

Thus, when we consider the technique that is adopted in science fiction narratives, instead of stressing too heavily the

time frame in which the stories develop, the parallels with Calvino’s storytelling patterns become more apparent. As

Mark Rose points out, an important nucleus of science fiction is

the transformation of the familiar into an unfamiliar world through the agency of a fantastic intruder

[…] [which] may be an alien creature, a novel and devastating disease, a climatic or ecological

change, a technological innovation or any of a large number of other possibilities. […] The

narrative’s emphasis may fall upon the threat of change, the process of change, or the effects of

change (Rose 1981, 26-27).

From this quote we can gather the recurrent pattern of the Cosmicomiche, which are all narrated on the cusp of some

big cosmological change and concentrate especially on how it effects the characters. From 1961 to 1966, J. G. Ballard

produced a series of “disaster novels” that focused on earthly disasters and the effects they had on earth’s inhabitants.

Ballard, who has occasionally been compared to Calvino, wrote a series of sophisticated apocalyptic novels that did

not merely replicate the patterns of earlier apocalyptic science fiction, but that nonetheless used those patterns

productively – just as Calvino did. The thinly veiled apocalyptic character of Calvino’s writings about the future or

technological and cosmological discoveries could also be tied to the dark broodings of some of the more cynical

amongst science fiction futuramas3.

Time as we know it is not important in the Cosmicomiche. Calvino’s tales jump through time in non-linear,

criss-crossing giant leaps. Calvino presents alternative worlds, worlds of possibility, narrating cosmologic changes as

they never happened, could have happened, might have happened. This treatment of time turns his stories into

ruminations about history, destiny, and evolution itself, a fact that has been amply recognized by literary critics

(Lanslots 2005; Nimis 2005). The meta-temporal aspects of his fictions purportedly connect him to Borges, whereas

science fiction is hardly mentioned in this respect. However, science fiction is not always a “simple,” straightforward

futuristic depiction: often it engages with time in a more complex, problematic way. Famous science fiction tales have

engaged with historicity instead of history and privileged “futurity” above future. In other words, science fiction

stories can depict futuristic worlds, but they can also engage with our own perception that becomes apparent in that

depiction, with the future as both image and imagination. The importance of perception in prediction comes to the fore

in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels, as well as in the famous meta-reflexive passages in Lem’s Solaris, a legacy that is

taken up by later science fiction writers and most notably by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson (Briggs 2013). The

logic of the time travel story is imbued with this duality between perception and prediction: the time traveler not only

has to engage with the effective future that he finds, but also with the expectations that he (we) had of that future (and

possibly, in more meta-science fiction, with the fact that the future world is a product of the imagination of the science

fiction writer). Philip K. Dick’s novels engage time with this inherent logic of science fiction. One of his novels, in


which the main character, who lives in a near future (2012), travels both back and forth in time, is emblematically

called Dr. Futurity.

The effect of this non-linear, unpredictable time frame can be alienation from historical progress itself,

rendering history “critically contingent,” severing it from its inevitability, on which “hard” science fiction in fact

heavily depended (Hills 2009, 238). This can translate into strangely atemporal worlds (such as Ballard’s Vermillion

Sands and Calvino’s own Città invisibili), as well as in statements that effectively blur the distinction between past and

future, as happens at the end of Calvino’s I dinosauri and Priscilla. In Gli anni luce and Quanto scommettiamo

cosmological and human time are mixed to become an absurd, impossible whole. It can be said Calvino relativizes

time, but, while this differentiates him from some science fiction narratives, it brings him closer to certain other strands

of science fiction, which are further removed from “positivistic,” so-called “hard” science fiction (Castellucci 1999,

