(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: robot congregation)
Nate:
Good evening, and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, JM and Gretchen, and tonight we're talking about "Galaxy's" expansion into the international market.
We discussed stories by the Strugatsky brothers and Luigi Cozzi in the previous segments for this episode. But in this segment, we're going to be talking about Sandro Sandrelli, and a story which, like the Luigi Cozzi story last time, was initially published in the magazine "Galassia," which published some Italian science fiction authors occasionally. This magazine wasn't the Italian version of "Galaxy," but rather a companion piece to the Italian "Galaxy." Both the Italian "Galaxy" and "Galassia" were published by Casa Editrice La Tribuna, and it's slightly confusing that there were a few previous magazines called "Galassia" that had nothing to do with "Galaxy."
But this "Galassia" largely published complete novels by American authors like L. Sprague de Camp, James Blish, Manly Wade Wellman, E. C. Tubb, and so on. But they break from this format in issue number nine, where they publish an anthology of all-Italian-author short stories, from which our next story came.
The novel series had several editors during its run: R. Sgroi from issue one through five, Luigi Vitali from issue six to thirteen, where this story fits in, and after that, Roberta Rambelli, who Luigi Cozzi described as:
"During the Fifties and the very early Sixties, Italian readers didn't get any sort of serious critical work on the magazine field, the very first attempt at it being credited to Mrs. Roberta Rambelli. Though today she is somewhat ashamed of these initial efforts, she made quite a stir writing that C. L. Moore is a pen name for Katherine MacLean, and that the 'Foundation' series is a feeble juvenile work by Asimov. She really does deserve a lot of praise for them."
So this story by Sandro Sandrelli, "The Prototype," again fits in issue number nine of that "Galassia" series. Sandrelli himself was born in Venice on July 26, 1926, and was one of the major figures of the Italian postwar science fiction world. His writing career started off as a science journalist for "Il Gazzettino," and he started publishing science fiction stories regularly in 1957. Earlier dates of 1949 are considered unsubstantiated by modern critics, though they're definitely floating around in some sources.
In addition to his own science fiction writings, he was also an editor of the "Interplanet" anthology series, which had seven entries between 1962 and 1965, and he ran the fanzine "Interplot" between 1965 and 1967. He was also a major collector and donated 700 Italian fanzines to the Biblioteca di Via Senato in Milan.
For his own science fiction output, he wrote around 60 short stories and novellas and one novel, "The Returns of Cameron MacClure," and he's possibly best known for his novella "Cain from Space." That is Cain as in the biblical Cain, not the walking instrument, which lends itself to the title of a collection of his shorter works.
And indeed, I purchased this very collection in a store in Rome, though not the Cozzi-Argento-owned store. This was one called Pocket 2000, which is just a really awesome bookstore that has lots of fantasy, science fiction, horror, nerdy fandom-adjacent stuff, and a lot of comic books in it. But yeah, I got three used books of classic Italian science fiction, and I wanted to do one for this episode, and this is the only story in all three of those books that was published in "Galassia," so that kind of made it the winner by default.
So yeah, this is a very, very brief story. I can't imagine that we'll be having too much to go into here, because it's just kind of like one little sketch and one little punch, but I think it's a lot of fun. So I guess before we get into what happens, what do you guys think of this one?
JM:
I don't know. I'm not sure. I have to kind of locate this in my mind, because I felt, although it was kind of cool, I just felt like I had read this story before, like by somebody else, basically. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it exactly. I think maybe it's just a combination of things. I kind of felt like it kind of reminded me a little bit of an Arthur C. Clarke story, maybe a little bit like a Damon Knight story. I'm not 100% sure again that there's a single story that I could pinpoint, but I just felt like—and then again, I'm not sure if it's really fair to this story, maybe not—but I do feel like those were older stories, and so this would be kind of derivative a little bit of a work.
And it was kind of cool and fun for what it was. Yeah, I don't know. I just, again, kind of feel like I'm in an unfortunate position because I don't think it was a bad story. I just felt like it was something I had read before. And even though I say that, I still can't quite put my finger on it. But maybe it's just the style of a certain type of American magazine science fiction short story in the 1950s, especially. I guess it was still pretty cool, though. Yeah, again, like you said, it's pretty sketchy as well. But I didn't really have that dissatisfaction that I had with the Cozzi story. So yeah.
