(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: ominous oscillating synth)
background on Italian science fiction
JM:
Hello, we are Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast, and this is our host choice episode, where we are discussing a bunch of non-English works, and now it's my turn to introduce Renato Pestriniero, who is our author tonight, born in Venice in 1933. However, it's important to clarify that while Pestriniero himself is not much known in the English speaking world, and Italian science fiction in general has not only been neglected abroad, but perhaps based certain challenges at home for many decades that meant it didn't develop much of a basis as a genre until the second half of the 20th century. Pestriniero, though, doesn't exist in a vacuum, and there were antecedents to what he was doing.
Do you guys read any previous science fiction works from Italy, or Italian authors?
Nate:
No, I don't think so.
Gretchen:
Yeah, not that I can think of.
Nate:
The only Italian stuff I've read has been, like, I guess, I read "The Betrothed", which is historical fiction, and I guess Dante, you know, probably some other renaissance stuff I've been blanking on.
JM:
And Eco.
Nate:
Right, yeah, I guess Umberto Eco, yeah, "Foucault's Pendulum", which is awesome.
JM:
But not really science fiction. But it's probably not really science fiction, although it certainly has traces of it in its woven into its narrative, as do a lot of the works of Calvino, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've read one book previously, "Terra!" by Stefano Benni, and it reminded me a bit of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". I feel like it was kind of in that style a little bit. I was pretty young when I read it. So I don't remember too many details, but I really liked it at that time. So I don't know how it would hold up for me now.
I also read another story that I don't know the name of and don't have enough info to go on. So I wasn't able to find it, but it was in an anthology that I read when I was like nine. And it was like this first contact story of a bunch of humans from different countries who had all traveled on a ship to, I don't know if it was Mars or some farther further away planet, and they encountered an alien. And of course, they were terrified because it looked like a monster. And they were going to shoot it. But then they had this kind of epiphany where they realized in the alien also realized at the same time that each of them was terrified of the other. And like, that was the only reason why they were being aggressive and crappy. And so if they just kind of got over that, maybe they could get along. It was nice. But it was probably geared a little bit towards children. And I think that's sort of a trend in definitely a lot of the stuff that we see in Italian SF for a while.
But according to Arielle Saiber, in her article, "Flying Saucers Would Never Land in Lucca: The Fiction of Italian Science Fiction" in the Journal of California Italian Studies, Italian science fiction faced challenges, adherence to a classical tradition. This is somewhat vouched for by Pestriniero. 19th century leftist intellectuals, wary of capitalism and anything seemed to be American. An early 20th century focus on hyper realism in writing, and the Roman Catholic Church, which loomed large in influence and power in this country, right up to recent times, and pretty much had an implicit focus on illegitimate prophecies being dangerous and not fit for right thinking people.
So how serious these challenges really were, it's difficult to say from my perspective. But it certainly did make for publication difficulties for Italian writers, as even when science fiction did start to become recognized in Italy, the preference was slanted very much toward publishing reprints of American, British, and perhaps some French works. So again, I'm going to say a lot of things in English, because I don't really know Italian, I think might be better at pronouncing it than a few other languages. But still, I don't really know it. So I'm going to try to avoid portraying too many things, but we'll see how it goes going forward. But I just want to talk a bit about, yeah, I'm mostly unfamiliar with Italian literature as a whole. And I certainly don't see too many Italian names among the noted science fiction practitioners. I don't believe in any of the reference works we've collected that are like encyclopedic in nature, in some fashion, you can find many Italian authors listed, maybe in the film category, though.
I'm somewhat more familiar with some of the science fiction films that started coming around around the 1960s. Stuff like "Wild Planet" by Antonio Margheriti and "Assignment Outer: Space", "The Tenth Victim", which is based on a story by Robert Sheckley. And of course, "Planet of the Vampires", which is the adaptation of tonight's story.
But it doesn't look like there was much in the way of serious SF scholarship in Italy before 2011. And both the contributors to the online science fiction encyclopedias Italy section, and the global science fiction studies book on Italian science fiction written mostly by Simone Brioni and Daniele Comberiati point out that the established wide gap between literary and scientific language that's traditionally existed in Italy also does its part to stunt perhaps the development of science fiction itself.
In the later half of the 19th century, the works of Wells, Verne and Edward Bellamy were translated into Italian. At home, there were certainly important scientific developments, including Schiaparelli and his telescopic observations of Mars, which we discussed in an earlier episode of Chrononauts.
Nate:
Yeah, there's a fair amount of major Italian developments in electrical technologies too. I mean, Galvani and Volta around 1800 both revolutionized the entire industry with the development of a primitive battery from Volta and Galvani's observations on the relationship between electricity and the body, you know, how electricity moved muscles and things like that.
JM:
Yeah, so I think it's quite interesting. I mean, you would almost think that in that kind of climate, these kind of stories would flourish, but it seems not. It seems there is a very strong divide between literary and scientific worlds in Italy.
Nate:
Yeah, the early examples that were noted by the science fiction encyclopedia, I couldn't find original text of online anywhere. So I'd imagine even within Italy, they're still probably not that well known or fairly obscure and hard to find.
JM:
Oh, okay. Well, we might get to some of those. I don't know which ones you looked for, but you can tell me as we go, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, I looked for Grifoni's "From the Earth to the Stars", or something like that.
JM:
Okay, yeah.
Nate:
And I, yeah, there's no luck finding it.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. Okay, interesting. Yeah, they seem to be quite scarce and there certainly don't seem to be a lot of easily available English translations of either 19th or many 20th century works even.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
But before 1861, Italy was not a unified nation. And many early works in the country projected a future of a unified Italian state. The first book that Brioni and Comberiati mentioned from this period is Ippolito Nievo's "Philosophical History of the Future Centuries Yntil the Year 2222; or, the Wake of the End of the World". And of course, that's my English rendering of the title because I'm not going to say the long Italian title, but I will say the names of a few magazines and things like that if I can. But this was in 1860. And in the 1860s and 70s, there were a few future histories, moon journey stories and other such things, including a short book attributed to Carlo Rossi and entitled "A Beach Guardian", which had the subtitle "A Free Translation of the Battle of Dorking". And in it, it was France invading Italy and coming onto Italian shores and sacking the towns and ends with an exhortation to beef up the fleet. So I guess that's pretty cool. It did do a very just a free translation of somebody else's book. And you could just pretty much rip the whole thing off and set it in a different country. Just kind of interesting because we did kind of talk about this during our "Battle of Dorking" segment last year and how influential that really was. And yeah, we talked about some of the German ripoffs and yeah, there were Italian ripoffs too.
Nate:
The Italian ripoff tradition carries well into the 20th century with the glut of low grade ripoff films of various franchises like "Road Warrior".
JM:
And it's interesting how all this all ties together.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
The Pestriniero story is very short, so it's worth getting into some of where this background came from, I guess. So as soon as Italy had gained its independence, there's kind of there were independent states at the time, but most of what's now Italy was under control of the Austrian Empire. But as soon as Italy attained a certain level of economic freedom, the idea of pursuing its own colonial aims hopped into the nation's head very quickly.
