Kai Zen's Blog, page 17

Our Selection 6 (Steele Rudd)

Chapter 6.

Good Old Bess.

Steele Rudd

Supper was over at Shingle Hut, and we were all seated round the fire — all except Joe. He was mousing. He stood on the sofa with one ear to the wall in a listening attitude, and brandished a table-fork. There were mice — mobs of them — between the slabs and the paper — layers of newspapers that had been pasted one on the other for years until they were an inch thick; and whenever Joe located a mouse he drove the fork into the wall and pinned it — or reckone...

El puñal (Leopoldo Lugones)

Leopoldo Lugones

Nunca como aquella mañana, había dado mejor fruto mi laboriosa soledad. Acababa, efectivamente, de hallar por mis propios medios la palabra secreta de los iniciados drusos, el imperativo anagrama de la convocatoria, con que pretendían llamarse por influencia mental, a despecho de la distancia y de los obstáculos –verdadera llave de oro de su formidable hermandad– los discípulos del Viejo de la Montaña.

Nadie ignora la existencia misteriosa, si no es mejor dicho obscura hasta lo...

Surfing: The Royal Sport (Jack London)

When all is said and done, it is my steadfast belief that homicide is worse than suicide. Ford saved me from being a homicide. “Imagine your legs are a rudder,” he said. “Hold them close together, and steer with them.” A few minutes later I came charging in on a comber. As I neared the beach, there, in the water, up to her waist, dead in front of me, appeared a woman. How was I to stop that comber on whose back I was? It looked like a dead woman. The board weighed seventy-five pounds, I weigh...

The Italian (Milky) Way To Science Fiction 5

The 1984-like atmosphere of post Genoa seemed to plunge the country into a song by The Clash: Know your rights.46 If the poetics of Evangelisti were close to heavy metal, Riccardo Pedrini’s–aka Wu Ming 5 (the collective of writers Wu Ming was born from the ashes of the situationist Luther Blissett project)–was a direct offshoot of punk. Pedrini came from the experience of squats, redskins’ movement and was the guitarist for the bolognese punk oi band Nabat.47 Pedrini, until then, an essayist...

The Italian (Milky) Way To Science Fiction 4

Cinema, unless we were dealing with some auteur film produced in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, had to come to terms with very low budgets: a situation that led to giving moreattention to the plot (in the case of art films) or to the production of b-movies: often just cheap and camp versions of American movies like Planet of Apes, Star Wars, Alien, Escape From New York, Mad Max, Terminator, Robocop. The Italian copies rarely had good ideas and very often were just awkward clones. So it...

The Italian (Milky) Way To Science Fiction 3

Meanwhile, as Italian fiction tried until Tutti i denti del mostro sono perfetti to engage in a serious way with sci- fi, thanks to the pushing of the Urania prize, another media had brought the genre out of the fandom ghetto and had put it in an entirely new pop perspective. This was a medium that was able to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each month; a media that since the Thirties had told amazing fantastic stories. It was 1991 that the comic Nathan Never22 appeared in newsstands pub...

The Italian (Milky) way to Science Fiction 2

So Nineties (driven by death)

1984 is the Orwellian year par excellence. Maybe that’s why, due to a series of coincidences and circumstances, some big Italian publishers gave room to some sci-fi and fantastic authors in their general collections. So, books like La casa sul lago della luna by Francesca Duranti (Rizzoli), Dio e il computer by Roberto Vacca (Bompiani), Cercando L’imperatore by Roberto Pazzi (Marietti), Concerto Rosso by Pier Luigi Berbotto (Mondadori), Palladion by Valerio Massim...

Gli accendini

La prova inconfutabile che il karma esiste, che fatalità e destino determinano eccome le nostre vite e il lento girare attorno al sole di questo rigoglioso pianeta(con parecchie nuvole nel mezzo, cazzo!), che nonostante le preoccupazioni e gli affanni di noi umani la cosa migliore da fareè sempree comunque ‘going with the flow’, èciò chesuccede ogni giorno con gli accendini.

Perchè questi strani ed ingegnosi aggeggi inventati tempo fa dalla Bic sono così fuori dal controllo di noi nervosi poss...

The Italian (Milky) way to science fiction 1

Here you can read the first (of five or six) part of the long version of Jadel Andreetto’s speech at the Global Sci-Fi Symposium at Wellesely College, Boston (MA), 3/8/2013.



Science Fiction is translated into Italian with the word fantascienza. The OED defines Science Fiction as: fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets.

In Italian dictionaries, fantascien...

Our Selection 5 (Steele Rudd)

Steele Rudd

Chapter 5.

The Night We Watched For Wallabies.

It had been a bleak July day, and as night came on a bitter westerly howled through the trees. Cold! wasn’t it cold! The pigs in the sty, hungry and half-fed (we wanted for ourselves the few pumpkins that had survived the drought) fought savagely with each other for shelter, and squealed all the time like — well, like pigs. The cows and calves left the place to seek shelter away in the mountains; while the draught horses, their hair stan...