103, 117-118). Science fiction almost exclusively recounts a past, although it sometimes does so from the perspective

of the future, which makes it future for us. Even though the narrator tends to speak from a far future, from his point of

view what he discusses is in the past. Hence the narrator looks back, not forward: he recalls instead of predicting. This

brings Boris Eizykman to praise the: “unlimited narrative openness on which SF may justly pride itself: all times and

places become accessible, predisposed to discovery, thanks to the shifting and generally undetermined whereabouts of

the ‘fictitious narrator’” (Eizykman 1985, 68). Calvino himself recognized this calculated openness of the genre: “Le

macchine per muoversi nel tempo […] sono un’invenzione degli scrittori di fantascienza che serve di pretesto a

fantasie del tutto inverosimili ma basate su un gioco di ipotesi logiche.” (Calvino and Salnari, 109). The science fiction

narrator thus finds himself in the position of Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, living in all times simultaneously

(Vonnegut 1970). Qfwfq, Calvino’s cosmicomic, metamorphic, omnipresent narrator/protagonist holds a similar

position.

This constant of science fiction writing is captured well by Isabelle Stengers, when she writes that science

fiction characters tend to be “observateurs partiels,” partial observers, as they would be in science (Stengers 2000, 102-

105). As a shifting point of observation, such a character is contextual and functional, not so much psychological.

Calvino himself made a similar point when, in I livelli della realtà, he talked about characters that are like the

“operatore in matematica” (Calvino 1995, 393). By employing this term, he emphasized that characters can be

“merely” the center of the story in a physical sense, not in a psychological sense: just as in Olaf Stapledon’s Star

Maker, they are the “mere disembodied viewpoint” that is the conditio sine qua non for the outside world to reveal

itself in all its complexity (Stapledon 1999, 23). Similarly, Calvino calls Qfwfq “nemmeno un personaggio […] un

occhio” (Calvino 1991, 1318).

Space and form

Considering the almost unlimited temporal span of the genre, we might take up Frederic Jameson’s invitation

to consider not time the distinctive feature of science fiction, but space (Jameson 2005, 306). The curiously formal,

reflexive, overdetermined, clearly constructed, artificial science fiction cityscapes and landscapes are the

commonplace scenario for an encounter with all that is “other” – and which, according to the familiar science fiction

logic of inversion, at a certain point is often recognized as not so different from, or even an inherent part of, “self.”

Both Calvino and writers of science fiction have been scrutinized by literary critics for remarkably similar reasons:

both have been “accused” of being non-psychological, of creating characters that are types rather than psychologically

complex personalities, as well as of representing a particularly non-sexual or frigid type of literature (Rose 1981, 8, 37;

Bould 2009, 9). These characteristics can indeed be ascribed to a great deal of science fiction and Calvino alike, but

they can also be considered strengths, because they allow for different ways of depicting a world and engaging with

environment by turning surroundings into characters. Following this logic of surroundings that are foregrounded,

sexuality more often than not becomes eros, in which the environment somehow participates (Vest, 2009, 133-134).

By the same logic, worlds interlace with “I’s” and the development of the outside world forces the characters of a

science fiction narrative to take on the same or contrasting shades and colors, to adapt or react, a decision that Qfwfq

has to make in every single cosmicomic.

Science fiction can be a way of renewing our view of the world as well as restructuring and retelling its

foundations, and this combination of characteristics has brought quite a few critics to see science fiction as modern

myth. Giorgio de Santillana, whose theories on myth constituted an important inspiration for Calvino in the sixties,

recognized this potential role of science fiction in his book entitled Hamlet’s Mill: “Science fiction, when it is good, is

a wholly valid attempt at restoring a mythical element, with its adventures and tragedies, its meditations on man’s

errors and man’s fate” (De Santillana and von Dechend 1977, 51). A similar view was held by Einaudi’s Sergio Solmi,

who stressed the role of science fiction as a modern heir to the romanzo cavalleresco. Solmi writes about the genre in

terms of “folklore scientifico” and “fantascienza ariostesca” and sets forth his view of science fiction as modernized

fairy tales, because they use “regole del gioco” that are “strutturazioni razionali” and “paradossi fisico-matematici”

instead of “formule magiche” (Solmi 1971, 65, 69; Solmi and Fruttero 2006, xiii-xiv, xxiii). This must have sounded

very appealing to Calvino, who closely collaborated with Sergio Solmi, whom he held in high regard. In fact, Calvino

seems to imply a similar overlap between the impulse of writing myth and (early) science fiction when he writes about