Science fiction stories were published in magazines like "Giornale illustrato dei viaggi e delle avventure di terra e di mare", which translates to "An Illustrated Journal of Travels and Adventures of the Earth and the Sea." And alongside accounts of game hunting expeditions in Africa and so on, much of the SF there was evidence of the expressed colonialist sentiments, and perhaps unsurprisingly, according to Brioni and Comberiati, who really stressed this angle pretty hard.
So there's also descriptions of barbaric foreign peoples and their ways of life, non-Europeans mostly, especially Africans and island people. So right away you think of the Mondo films from the 1960s, right?
Nate:
Right.
JM:
That's a huge thing in Italy. And it seems like Italy, I mean, this was a huge thing everywhere in Europe, these kind of stories, but it seems like Italy particularly was attracted to them. And I don't know if it's because of its position in the world and on the sea and stuff, but I don't know, it just seems like indeed tales of cannibalism were even pretty common. So I wonder why the Italian film industry in the 70s and so on was so weird. This obsession with foreign travels and contacts with strange lands and peoples seemed to be traced back to the publication of Marco Polo's "Milione", literally million, as in the number of stories that the book reports to contain of people and experiences. And this was translated into English as the most noble and famous travels of Marco Polo almost 400 years later, around 1579. And was one of the big inspirations for Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" in 1972, where he, I hadn't read this, but he's supposed to directly reference and play with that text. And it does sound pretty interesting, according to the composers of the Italian article in SFE. It really does read like a first contact story where these Italians are going to the Eastern lands and trying to bargain with and do make understandings with the cultures there and stuff like that.
So yeah, I'd actually be curious to see what that's like. I wonder if it compares to some of the old historical classical works like Herodotus and stuff like that almost. It would be interesting to take a look at that. I'm definitely not well versed in this kind of thing, but I definitely, you know, kind of brought me back to first hearing about Marco Polo and getting into that Doctor Who story when I was younger.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Oh, that's really interesting. And what happened, I want to find out about him and getting my dad to look it up in the encyclopedia and stuff.
Gretchen:
Yeah, especially after reading, "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" a few months ago, I would love to read more Calvino.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, an authentic account of 12th century journeys. There's certainly no shortage of vaguely science fiction-esque fantastic journey stories, such as the 1516 epic poem "Orlando Furioso" by Ludovico Ariosto. And in this a night journeys to a dark wizards palace on the moon by way of writing a giant hippogriff, which E.R. Eddison seems to have crypt for "The Worm Ouroboros" in 1922, where the dreamer character of his Lessingham falls asleep in a chamber full of lotus blossoms and gets born aloft to Mercury on the back of a similar beast to witness a vast play of world chattering intrigues and battles.
And of course, there were many utopias as well in the 17th century, and in the 18th picareqsue travel, foreign works like "Gulliver's Travels" and Voltaire's "Candide" are supposed to have been extremely popular. And there were of course a number of pastiches or tributes or imaginative pieces that use these for springboard, one of which I will note because it has the entertaining title. "Enrico Wanton's Travels to the Unknown Lands of the Southern Hemisphere and to the Kingdoms of the Monkeys and the Dogheaded People" by Zaccaria Seriman. And if you're wondering why that doesn't sound like an Italian name, apparently he was an Armenian, so it's interesting.
But the last one to mention from this time period is undoubtedly the colossal work by Giacomo Casanova, which we did mention in our Hollow Earth episode. Written in French in 1787 "Icosameron", where a brother and sister discover a vast underground world inhabited by in a similar perhaps mode as Voltaire, the megamicre. And much of this five-volume epic is spent meticulously describing everything from their governmental systems to their scientific and philosophical principles, and their wonderful inventions, and their harnessing of forces that allows them to move heavy vehicles without animals. And I don't know, it sounds cool, but it also sounds like it goes on and on and on, like just picturing 5,000 pages or something. Apparently it's really long.
Nate:
Yeah, I was never able to find a complete translation of it in English. I was only able to find like an abridged translation.
JM:
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. All the English translations seem to be abridged, and I guess that's one of those things.
Gretchen:
No one wants to put all of the effort into translating such a long narrative.
JM:
Casanova was known for many things, but writer of science fiction novels, he's not really that important, I guess.
But now we come to the 19th century, and we have to point out that although there were certainly a few tales involving automata and dream journeys into the future and such, there was really no Italian equivalent of Poe, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, Verne, or Wells. And I think we can all agree that all these figures are in their way real turning points in what science fiction would become, and taking it away from the admittedly interesting but sort of primitive, I don't know, like just travel to a foreign land and either enact conquest or just watch everything that's going on kind of stories.
Nate:
Yes, and "Orlando Furioso" also does sound interesting. That is one of those stories we didn't cover during episode one, and maybe we'll have an interest in coming to it at some point when we do another one of these diversions. But yeah, for the most part, those obscurities and weird curiosities from before 1800 are probably not worth getting that much into, at least all the descriptions of those Hollow Earth novels and weird political satires and moon voyages just seem like all the other ones, like they're kind of, you read one, you read them all in a sense.
JM:
But right, like when you read it, yeah, exactly. And I think after "Erewhon", I think we can take a long break, yeah, been there, done that.
But now that we've turned the clock way back, let's yank it back unceremoniously and unskillfully to the early 20th century and the Giornale Illustrato.
So although the quality of the tales I can't really speak for, and it sounds like some of them probably weren't that great. Again, the striking nature of many of the illustrations are pointed out by Brioni, and kind of, you know, in a case that may be similar to Orchid Garden, in that a lot of the stories are also translated. Perhaps not that well, and probably a few original stories, but yeah, some really cool pictures. There's a striking image of an Italian flag on Venus and stuff like that.
And we get some important works from the 19th century, like Paolo Mantegazza's "L'Anno 3000: Un sogno". He was a physician, politician, and writer who traveled extensively and was a big supporter of Italian colonial efforts in Africa, as well as racial hierarchy theories. So his 1897 book was highly influenced by travel narratives as well, and was written in as a response to Belamy's "Looking Backward". And it sounds a pretty unpleasant book. There's also Emilio Salgari, who published a lot of stuff in the magazines, and he was a writer of futuristic stories like "The Wonders of the Year 2000", "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under America", "The Conquest of the Moon", and "King of the Air".
And there's also Yambo, who composed that "Explorers of Infinity", Nate that you were mentioning earlier. Did you call it something? Do you know it as a different title? Of course, these are English renderings. I think that's one of the ones you were talking about, the space opera that you couldn't find.
Nate:
Yeah, it's "From Earth to the Stars" by Ulisse Grifoni from 1887.
JM:
Oh, okay. It seems like a different one, I think. So yeah, sometimes it's hard to keep these words straight. But Yambo, who wrote this in 1906, "Explorers of Infinity", is also the director of what's known anyway as the first Italian science fiction film in 1910, "An Interplanetary Marriage".
