From Estrangement to Commitment

Italo Calvino did not think of himself as an SF writer. This fact, however, has to do with the situation of SF in Italy at the time Cosmicomics and T Zero were published more than with certain prejudices about how SF is to be defined-such as the notion that the genre should be wholly identified with the novel of scientific anticipation. Given a generic typology like that which Darko Suvin establishes, the two works of Calvino's just mentioned can properly be claimed as belonging among the best SF by reason of their mode of proceeding, which is at once cognitive, pluritemporal, and estranged. This proceeding leads Calvino to construct cognitive utopian fictions, the product of the demands for order, identity, and applicability to the extrafictional world, all of which are thematized in his "cosmicomical" stories. The result is an œuvre which implies, especially on the stylistic level (in both the narrow and the broadest sense), an engagement on the part of the writer. Calvino, in other words, calls into question established norms of thinking in a way that also imparts the idea of the world's transformability. (FC

Art · Linguistics · Zero (linguistics) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Italian Literature and Culture · Philosophy

• Fantascienza Outside the Ghetto

  Domenico Gallo Domenico Gallo, Domenico Gallo et al.•Science Fiction Studies•2015

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