Chapter Three

Jules Verne’s Les indes noires: “ecco il mondo visionario celtico che s’infiltra nell’apologia della scienza del

positivista Verne a dimostrare […] che la stessa linfa mitologica scorre e si mescola nell’inestricabile groviglio delle

ideologie apparentemente contrapposte” (Calvino 1995, 544). In this case, myths and science (fiction) have the same

function, because myths do not contradict reality, but rather structure reality (Hagen 2007, 50).

However, what has drawn many readers to science fiction is probably not (or not exclusively) this myth-like

structuring of the world, but most likely the way in which alien worlds are discovered in a “meta-empirical” and “non-

naturalistic” manner (Suvin 1979, 20). An important task of science fiction narratives is “to convey the experience, at

once sense-perceptual and emotive, of an alien world […] the feel of ‘new’ worlds” (Philmus 2006, 203). What

distinguishes Calvino’s tales from much science fiction is that he projects this sense of discovery onto the earth itself,

often seeking the other and the alien on our world, not necessarily far out in space: the notum becomes the novum4. A

good example of this is La molle luna, a story of multiple contaminations, of neg(oti)ated boundaries, not only

between past, present and future, but also between the material of earth and moon, that fuse in this story to stress the

intrinsic impurity and non-integrity of both.

The protagonist of the Cosmicomiche, Qfwfq, who is recognizably human in his tone, in his matter-of-factly

recollections, is also incredibly varied in his gestalt. He metamorphoses constantly, in liquid anthropomorphizations,

to take the most disparate forms, from camel to fish, from miniscule point to unspecified entity. He is presented as

alien or other, but his voice, his consciousness and sometimes also his form, are distinctly human. Other life forms,

such as animals, robots, aliens or still other creatures, potentially offer a renewal of the way we view our own form,

our own evolution: the same logic underlies many short stories of Robert Sheckley from the 1950’s, stories such as

Shape, Specialist and Warm (Abramovich and Lethem 2012, 30-73). Again, this experimentation with the form of his

characters, which are human despite their inhuman appearance, can be found already in the Visconte dimezzato, in the

figure of Agilulfo in Il cavaliere inesistente as well as in the ruminations about the boundaries of humanity in La

giornata di uno scrutatore (Iovino 2014). In the words of Contardo Calligaris when paraphrasing Il visconte

dimezzato, Calvino had been convinced from early on in his career that “nell’ottusità dell’interezza è adombrato il

fallimento necessario di qualunque forma che si voglia totale in un mondo alienato”, as well as that (in La giornata

d’uno scrutatore) “l’umano non ha confini se non quelli che gli diamo” (Calligaris 1973, 35, 88). It was precisely this

“invasion or interpenetration of original life and artificial life – a subversion of order by the strange” that attracted

Ursula K. Le Guin to Calvino’s writing (Le Guin 1997, 279).

But Calvino in general does not depict alien worlds in full phenomenological detail; his approach is much

closer to Lem’s call for “involution,” away from the sensory side of science fiction. In fact, this already becomes clear

from the level of abstraction in the titles of his cosmicomics: Un segno nello spazio, Tutto in un punto, La forma dello

spazio, Il niente e il poco, Gli anni-luce, Senza colori, L’implosione, etc. Calvino tends to erase at first in order to then

slowly, contradictorily, and abstractly build up worlds of vectors, directions, lines, points, vaguely outlined

phenomena, dark-light contrasts. It is the creation of a world in its purest form, out of nothing. Franco Ricci has termed

this “combination of colour and line so potent and protean” Calvino’s “proto-technique […] where art truly begets

Nature just as Nature once begat art” (Ricci 2007, 266) This procedure brings Calvino close to a French source that he

himself acknowledged: Raymond Queneau and his Petite cosmogonie portative of 1954 (Baron 2008, 228).