And of course, we can't complete the discussion of Italian science fiction completely without the mention of the futurists and their movement in the 1910s and 1920s. And "Mafarka the Futurist, an African Novel", was 1909. And it's by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. And, well, I read a couple of synopses of this book because it sounded really far out and wild. And it's mentioned in both "The Cambridge History of Science Fiction" and, of course, in the Italian SF book. And, well, it's like "Future Eve" by l'Isle-Adam, taken up to 100, basically, including the misogyny. I don't think we're ever going to do this book on the podcast. It's really, really next level stuff. Basically, this, it's supposed to be set in Africa. And it's supposed to be about African people. But like, none of that's ever really gone into like there could be anybody almost like there's no real sense of place or geography. And I think for Marinetti, and perhaps some of his predecessors, you know, Africa is just this like, other place where you can set their stories that have it's really interesting because you know, there's kind of this double thing involved where it's like, yeah, this is about this African chief who develops a Superman, basically. And he does this he does this without the intervention of women, which is something that he's very happy about. And when this creature is born, it immediately starts growing and it grows so tall that it like basically, its head is like in the clouds. And it's like this, it starts flying around. And I don't know, it sounds really, really weird, really wild.
But the futurists under the auspices of people like Marinetti, pretty much blossom into outright fascism. But it was also the first concrete avant garde movement to emerge in Italy. And the futurists were obsessed with machines. And Marinetti's buddies included authors, artists and film directors, among them, Alessandro Varaldo, who repeatedly brought the crime genre to Italy, and published tales under the Libri Gialli range, starting in 1930, which is the famous Giallo books with the yellow covers.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
And the group called themselves "I Dieci", I guess that would be "The 10". And they would be known now as the Italian futurist movement. But they were basically a literary collective. And I don't know if that's really ironic, considering that many of them were fascists, but they definitely seem to have a kind of a real doublethink kind of thing going on, which you kind of recognize in some fascist movements today, where they pretend to be about something else. Right. And they got a lot of attention, including from abroad. And they were able to publish novels and anthologies. And they made a collaborative book, which sounds like a lot of fun, actually, it's called "The Tsar is Not Dead". It sounds a lot like "The Angel of the Revolution", but from a pro monarchy, like intensely pro monarchy perspective. And each chapter was written by a different member of the group. And they were playing all these games with it. And they had a contest to see if people could guess who wrote each chapter of the book.
I don't remember if it was in this book or in the anthology that they published, which is basically a whole bunch of short stories, some of which are sort of science fictional in nature, apparently. But they had a preface, and they explained their aims. And they had many goals. But their most stated openly goal was to increase the price of books in Italy, to return some of that value, aka time to the artist. And it was a big deal, they said, that all these men in I Dieci were different from one another, and cooperating in solidarity in this, they said.
But it's pretty clear when you read their books, and also in the preface to "The Tsar is Not Dead," that they kind of also state that they have no political aims. And they just want to tell a really fun adventure story, and that you should all just relax and enjoy it. And then they proceed to tell this like, immensely reactionary, like pro-monarch work. And you know, it's like, they might be right in some ways to make the massacre of the Tsar's family, like, look like the most horrible thing in creation. I don't know, it's just really interesting. And it gave me "The Angel of The Revolution" vibes.
And but yeah, I don't know, like, those guys pretty much went silent after the Second World War, or didn't survive. But obviously, they'd had an influence, and there were quite a few men involved in different walks of life. But Marinetti especially seems like quite an asshole.
But comic books really took off in the 30s. And Superman was really popular. It was new in America at the time. But there were also Italian creations. And they were pretty solidly aimed at a juvenile audience. So the magazine L'Avventuroso, or The Adventurer, was also a thing. And here we have a reverse of the later experience, where anglicized or French names were Italian eyes to please the fascist censors, who of course, wanted patriotism. And this is kind of a fun contrast to what would happen later, I guess, where they would do the opposite thing. But it seems like hiding your identity as a science fiction writer in Italy was very important, or maybe as a director of horror films.
Not much was happening in the 40s, though. World War II took a lot out of the nation, and science fiction was kind of considered an Anglo-American thing. Hence the publication of all these translated works, and writers like Pestriniero having trouble getting stuff out there.
In a highly political time, science fiction was not respected by either the right or the left. And it was called Fantascienza in Italy. This term was first coined by Giorgio Monicelli, a translator, French and English, who created the magazine Urania: Adventures in Space and Time in 1952. And this was done for the Mondadori Publication Group, and they were the same group that published the gialli. So again, we have all these things tied together, which is pretty interesting. He was an avid reader of American pulps, basically from the 1930s onward. And unfortunately, the magazine Urania only lasted for 14 issues, but it published short stories mostly translated from English magazines, like especially Galaxy Magazine, which was new at that time, started in 1950. And definitely was the sort of social-political satire side of science fiction being expressed in full force. And certainly something that I'm looking forward to talking about more as we get into the 1950s.
Nate:
Definitely, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, they also published scientific articles. And of course, pieces about exotic lands and customs, though here apparently presented in a somewhat more scientific and less lurid way. And interestingly, though, along with the magazine, there was a series of novels that accompanied it, and it was sold exclusively on newsstands and was extremely successful in contrast to the magazine. And the series of novels lasted for years, eventually itself taking on the collective name of Urania. And of the first 267 issued novels, only 11 of them were Italian. Mostly they were translated works of people like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, John Wyndham, Clifford D. Simak, and Jack Williamson. And although a few were apparently French, now that we're in the 50s, of course, and the Patriots are no longer in power, we acknowledge the American nature of science fiction. And suddenly, all the Italian names too are being anglicized.
And there were several Italian writers that I haven't heard of around this time, including at least three prominent women. And the only name I recognized was Ernesto Gastaldi, who is a screenwriter, definitely seen his name on many credits for Italian films, but he wrote under the pseudonym Julian Berry. And in 1957, Monicelli had a dispute with his publisher and started his own competitor series, I Romanzi del Cosmo, and these seemed to feature more Italian authors. And by the late 50s, some other magazines had sprung up, some of which also tended to look for more original material. And some of the writers even published under their own names.
This pretty much takes us to our subject, Renato Pestriniero, who was a young writer when the story was published in 1960. And he's still around, and pretty much writing up to the 2000s. And in the 60s, though, I mean, the new wave writers did sort of get translated and Italian audiences get exposed to people like Samuel Delaney and Roger Zelazny. But as you might expect, these didn't sound as well as stuff like Urania had, their contents being more experimental and kind of going over the heads of most of the general public. So I think we'll end the general Italian background here, although the science fiction encyclopedia mentions a number of authors from the 1960s that definitely sound like they might be worth a look someday on Chrononauts. And we'll have to see how much of this stuff has actually been translated into English.
(music: eerie radio static)
Pestriniero biography and non-spoiler discussion
JM:
"Una notte di...", you know what, I'll just say it in English, because I don't know how to say 21 in Italian, but "A Night of 21 Hours" was published in Issue 61 of Oltre il Cielo, or Beyond the Sky. And it was also in the anthology "Interplanetary 3" in 1963, which is where the film director, Mario Bava, seems to have read it. And the magazine was, again, both devoted to science and tech and fiction. And it kept going until 1970 and produced 155 issues.
