Flying Saucers Landed in Lucca. Social Science Fiction and the Italian Graphic Novel (2000s-2010s)

Abstract

I need to start right away by clarifying the title of my presentation, which is a double quotation: in fact, the infamous sentence “flying saucers would never land in Lucca” was pronounced in the Sixties by Carlo Fruttero, who, together with Giorgio Monicelli, was one of the historical editors of Mondadori’s science fiction series of novels Urania, the first and most enduring SF series of novels in Italy. Urania, which, in the beginning, featured also a magazine of short stories, published both Italian and international science fiction. Fruttero’s sentence has been brought to the fore in the years 2000s, by Arielle Saiber, one of the foremost scholars of Italian science fiction. I start from this quotation, because I believe that this is a crucial idea, containing in nuce many of the aspects of the Italian science fiction yet to come, and therefore touching the evolution of this trend into comics. As Saiber recalls, Fruttero’s declaration was his answer to an interviewer, who had asked him why he would publish foreign, rather than Italian, science fiction. And here is how Fruttero argues his position: “A flying saucer lands, fishermen or farmers arrive. Whom do they warn? The FBI? No, they go to the police chief. Then, from there, they call the mayor. The mayor gets in his Seicento and runs to the Prefect, and one sees right away that the dramatic situation fails; it becomes a sketch of local life that might have some amusing aspects to it, maybe some quaint, folkloristic elements, but no dramatic force…”. There you go: a quick, humoristic but still very pointy auteur description focused on an inquest in the inadequacy of Italian institutions: a socio-political speculation through the metaphor of science fiction. This predisposition to SSF as opposed to adventurous, escapist SF seems to be confirmed by Italian Cinema of science fiction: as Carlo Pagetti points out, the costs involved with (possibly good and effective) special effects and post-production were too high for the Italian cinema to compete with Hollywood. Social science fiction, instead, was much less concerned with spectacularism, much more focused on the critical elaboration and speculation of a given social system, and it was practiced by a number of directors, including Elio Petri and Marco Ferreri.