Cosmogonie differs from cosmology in that it is about the engendering of worlds, not so much about the general laws

that determine its course. Queneau was among the enthusiastic authoritative supporters of science fiction in France,

which after the Second World War was in fact more successful there than in Italy (Gouanvic 1994, 171-174; Lyau

2011, 17, 20).

Writing in itself can be seen as a form of cosmogony, as becomes clear from a passage of Jason Vest’s

discussion about the parallels between Calvino and Philip K. Dick: “Although Qfwfq is not the universe’s creator, he

is also not a simple cosmic particle. Qfwfq speaks words that generate worlds” (Vest 2009, 119). This is, however, not

a straightforward process, but an invention and re-invention of space from tale to tale, a space that is “polimorfico e

sfuggente” (Cazzato 1999, 171). In writing, in space-pages (a recurrent topos in the literature of Calvino), through the

invention of language, material appears, worlds are hinted at, elliptically encircled and elliptically disclosed. Language

matters in a double sense: it is important and it creates matter. “Qui si tocca,” a pivotal utterance from Sul far del

giorno, is the epitome of this way of writing: at the moment in the story in which the phrase is formed, solid matter

does not yet exist (Calvino 1997b, 28). The expression thus coincides with the creation of matter. The story itself is

ambiguously titled “sul far del giorno” [emphasis mine]. The conventional meaning of this phrase is, indeed, “at

daybreak,” but, taken literally, the story is about “the making of day.”

The important connection between environment, the way we experience it and the language we use to

describe it, is present as an undercurrent in all of Calvino’s tales, and sometimes this comes to the fore in (thinly

veiled) metafictional statements that delineate precisely the biggest challenge in writing science fiction. An excerpt

from Quanto scommettiamo demonstrates this challenge: “lui stava zitto: povero d’immaginazione com’era, appena

una parola cominciava ad avere un significato, non riusciva a pensare che potesse averne un altro” (Calvino 1997b,

84). This struggle to describe different, intrinsically new worlds with old concepts and language that is normally used

to describe familiar surroundings is part and parcel of science fiction narratives. The language that has to be renewed is

not only that of everyday life, but also that of former ‘narratives of the new’. We encounter here, again, the oscillation

between cliché and renewal that characterizes the history of science fiction, a facet that was thematized decades before

Calvino, in 1938, by C.S. Lewis in Out of the Silent Plane:


He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black

cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how

much it affected him till now—now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for this

empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”—he felt life pouring

into him from it every moment (Lewis, 1996, 34).

At the same time, space as mental and perceptual category and space as everything that is around us and our earth are

thus invented. Emptiness becomes story and world at the moment of writing, the narrative material is shaped as if in a

workshop. First, we experience the breaking down of the concept of space as we know it, before it is built up again5.

This is what necessarily happens when we think of unknown or non-existing planets, but also in the many science

fiction narratives that work their way outwards in what Frederic Jameson called the “spaceship-as-universe” theme, in

which the universe of both characters and story consists in fact only of an enormous spaceship (Jameson 1973).

Something very similar occurs in Calvino’s La forma dello spazio, in which every conventional aspect of space is

questioned by telling a tale that takes place “somewhere out there.” The beginning of Tutto in un punto follows a

similar procedure: “Si capisce che si stava tutti lì—fece il vecchio Qfwfq,—e dove, altrimenti? Che ci potesse essere lo

spazio, nessuno ancora lo sapeva. E il tempo, idem” (Calvino 1997b, 46).

In suggesting that science fiction constitutes a privileged site for polysemy, science fiction critic Vittorio

Curtoni takes space as an example to illustrate his point:

prendiamo uno dei termini più ricorrenti sin dall’inizio nella letteratura di science-fiction: spazio. Da

un punto di vista scientifico tale termine è univoco […] da un punto di vista narrativo, qualora

diventi teatro di azioni fantastiche o comunque non reali, lo spazio assume immediatamente una

profondità polisemica di grande suggestione, e lo stesso discorso vale per tutti i termini scientifici cui

la fantascienza si è servita (Curtoni 1977, 26).