For a long time, writing science fiction was a hobby for Pestriniero and not his full time career. He said he spent much of his free time writing stories. And he also complained about the difficulty for Italian writers in the genre to get published. They only wanted translations from English, it seems. That said, I think he does underestimate some of the psychological qualities of the stories published in English in the 40s and 50s. Maybe he didn't read that much of it, or maybe he was only exposed to certain kinds. Who knows, right?
He likes to compare his stuff more to J. G. Ballard and his discussion of the mental states of astronauts that would start coming up a few years later. But he unknowingly says something very similar to a quote from Jack Williamson that I believe I referenced in our Amazing episode: "I'm more and more convinced that science fiction, particularly social science fiction, is the best way to investigate and reflect on any moral, ethical, religious, political, and psychological situation of the common man, today and tomorrow. His difficulties in facing and overcoming the gaps between his knowledge, his normal way of life, and the negative sides of technological fallout."
So finally Pestriniero did get some recognition, the commemoration on his 75th birthday in Venice at the 2008 Venetian Literary Conference.
He was born in Venice in 1933, and he appears to have stayed there most of his life. And while he was writing stories, he worked for a company, some kind of multinational Swiss company. Sounds fishy to me. But he published a lot of short stories and apparently close to 150.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Several novels, and many nonfiction works as is. He published his first SF story in 1958, while he was doing military service, and he said he specialized in aviation. Certainly the titles of Pestirniero's novels sound pretty great. It still seems though like this story and the Bava adaptation is one of the most widely cited things. The movie is shown a lot at various, I guess, representation of the best Italian SF had to offer at that time.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
He started publishing stories in Oltre il cielo, and he used the pseudonym Pi Erre at first, not knowing how his stories would be received, and probably maybe cautious about his job too, like more or something.
But another thing he's noted for is a collaboration with A. E. Van Vogt, who I mentioned earlier, but I don't know that it's a true collaboration. It's, I think, an expansion of his short story, "The Enchanted Village", which was published in the 40s. And it sounds like he just sort of kept the Van Vogt story and added a lot to it. And this is a pretty common thing in the 90s. Silverberg did this with Asimov at least once or twice. And I think some other writers have done that kind of thing as well. But it's still kind of cool. I really like Van Vogt, as I think we will discuss fairly soon on the podcast, maybe in a few months. Definitely has his faults, but a really interesting, especially 40s writer.
So it looks like he's also somewhat famous for a travel book about Venice with Neil Watson doing the illustration, I guess, photography, "Searching for Venice". So I don't know, he doesn't seem like a lot of the stuff's been translated into English. This particular story was only translated once before, I believe, and it's a very rare print publication, not digitized before. Or is it digitized?
Nate:
I don't think so. I mean, if it was, I wouldn't have done the translation. From what I can tell is a fanzine type thing. At least that's how it looked when I saw a cover and maybe a page inside on ISFDB. The guy who did the initial translation also seemed to publish translations of a couple Dutch language science fiction stories. But again, it looks like a fanzine type of deal. So I'm not sure how widely it was circulated.
JM:
Well, in this time, Oltre il cielo was bi-monthly. So this was in the first of two issues from June 1960.
So we all knew the movie beforehand.
Nate:
Right.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
What do we all think of this one?
Nate:
I thought this was a pretty cool, especially when contrasted with the film. I mean, we'll get to that when we talk about the actual story itself and what the film does with it. But it expands on different elements that aren't really present in the film that I think make more sense in the context of it. The issue of, I guess the true nature of one's mind, you know, the ego versus the id is gone into a lot here. And it kind of adds a cool touch to the story. In addition to all the cool atmosphere that we get in the story of being on this strange planet filled with a dense thick fog and everything is like purple and pinkish and it's all spooky and stuff. That stuff is all here too. And that's great. But yeah, the psychological focus I think is an interesting one.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree with that. I do like the concept of like the id versus ego as well. Yeah, like it still has the atmosphere that you get from the film. It's just that there's a bit of a different concept that I, I enjoy almost as much. I think that it's really cool.
JM:
Yeah, the story definitely tries to be more psychological. I don't really know that entirely. Like, again, it's pretty short. It almost feels like just as it sort of gets going, it ends. But also I like the way it works. Like it feels very self contained and very nightmarish and kind of like, absurd almost, like in a way that the film isn't. The film went through so many different writers. I think like maybe Bava wanted to start off with more of this concept, but it ended up turning into like an alien possession kind of thing. That's not here. And I didn't know that. I mean, it feels like that's where it's going for the first majority of it. And it's not that at all. It's kind of interesting the way he deals with it. Like, it's equally nightmarish in a way and it's over with very quickly.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I kind of enjoy the abrupt ending. Like it feels pretty appropriate.
JM:
Yeah, it's pretty final. And there's not much of a struggle from our heroes. There's not really a lot they can do. Like, what are they going to do? Never sleep?
Nate:
The hopelessness takes a lot quicker to set and then it did on the Aniara, that's for sure.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, I do like the directions that the film goes and definitely cranks up the horror aspect and captures a lot of the physical beats from the story. But just takes it in a different direction.
Yeah, I like this one a lot. It's definitely, I think for what it's doing, you know, I'm kind of of two minds. Like, I almost say, okay, yeah, it feels like just as it was getting really interesting and getting going, it ends, but at the same time, I like that. Like, it somehow works here in a way that the last Arelsky didn't quite. Because with that one, it was more a matter of, well, there's so many things to talk about, and so many things to get into that there's no time for any of them. Where here it's more like, it leaves you wanting more, but it also feels like dreamlike. Yeah, it feels like things just went from bad to worse. And now you're waking up and you're left with this awful, awful, but kind of absurd vision. I mean, I don't want to, we'll get to it when we get to the end, it's a very short story. So I think I'll just go through it now.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I do want to say that comparing it to the Arelsky, the Arelsky, it's the kind of leaves you wanting more in a way that isn't as positive. But I think here that's more effective. It's a good thing that it leaves you wanting more, in a way.
JM:
Yeah, there's definitely a difference between those two ideas. And to be left wanting more is a good thing, in theory, unless it's a bad thing, right? The line is perhaps not that clear. And maybe some people wouldn't agree. I mean, I have a friend who constantly argues with me about this, because she prefers the way modern films do, like, remakes of stories, because they tend to explain a lot more and get into the origin of things. And that's what she likes. She wants to see that. Whereas I kind of prefer a lot of things being a little bit sketchier.
So I don't know. I mean, I don't know that one is necessarily better than the other. But it's just an interesting way of doing things. Like, I wonder if somebody could make a neat episode of like an anthology series or something that's like closer to what this is than the film.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, this is an interesting example of wanting more and how the stories convey information is there's not like a lot of character development here or any plot actions. I had just rewatched the film today and just making some notes on it. There's just so much more events in the film, conflict between the characters and objectives for the characters to accomplish and things like that that just really aren't present in the story at all.
The story, just like weird stuff happens and it's weird and there's vibes and stuff like that. But as far as actual plot elements or defined characters or conflict between the people, you don't really get a lot of that here. And it's cool how that unfolds because the story is so short. So I think it can get away with that just kind of being this strange feeling that you get.
JM:
Right. And you do need those kind of extra movements and developments for a popular film. And that was one of the things that what I think is really interesting to see how the story went from story by Pestriniero, who got paid the equivalent of $125 to have the story made into a film. He said he was invited to Rome to witness the production. But the check he had gotten weren't even enough to cover his travel expenses. So it's not a terribly short journey from Venice to Rome, I think. So yeah, I think one of the interesting things is seeing how the writing developed and like it changed a lot of hands. And the first screenwriter was Arkoff, Samuel Arkoff. Anyway, he was one of the guys that worked for American International Pictures. And he did a bunch of other films like that really cool Danish science fiction film "Journey to the Seventh Planet". He wrote the screenplay for that. He wrote the screenplay for "The Angry Red Planet" in the late fifties.
So the guy had a resume and Bava had read the story originally. So the idea of doing this film came from him. But he wasn't a screenwriter. So first it went to this American guy. And then it went to another couple of Italian guys. And then it went to a Spaniard. And then it went somewhere else. And so by the time it was finished, it had gone through a lot of different drafts. And a lot of the original idea was changed quite a bit. So I think Bava had intended actually to stick a little bit more to this idea in the story of like making the possession seem kind of like a good thing for these people. I think that looks like that was almost more of his original intent. And that got a little bit lost along the way. But he did comment right away on getting the first draft that the screenwriter really understood how to make things eventful. And like, yeah, he took the basic blueprint of the story and created all these events around it and made it exciting and added an alien spaceship, so that Bava could really go to town on cool sets and everything like that. And they knew what he was good at.
Nate:
Yeah, it would definitely be interesting to see earlier versions of the script if any exist.
JM:
Yeah, a lot of this is documented pretty clearly in the "All the Colors of the Dark" book, but I don't know about the actual scripts. Yeah. But yeah, I'm going to get into the story, because it is very short. So there won't be a long discussion afterwards. So I just want to leave the rest of the talking to where we finish the story. And then we can discuss it.
(music: electronic pulsating)
spoiler summary and discussion, "Planet of the Vampires" discussion
On the surface of a grey, barren desert planet, two ships have come to rest. One rather violently. This is the big science vessel Orion. The two are investigating the planet when the Orion experienced some kind of engine failure and smashed brutally into the world. Its smaller sister ship, the Vega, has come down landing safely. But the two ships need one another to complete their mission and return home safely.
Unfortunately, the Orion is completely wrecked, and there are no survivors. Crewman Dudley Hustin talks to Captain Wheaver as they sit glumly in the Vega. Dudley is upset that his brother Peter was on the Orion, and they all seem to have been a close knit group of people. The captain says they will miss all of them. It seems unlikely that the Vega will be able to get back home. I don't know what the mothership is required for exactly, fuel maybe, or navigation or something, but it certainly seems like the two of them in close proximity is part of the setup, and they need each other.
So there's a cool reflection where Renato talks about all the various expeditions that have been lost already, and he describes the haunting experience, like second hand, basically through recordings that are picked up of weird noises and screams of agony or slow lingering death, and there are many hostile environments out there in the void.
The story is quite atmospheric, describing night on the alien world with three moons rising, and the man are of course troubled, and Captain Wheaver reflects. "Millions of years have passed since man appeared, he has subjugated his home planet, he has spread throughout the solar system. By now he has adapted himself to space, he has shaped himself according to its incredible laws and he has pushed himself towards other planetary systems. Millions of years have passed and with his ability and his ingenuity, man has dominated the known universe, so far. But it is enough to leave this man in an abandoned house, alone at night, and he will find himself completely defenseless from the assault of invisible enemies against whom he will have no weapons to defend himself: the fear of the unknown, of what sometimes he himself creates and unintentionally distorts under these circumstances, of the darkness that can hide anything..."
And Tim Lucas, the writer of All the Colors of the Dark, speculates that it's this specific passage that made Bava go, "well, I could make this movie". So that's kind of interesting, but I didn't think it was cool. I really like that. The Pestriniero definitely does understand how to create the horror atmosphere here.
They finally start pulling out the bodies from the wreckage. They're all mangled and mutilated and crushed, and not much equipment survived either. They bury the bodies with makeshift steel crosses. Captain Wheaver is determined to still carry out some research on the planet and try to get home in one piece. The men are skeptical about their chances, but Wheaver insists on still doing everything by the book, and that includes having a guard rotation during the night.
The night here lasts 21 hours, which he divides into four shifts. Crewman Lorry Anderson loses his cool and starts to panic, but Wheaver is stern and square jawed. Dudley Hustin, who sounds like he should be the square jawed guy, but he's not. But he's the first to do sentry duty, while the others file into the ship for some rest. Dudley sits tiredly as the fog coalesces all around him, and he's a bit spooked, and he ruminates on how much more unsettling the darkness is.
Meanwhile, three of the four remaining crew sleep in the Vega, while Captain Wheaver stands in a corner, smoking and brooding. And yeah, smoking on your spaceship. Well, the rockets are off now, I guess.
He's considering trying to go back to sleep when something catches his attention. It's Crewman Anderson, who gets out of his bunk with a happy smile on his face and walks with his eyes closed to the navigation room.
What the hell is going on? Sleepwalkers aren't allowed to be astronauts, must be something else. And Pat Wheaver follows the man. And this Anderson seats in his control seat, and appears to be experiencing some pain. The tickled, childish expression keeps returning to his face, though, and Wheaver's going to bring the man to a vicinity when he hears something in the corridor. It's Crewman Eb Doyle, stalking into the room with a weird expression, and his eyes closed, and he grabs a wrench and starts smashing the ship's radio, which of course is the first thing any alien invader would like to do.
But this spurs Wheaver into action, and he starts shaking the two men and shouting at them. And Doyle is so shocked that he instantly faints. As for Cliff Donovan, he seems okay. Maybe he didn't get any sleep. And he talks to Lorry Anderson, who is very ashamed. And he says it was like someone else was in his head, only he knew that it was also himself the whole time. Above them, this sky turns a strange red color. It's just one of the moons rising.
So those two are outside. And now, of course, we need at least two on guard. Eb, Dudley, and Pat sit in the ship drinking black coffee. And Dudley confines that, while he was on shift, he saw shadows creeping through the fog, and heard distinct rustling noises. And he put it down to the spooks, and wouldn't even say anything were not for other weird stuff going on this night. One of the shadows looked like his brother. And just then the radio comes to life, the dead men are up and about. It's not just the walking dead. These men are so damaged in body with caved-in chests and stoned-in heads and mangled limbs and blood everywhere. But they all seem inordinately happy and pleased with themselves.