In this sense, science fiction, by depicting “impossible” places can thus call into question our “natural” sense of place

and space (Kneale 2009, 428). This problematization reaches its summit in Il conte di Montecristo, where “Calvino

sembra voler dissacrare ogni nozione tradizionale in fatto di tempo e spazio” (Bonsaver 1995, 142). The theme of

escaping from a four-dimensional room is certainly not uncommon in science fiction, an example of which can be

found in Isaac Asimov’s Gimmicks Three (Asimov 1960, 67-72).

Names, colors, anthropomorphism

Among the traditionally somewhat neglected topics considering Calvino’s writing, during the last decade

more attention has been given to the way he uses names and colors in his fiction. Nevertheless, this has not been done

in comparison with the genre of science fiction, except for some cursory remarks (Polezzi 2001, 174). When Mario

Barenghi writes that it would be interesting to reflect upon the onomastica in Calvino’s works, he mentions only

possible classical and medieval sources (Barenghi 2007, 259). The fact that the names in the Cosmicomiche, and most

of all that of protagonist Qfwfq, are unpronounceable, puzzling and more like scientific formulae than proper names,

has been acknowledged by readers and critics alike. Interestingly enough, though, no one seems to have remarked that

such names recur regularly in science fiction, where strange names are often among the key elements for generating

the right amount of alienation. It is rather common for science fiction characters, especially if they are non-human, to

have formula-like or unpronounceable names full of numbers or sequences of consonants (Krueger 1966; Wolf 1979).

We encounter them from the Martian Chronicles, with names like Qqq and Www, to Star Wars, with the famous R2-

D2. Calvino himself has included an episode with strange names from the Martian Chronicles in his aforementioned

anthology, as well as a story of Frederic Brown that includes the name “three”, which is actually

“389.057.792.869.223” (Calvino and Salinari 1969, 112).

Part of the insurmountable challenge captured by science fiction narratives is the encounter with the

unknown, the intrinsically non-human and ineffable, which has to be recalled and recounted in human, everyday terms.

By its very nature, the genre operates on the boundaries of human experience and knowledge, attempting to stretch

those boundaries, even if that is simply impossible. In his Lezioni americane, while revisiting the impulse in writing

the Cosmicomiche, Calvino himself captures the contradiction of anthropomorphizing something that is inherently

non-human:

La scienza mi interessa proprio nel mio sforzo per uscire da una conoscenza antropomorfa: ma nello

stesso tempo sono convinto che la nostra immaginazione non può essere che antropomorfa; da ciò la

mia scommessa di rappresentare antropologicamente un universo in cui l’uomo non è mai esistito,

anzi dove sembra estremamente improbabile che l’uomo possa mai esistere (Calvino 2000b, 89-90).

Chapter Three

Calvino is referring to science here, but the same logic underlies science fiction. One of the most well-known and

interesting fictional treatments of this paradox in our anthropomorphic approach to non-human environments is

Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. Even though he physically transcends being human, Qfwfq shows the same inevitable

shortcomings in approaching the world around him as Lem’s characters: “Like ourselves Qfwfq continuously and

obsessively interprets his world in relation to himself” (Siegel 1991, 44).

There is thus an impossibility of really imagining alien spaces, as well as of “wording” other worlds. A

recurrent theme in science fiction is the problem of a shared language when worlds and creatures are

incommensurable. What language could convey the intrinsically new and different? This paradox comes to the fore in

several of Calvino’s tales, as in Lo zio acquatico, where Qfwfq’s uncle not only lives in a different world (the sea) but

also uses a language that is fossilized, firmly anchored to the world he lives in, unsettling for those who have been

born on land (Calvino 1997b, 72).