It's the formerly calm Cliff screaming into the microphone. And Lorry is nowhere to be found, and Cliff is running to the ship for safety. So Pat decides they should go and try to get Lorry wherever he is. And they find the five graves of their comrades, of course, open. And Cliff and Dudley vanish next. So now there's only Pat and Eb Doyle left. And they heard shooting in the night. Doyle is completely sure that Cliff and Dudley are dead. Their suits aren't transmitting anymore. And then Doyle sobs out, "look! Over there! Over there!" All the dead men have come out to party.
Dudley and Cliff are indeed among them, both with fatal gunshot wounds. And they are sporting and converting about all playing and laughing like children. And Pat has a theory. Something on this planet is affecting them. And it only works at night when people sleep or when they're no longer alive in the conventional conscious sense. And they are taken over by the childish innocent, but sometimes quite dangerous id.
So there's no alien possession here anywhere. Just the childish desire to break toys to see what they look like inside. Which is something that I knew very, very well when I was a kid. So again, completely. I'd be the one smashing that radio, which I actually do remember doing at some point. Having a little radio and smashing it to bits to see what the inside was like.
But people on this planet can never die, it seems. No matter how damaged their bodies are. If Pat says quietly, at least, perhaps unwittingly, they are happy. And be them. At 18:23, since the harrowing night began, the remaining two are exhausted. And Pat keeps dozing off. Once when he wakes up, he's alone. And the room is a total mess. Seems Doyle got the bug. And he had fun throwing papers and stuff everywhere. And now there's no sign of him.
Now that he's alone, Captain Pat Wheaver finally seems to break. And he moans and asks, why he should be the last? Why? Because he's Captain, of course. But he won't be saving this ship.
At 20:00 hours, the Captain goes out, walking toward the Orion, where he can hear the sound raucous singing. The kids are there, hopping and skipping around, having an awesome time. Pat longs to join them. And the children seem to welcome him. But his conscience won't let him. So he makes sure his gun is loaded.
"Wait, friends, he said. One more moment, and I'll join you."
"A very white sun was about to rise from the gray line of the horizon. The nocturnal vapors had almost completely disappeared, the sky had lost its clusters of stars.
A shot broke the silence and propagated across the plain.
Festive shouts rose from the group as they began to dance around Pat's body again."
That's how the story ends. And it's haunting, but oddly liberating, hopeful. I don't know.
Nate:
It's creepy, but not sinister.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. And Pestriniero did comment that he meant for you to feel like they were better now, almost.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So yeah, I mean, it's definitely a bit creepy. And yeah, I mean, these kids are so excited that they're like firing their guns off randomly and stuff like that. Like maybe they didn't even mean to shoot Dudley and what's his face. But they they're just having fun.
So and if you have a hole in your forehead, you stay with them forever.
Nate:
Yeah, it seems that way.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, this was cool. And again, a nice contrast to the film, which I guess we'll get into in a little bit, but it seems that whatever is causing this state of mind is implied to be more natural phenomenon of the planet rather than some kind of malicious entity.
JM:
Malignant alien. Yeah.
Nate:
So it's an interesting take on it. Again, the separation between the id and the ego, causing this childlike behavior to make one feel like like one isn't in one's own body, but just kind of acting out out of some childhood impulse that you can't control.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I thought it was an interesting take and quite different from the film.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely feel like "Forbidden Planet" was a pretty strong influence on this.
Nate:
Yeah, Pestriniero says that he hadn't seen "Forbidden Planet" or read, "Who Goes There?".
JM:
They always say those things.
Nate:
They'd always. Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, it could be true. It could be true.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, we can't confirm or deny it.
JM:
Right. Yeah. And I mean, there were older science fiction stories in the pulp, like a lot of things in Astounding, for instance, that we'll be getting to soon enough that had these kind of scenarios. And usually the stories in Astounding and more hopefully, I think, especially after Campbell took over, although he wasn't averse to mood pieces either. And he wrote a few of them himself, which kind of like a bit on the melancholy side. Like again, seems to be a theme tonight, actually, where you get to see stories of the end of civilization, the end of humanity as we do it. And like, I guess this is kind of that, like imagine if whatever was on the planet was transmissible, none of these people are going to get away. So I guess they're just going to dance and have cavorting fun forever.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Also, interestingly, though, it reminded me of "2001" as well. And the end of that movie where Dave comes into contact with the monolith at last, and he becomes the new star child. And like, it's like, I think it's a line in a, it might be in the book or something like that. And he's like talking about the universe and how it's spread out before him. And it's like, what a wonderful place to play. That's kind of what this reminded me of too.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
The names were kind of funny.
Nate:
Yeah, they're absolutely great Italian approximations of English names.
JM:
Yeah. It seems typical of, I mean, we saw that in a Russian story recently, too, that, you know, these kind of funny.
Gretchen:
What is it, Tim and Tim?
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
Yeah, just like Ni-Sol and Gi-Sol, you get them confused.
JM:
Yeah. So it's kind of funny because in this story, I guess, you know, you can pretty much assume that the characters come from Earth. But when we get to the film, like, I mean, what we're kind of we've been talking about at this whole time, but like the characters are, there's a twist at the end. And it turns out the characters are not supposed to be from Earth. But they also have very, it's not quite as bad, like the they sound a little bit more like, not just exclusively Anglo, but it's still kind of like that. And they use very common terminology, like somebody referring to Swiss cheese at the beginning of the film, to discuss like what their ship would look like if meteors hit it, stuff like that. And it just seems very like you really feel like you're supposed to believe that they're from Earth. And when it turns out they're not, I feel like it doesn't quite come off as well as it should, just because it's not, I don't know. And I guess, again, it's a contrast with the visual side of things, though, because unlike "Aniara", "Planet of the Vampires" film does look pretty otherworldly and like, not necessarily of its time, although I guess crazy designs were maybe more common in the 60s.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. I think in some way, I mean, it's definitely of its time.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's one of my favorite science fiction movies of all time. And it definitely looks amazing. But it definitely has a 60s low budget feel, in that some of the special effects for like the spaceship landing or something like that is what you'd see on original Star Trek. And I think we mentioned "Forbidden Planet" not too long ago. Some of the set design definitely looked like it took some influence of "Forbidden Planet" in the spaceship and how like the control room is constructed. And you see similar sets not too far off in some Doctor Who episodes, but Bava just has such a great feel for colors and camera movement and shot positioning.
I think one of the quotes from the "All the Colors of the Dark" book is that Bava positioned his actors more like set pieces and background decorations rather than characters that were supposed to interact with one another, because he shot these films with a multilingual cast of people who were from all over the world. The lead actress in this is Brazilian, he's working with various Spanish, Italian, German, in addition to the American and British actors he had in and out of his films.
So they would say all their lines in whatever language and then everything would be just dubbed over in post and kind of lends it a weird feel in all the languages that it's produced for. So this one I've seen cuts in English, Italian, and German. I typically watch it in Italian, but I mean, there's not like the original cast was speaking Italian, that's kind of another pastiche.
JM:
Yeah. There are some interview clips, or quotes, I should say, from a couple of the American AIP people in "All the Colors of the Dark" when they talk about that. And one of them I can't remember who it is. It might be Arkoff, it might be somebody else, but he basically talks about the process of making those kind of genre movies in Italy and probably in Spain too, but especially in Italy where, yeah, like there's not a lot of communication on set. Nobody really understands each other. So like everybody speaks a different language and they're sort of able to roughly figure things out. But like, you can't really go to anybody and be like, hey, what's my motivation? Like, that stuff just doesn't work.
And yeah, it's kind of funny because Argento especially has the reputation for Dario Argento that is he has a reputation for not liking actors very much, like it doesn't really like telling them what to do or communicating with them very much. And it's almost like, yeah, they're more like props than sometimes. And he gets kind of annoyed if people ask him too many questions and stuff like that. Bava seems like he was a pretty nice guy to work with for the most part. And the American guys said when they came over and they looked at what was happening. And it was like, they were really impressed. And they saw the film and they were really impressed. But Arkoff also said he's like, it was a crazy way to move movies. And they'll never be made that way again.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Like that's pretty much what he said. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, Bava pretty much was the Italian film industry for a while. He just did so much stuff on the sets of so many movies. And I think he pretty much learned the entire production from the ground up. And he's most known for his horror stuff. And he did a lot of that stuff in the 60s and 70s. But he also did a fair amount of non-horror films too.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
There's a couple sword and sorcery movies. There's a couple comedies which are by accounts terrible.
JM:
I think Danger Diabolik kind of counts.
Nate:
Oh, yeah. That's great.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I was about to bring that one up.
Nate:
Yeah. But he has a real talent for the camera and how to move it around and how to construct interesting looking shots in ways that I think exceed even Argento and Fulci. And Fulci in particular, some of the camera work is just kind of amateurish in comparison. But "Planet of the Vampires" has just some incredible, incredible shots in it. The alien derelict scene which was added for the film and doesn't appear in the story at all, is probably my favorite science fiction scene of any film.
JM:
Yeah, it's really awesome.
Nate:
Yeah, the way it's put together is just incredible. Yeah, and I guess if you haven't seen the film, you should definitely watch it before listening us to us talk about some of the finer details of it because it's just a great experience. And it has a lot going for it that adds on top of the story that I guess was the process of it going through several different revisions during the script writing process.
JM:
Yeah. Pestriniero said he liked the film. He certainly seems happy that it's considered like maybe one of the very top Italian science fiction films. I don't know. I think he's a little bit detached about it maybe because he doesn't see that much of his original story in it. Right. And he only got paid $125.
Gretchen:
I feel like one of those reasons might be a little more prominent than the other.
Nate:
Probably, yeah.
JM:
Yeah. But he seems to acknowledge that it's a really good film and he kind of expresses a little bit of regret that he never got to meet Mario Bava. But yeah, he couldn't make the trip. So it didn't happen. I don't know. It's not the first or the last time. I mean, 10 years later, Francis Ford Coppola would buy "The Godfather" from Mario Puzo for a very little money as well. So I think it was more than $125, but it was like $450 or something like that.
Nate:
Probably less than he made.
JM:
Considering, yeah, considering what, like, well regarded classic film it is, right? You probably deserve a little more, but what can you do? Yeah.
Nate:
But this one does maintain more or less the same setting of the story of the weird mysterious planet covered in fog and the general maroonment of the two attached ships. Though this one, they're drawn by a malignant force and not just kind of the natural circumstances of a weird planet that they happen to stumble upon from some scientific expedition.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And the unfolding of how they, I guess, discover this and the malignant alien presence that's possessing them to attack each other and destroy their equipment and stuff like that is also what generates the conflict between the two groups of characters, the dead people and the people that are still left alive, which does make it a little bit more exciting from a film viewing experience. But again, it's a different take on the source material. It emphasizes different aspects of the scenario.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, I think in a way it does kind of bring it more into line with what you expect from a science fiction movie.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
But it's not a bad thing. I like those kind of plots, right? So the alien possession is cool.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. But these children are cool too. I mean, again, this is very, it's very nightmarish. And I guess I can see how if it hadn't gone on longer, it probably wouldn't have been as good, wouldn't have been as effective.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Mostly, yeah, he's kind of dry and a little bit like Pat sat down and drank his coffee and did this. But every so often, he'll really get existential with stuff. And there's some really cool moments in the story where, yeah, like when he's talking about the eerie reports that came back from the planets where the expeditions didn't return from and the captain thinking about how easy it is for someone to basically succumb to this dread in the darkness. And the other guy он watch hiding his experiences of what he saw because it was too unbelievable. But then in the face of everything else that's going on, well, maybe it's worth worth going into, right?
And I don't know, it's just there's some, there's definitely, definitely some cool moments of psychology to be found in the story that aren't really in the film.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
Again, I think that's an advantage that stories sometimes do have over film, is it? It's I mean, you can convey these kind of things in both. But sometimes it's easier to write about somebody's psychological state than to show it.
Nate:
Absolutely.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So and yeah, the characters, the actors in the film probably didn't have a huge idea of what was going on possibly. So I mean, some of them did redub their lines. The captain, Barry Sullivan. That was all his voice. And he was probably the only one to actually come to think of it in the English dub. Yeah, because there weren't any other English performers in the cast. So yeah, or English speaking, I should say. But really cool, interesting development, because I had no idea that "Planet of the Vampires" was based on a story. And it's not the first time that that's happened. And I always, when I like a film, I'm always like, Oh, I want to read the original source material and see what it's like. This is kind of an ideal situation where the story is really short. So the movie has all the chance in the world to build on it, whatever it wants, right?
Nate:
Right. And I think they're great companion pieces to each other for that exact reason, they focus on different stuff, but they complement each other very, very well.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, the film is great as a film. And the story is great as a story. There's the aspects of both that make it perfect for their own medium.
JM:
Yeah, I do like the slightly more diverse cast in the film, like in the characters, I mean, there's a couple women characters and different. Yeah. About the names again, it's just kind of funny because I was just reminded of something I might have mentioned this before. But so I mean, I talked a bit about the 60s Italian space opera films, and I really like them. They really have a character to them. I like those "Gamma One" films from Antonio Margheriti, I think they're really good.
In the 70s, some of them got kind of bad. And I think it was, I mean, I don't mind "Star Wars", like I enjoy the first trilogy of films a fair bit. But there's no denying that perhaps there were some unfortunate consequences of that in film. And I think that maybe, yeah, I mean, I think, I think the science fiction films that were blockbusters after that were not as I don't know, they were they weren't as creative sometimes as the ones for like 10 years before. And even though like some of the 60s Italian films were pretty silly, the 70s ones, a lot of the time, the later 70s ones, when there was kind of a second boom of science fiction films in Italy, where budget films were made, they were all kind of ripoffs of "Star Wars".