Interestingly, for Calvino, one of the obstacles of actually experiencing new worlds as they are, is constituted

by the stories and myths (of science fiction) that we have woven around those worlds before actually discovering

them: “se un Nuovo Mondo venisse scoperto ora, lo sapremmo vedere? Sapremmo scartare dalla nostra mente tutte le

immagini che siamo abituati ad associare all’aspettativa d’un mondo diverso (quelle della fantascienza, per esempio)

per cogliere la diversità vera che si presenterebbe ai nostri occhi?” (Calvino 1994, 11). This impossibility to depict the

new in a new way cannot be overcome, but it can be attenuated, as it were, by some common tricks of the trade that

science fiction writers, consciously or unconsciously, copy from each other. Amongst those tricks are not only names,

but also colors.

Calvino’s use of colors in the Cosmicomiche is similar to that in many science fiction narratives, because they

serve to quickly sketch and suggest a world out of nothing, a palette of colors on a blank (or, more likely, black)

canvas. Marco Belpoliti sums this up rather neatly when he writes about the use of color in Calvino’s books: “The role

of colour here is to suggest space as possibility” (Belpoliti 2007, 15). Significantly, Belpoliti hardly mentions the use

of color in the Cosmicomiche, but this quote is certainly applicable to these tales. They represent the first impressions

of alterity that meet the eye. From the first cosmicomic onwards, La distanza della luna, this play with colors becomes

evident, when Calvino writes about “luce color burro”, “acqua argentata che pareva mercurio”, “pesci violetti” and

“medusa color zafferano” (Calvino 1997b, 9-10). It is interesting to note here, furthermore, that Calvino is often

describing color not directly, but indirectly – burro, mercurio, zafferano – thus stressing the strangeness of the

description. As happens with space and time in other stories, color is also explicitly thematized in Calvino’s story

Senza colori, where the earth acquires color for the first time and the amazed Qfwfq is recurring to impossible cries

such as “il sole è rosso”, which does not mean anything at all yet for anyone. What follows is pure sense of wonder

projected on the earth itself: “ogni volta [era] sbalordito allo scoprire che il fuoco era rosso, il ghiaccio bianco, il cielo

celeste, la terra bruna, e che i rubini erano color rubino, e i topazi color topazio, e color smeraldo gli smeraldi”

(Calvino 1997b, 60). The episode can thus be said to be the color-equivalent of what happens with space when

someone says “qui si tocca,” out of nowhere.

A clear indication of the importance of color to suggest difference and alien worlds is again to be found in

Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, a book that Calvino knew well enough (at least in 1969) to include in an

anthology (Calvino 1995, 2286; Calvino and Salinari 1969, 94). Throughout the book, colors are central to the

descriptive sequences of first impressions, and in the first pages of the book we can find a telling Martian dialogue:

“Somehow”—she tried the words—“he looked all right. In spite of being tall. And he had—oh, I

know you’ll think it silly—he had blue eyes.”

“Blue eyes! Gods!” cried Mr. K. “What’ll you dream next? I suppose he had black hair?”

“How did you guess?” She was excited.

“I picked the most unlikely colour,” he replied coldly.

“Well, black it was!” she cried. “And he had a very white skin; oh, he was most unusual!” (Bradbury

1977, 16).

Color is sufficient here to suggest a strangeness beyond imagination (in the same dialogue, the strangeness of names

from earth is discussed). Later on in the narrative, the descriptions of a Martian town, with silver water, bronze flowers

and people with gold eyes, are contrasted with a deceptively normal colored, earth-like town (Bradbury 1977, 28, 48).

Decades later, a completely different type of science fiction remains true to this basic technique of estrangement.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, for example, opens with a sky that is “the color of television,” after which color-filled

pages contain spidery gold, synthetic pink, scarlet ultrasuede, scarlet-lacquered, azure, red neon and a whole palette of

other uncommon colors (Gibson 1995, 9-20).