And I was kind of thinking of one done by Aldo Lado, who's the guy that made a couple of really awesome movies, like "Short Night of a Glass Dolls". And he made this movie called "The Humanoid". And it's kind of interesting, it's got some definitely original weird touches to it, and a pretty cool cast and all that. But it includes Richard Kiel, who's most known as Jaws, the henchman in a couple of the James Bond movies, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
This is really big, got kind of guy, I guess, he's kind of like the hero of the film. But there's this kind of interesting, funny contrast with the names that really makes me laugh in that in Star Wars, right? We watch Star Wars, and we know that it's in a galaxy far, far away long ago, right? Because it says so right in the beginning. And so when we hear that Princess Leia of Alderaan has the plans for the Death Star, we're like, Oh, yeah, who's Princess Leia of Alderaan? We want to know her.
So in "The Humanoid", the bad guy is looking for a woman who is like the Princess Leia substitute. And I forget exactly why she's got something or she knows something or she has some power or secret knowledge or something. You think, you know, being Italian, they'd come up with some cool name for her that kind of rolls off the tongue. The name of the character is Barbara Gibson. And so in the movie, in the galaxy far, far away long ago, they're like, we must find Barbara Gibson.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. Some of the Italian movies from that era are fun. I've seen a bunch that are knockoffs of the "Road Warrior" and "Mad Max", and movie "Contamination" as a pretty shameless ripoff of "Alien".
JM:
Yeah, I've seen that one, but not the Mad Max ripoffs.
Nate:
Yeah. There's a really good one, "Warriors of the Wasteland" and "2019: After the Fall of New York".
JM:
I've heard about that one. Yeah. Not the first one.
Nate:
Yeah, some pretty ridiculous stuff. But yeah, a lot of fun. I enjoy the Z-grade trash as much as some of the more seriously well done films.
JM:
Yeah. I think I want to watch "The Galaxy Criminals", also known as "Wild, Wild Planet". I get it sometimes. That's a favorite of mine. Crazy, crazy film. Definitely, I guess, less stylish probably than Bava. But in its way, I think pretty creative and cool. And yeah, the "All the Colors of the Dark" book does mention him a lot as pretty much keeping the science fiction boom going in the 60s and early and kind of like not necessarily being the first because I think Bava was actually the first with an earlier film that I haven't seen from 1958.
Nate:
Yeah, he did a bunch of camera work for like, again, a billion Italian movies in the 50s, including some early science fiction, including some early horror, probably a bunch of westerns too.
JM:
Yeah, but in 1958, there's this film, the death of, I don't remember, but just that I saw the Italian title, not a translation, but it's like supposed to be one of the earliest like of its type and it's done in a kind of documentarian style. And it's set mostly on earth, but it's like a space disaster, a kind of story or something like that.
Nate:
Right, right.
JM:
I haven't seen that. I don't know too much about that. So I thought "Planet of the Vampires" was his only pure science fiction film, but apparently not. But yeah, this one's up on the blogspot. And I just gave away the whole story. And I think summarized it in a way that kind of brings across the feeling of it pretty well. But I really like this. I'd love to read more Pestriniero someday, not necessarily for the podcast, just in general, can't find much in English.
Nate:
No, it seems like a couple other things have been translated, but certainly nowhere near half of his work or even a quarter, I don't think.
JM:
Yeah, that's unfortunate.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It really is. I mean, yeah, I mean, maybe maybe he oversells his advanced way of looking at things in terms of other genre writers, but he wouldn't be the only writer to do that. You know what I mean? Like other writers do that all the time. Yeah, like I'm more, I'm more psychological and sophisticated than those other guys.
Gretchen:
I'm more literary.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. I don't really blame him. Like, why shouldn't you, you should feel that way about your work, right? Even if you don't have to necessarily spend all your days reading all the magazines to look for the gems, right? We can do that now more easily in retrospect.
Nate:
Yep.
JM:
And we do. And we're going to. Speaking of that, unless you guys have anything else to add, we can actually get into that.
Nate:
No, I'm good. How about you Gretchen?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm ready.
Nate:
All right. Yeah, what do we got for next time?
JM:
So next time on Chrononauts, we've been talking a fair bit in hints and in more than hints about a certain time period and a certain magazine from the United States that was quite widely read, called Astounding Stories of Super Science, or Astounding Stories, or Astounding Science Fiction, or Analog. Depending on what era you're looking at, really.
We're actually looking at doing two episodes, not quite concurrently, but somewhat with one in between, probably dealing with the days of this magazine, not looking too far into the beyond the 1930s yet. I'm sure we'll get there later on and probably even just discussing individual stories as they come, maybe not specifically focused on the magazine, but these two episodes are going to be, and we're going to start with the next one. And this will be focused on the earlier days of the magazine.
So this is before the time when we were referring to, especially in our discussion of "Lest Darkness Fall" by de Camp, where we mostly talked about Unknown and how it was tied in with Astounding. And that necessitated a lot of discussion about John Campbell and his editorship of Astounding, which really started in 1939. So the magazine changed hands a couple of times before them. And we're going to be talking about the somewhat early days, and we have six stories coming up for you all. And I think this is going to be really interesting.
So I'm going to take these in chronological order. We'll start with "The Cave of Horror" by S.P. Meek from the from the January 1930 issue. I believe that was the first issue of the magazine.
Nate:
Yep.
JM:
Yes. Okay. Perfect. And we're following that up with Sophie Wenzel Ellis and her story, "Creatures of the Light", which is from the February 1930 issue. Popular author and I guess if you can say, you know, some of these 1930s authors, they're not very well known now. They're not exactly household names. But this guy's kind of close. Murray Leinster and his story "Sideways in Time" from June 1934. We also have Raymond Zinke Gallun and his "Old Faithful" from December 1934. Harry Bates, who I believe was the original editor of the magazine, "Alas, All Thinking" from June 1935. And finally, finishing it off, John W. Campbell and his story "Who Goes There?" from August 1938, where we will once again talk about film adaptations. Yeah, maybe several of them, in fact.
For now, though, I'm detecting a disturbance in the third webe. And I think I have to check on the tensor waves. It might be time to switch off the Mima and try to get into the hard work of some real sleep using my caveman slave to tie me to the bedpost so I don't turn into a somnambulistic child and wreck my apartment while I'm sleeping. I don't know how you guys are going to handle it, but I wish you good luck. And, oh you listeners, I also wish you good luck. Don't worry about the shadows in the fog. It's just your dreams of childhood. We are Chrononauts. Good night.
Bibliography:
Brioni, Simone and Comberiati, Daniele - "Italian Science Fiction: The Other in Literature and Film" (2019)
Catalogo Vegetti della letteratura fantastica - "Renato Pestrinero" https://www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/autori/NILF14184/renato-pestriniero/
Delos Books - "A Mestre omaggio a Renato Pestriniero" (2008) https://www.fantascienza.com/11588/a-mestre-omaggio-a-renato-pestriniero
Edizioni Solfanelli - "Renato Pestriniero" https://www.edizionisolfanelli.it/renatopestriniero.htm
Lucas, Tim - "Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark" (2007)
Saiber, Arielle - "Flying Saucers Would Never Land in Lucca: The Fiction of Italian Science Fiction", California Italian studies, 2011
Science Fiction Encyclopedia - "Italy" https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/italy
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