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy also exemplifies the importance that color still has, as a traditional way

of depicting newness, but at the same time, it reveals the way in which science fiction stories are ‘color coded’ by a

tradition of depictions of the new to which they inevitably (cor)respond6. But already in 1976, when the first photos of

Mars reached the earth, Calvino moved his attention from Mars to Jupiter, with reasons that are significantly tied to

color: the “red” planet had become a dull gray heap of stones. With its distinctive color it had lost its newness. And

thus he declares in Un deserto in più that he moves on to the satellites of Jupiter, which “hanno dietro di sé non una

storia di illusioni ottiche e di letteratura di second’ordine, ma le limpide pagine del Sidereus Nuncius di Galileo


Galilei” (Calvino 1995, 2287). It is not hard to guess to which “letteratura di second’ordine” Calvino somewhat

snobbishly alludes here.

Conclusion

Calvino’s tales exemplify many of the procedures and patterns that lie behind the writing of science fiction

narratives: issues regarding time, space, form, the incommensurably new, the other and the relation between language

and world. Though short and airy of tone, Calvino’s stories are like neutron stars, in the sense that they capture

potentially grandiose material in a dense core. One of the reasons for this fortunate combination of characteristics is

the way in which Calvino masterly combines a “readerly,” more empirical form of (science) fiction with a “writerly,”

epistemological variant (which is usually associated with the advent of New Wave science fiction): or, to use

terminology that is more frequently used in science fiction theory, the Cosmicomiche tend to combine the extrapolative

and the speculative or analogical pole of the genre (Suvin 1979, 27-29). Calvino’s stories open with a scientific theory

that spurs the imagination, stretching the boundaries of knowledge to its most inventive extreme: a new world. This

unlocking of the ontological potential inherent in every epistemological shift is precisely one of the defining

characteristics of the best science fiction (Stockwell 2000, 104).

Calvino’s use of science fiction can be described in similar terms as what Maria Rizzarelli writes about the

use of Hollywood cinema by the Sanremese writer, which is “a far volare la fantasia, a placare la fame e la sete di

lontananza, a dilatare i confini del reale” as well as for “i meccanismi perfettamente funzionanti” and the “costanti”

and “variabili” that the well-functioning and recognizable Hollywood cinema offered him (Rizzarelli 2008, 106).

Calvino liked to construct his creative storytelling upon a firm foundation of rules and regulations, which he found in

many different places, many of whom are already recognized, from cinema to comics, from classic literature to fairy

tales, from myths to chivalric romance and adventure. However, science fiction, maybe partially because of its

longstanding negative reputation in Italy as “paraletteratura,” has hardly been suggested. Such a reading in the context

of science fiction can nonetheless open up new horizons to discover in a writer that has always been praised for his

versatility, his relentless search for something new.

1 Possible parallels can be found, for example, between Il castello dei destini incrociati and Samuel Delany’s The Einstein

Intersection, La nuvola di smog and Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, J.G. Ballard’s Crash and Calvino’s Il sangue, il mare. 2 Even though fantasy too is a genre that tends to reimagine the past, this article addresses works that are generally reckoned to be

science fiction. The idea is not to claim that Calvino’s work is science fiction, but merely that it is related to books that are usually

considered to pertain to the science fiction genre. 3 Cf. Calvino’s newspaper articles in the seventies, such as Un deserto in più, Quando finirà questa estate di disastri, Il tramonto

della luna and Quando va via la luce. 4 Calvino himself, however, points out that this mechanism is to be found in science fiction too in Calvino and Salinari 1969, 120; I

have borrowed the fortunate juxtaposition of ‘notum’ and ‘novum’ from Serra 1996, 157. 5 We could compare this amorphous, metamorphosing space with the living space that corresponds to our mental space perception

in Lem’s Solaris, or with the quickly shifting spaces of Le Guin’s narrative worlds; Cf. Rafail Nudelman and Alan G. Myers. 1975.

“An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin’s SF”, in Science Fiction Studies 2 3, 210-220; David Field. 1986. “Fluid Worlds: Lem’s

Solaris and Nabokov’s Ada”, in Science Fiction Studies 13 3, 329-344. 6 I am referring here to Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars (1996).

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Documents

Italo Calvino and Science Fiction: A Little Explored Reading