Gretchen:
As you said, Nate, it's got one little punch. It's not very long, but I think that it's a good story for its length. It's very short, but sweet. I do feel like there is sort of a structure that might be seen in other stories. I wouldn't be surprised if this is an idea that has come up in other stories. But I think it is still kind of a subversion on, obviously, the usual trope that we see in science fiction when it comes to humans and mechanical life forms and their dynamic toward each other. So I think it's a fun story. It's not very long, but I enjoyed reading it.
Nate:
Yeah, it does have that twist that you would almost expect from a story in "Galaxy," especially in some of the earlier days. Maybe even since it's from before—this was from 1961 initially—so it is kind of trailing the '50s era a little bit.
JM:
And that was the impression I got. It felt like an American '50s story that I'd seen before. That was probably in "Galaxy" from then, or "Astounding" maybe, or something like that. I wouldn't have read them there. I would have probably read them in anthologies, because that's where a lot of us come to these stories originally, right?
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, this is the last story in the "Cain from Space" anthology, so it does end the book on a little punch. It'd be cool to dig into some of those other stories someday, but that's for a future time and a future place.
JM:
So again, it's a very general thing, but there's a couple of anthologies that Isaac Asimov edited. And they're basically micro, micro science fiction stories: 100 short-short science fiction stories. And there's another one that's "Microcosmic Tales" or something like that. That's basically really, really short science fiction stories. A lot of them, yeah, generally ranging from the '50s to the '70s, maybe a couple of '40s stories in there, and quite a diverse collection of authors. They're pretty fun collections.
And a lot of them, yeah, they have a twist at the end, like the last paragraph or something like that is a sting, right? It's like a really short story. You want people to remember it, right? And there's a couple of really good ones. There's, I think, some of the writers in particular who were really good at that kind of story. Asimov himself has a few. Robert Sheckley was really good at these kinds of stories, where they're very, very short, but they're memorable because of something, and it's often a twist at the end.
And some people find that a gimmick, but I never minded it. It's fun. Fredric Brown is also another one who's really good at these kinds of stories. He has a couple of really famous ones. Of course, his most famous story is probably "Arena" because of "Star Trek," but there's a couple of famous ones, like one where these guys in the distant future build this massive, multidimensional computer system, and they turn it on. And it's kind of like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where you get to ask it a question now. They're like, "I know: is there a God?" And the computer says, "There is now," and they rush to turn off the computer, and there's a bolt of lightning from the sky that kills them instantly. It's just like, whoa, crap.
I don't know, I do like these kinds of stories. But I think, as I'm so familiar with this form at this point, and I've read those collections, I just kind of felt like this one didn't really do anything to stick with me, even though I thought it was trying to aim for that landing, especially by the end. But I could see it coming earlier on, because you could tell what they were describing, right?
It was cool. But again, it didn't quite hit the landing for me. But I will say, yeah, it didn't leave me feeling let down like the Cozzi story kind of did.
Why don't we just see what happens?
Nate:
Yeah, my summary is going to be incredibly, incredibly brief here, because it's a very brief story. So, at a tumultuous conference of robots, robot RPQ-115-A has made a controversial and blasphemous announcement that they've created a new life form, but not from metal. The robot race appears to be dying, and they need to think outside the box. And this new prototype is incredibly efficient in terms of its power usage, especially considering the sophistication of its audio and visual organs.
Making such a being certainly goes against the Great Tungsten Plate, but these times call for drastic measures. And after a very spirited debate, the prototype is exhibited and declares, "I am at your service, venerable ones. I am the first example of the new series of Auto-Dynamic-Aminoacid-Machines. My name is ADAM."
So again, very, very brief, with just like a little punch at the end of the human race being created by robots. And it's kind of a fun image.
JM:
And the way Sandrelli describes human beings as another machine is pretty cool. I pretty much knew right away where this was going, and I knew it was short, so it would probably just end like that. And it did.
Yeah, I guess describing a human being as a machine is still a sort of discomforting concept. It still makes you feel a little queasy when you think sometimes we're all just these moving parts and mechanisms in a way that can go wrong so easily and stuff like that. And then, you know, it's almost more like robots seem more—not dependable, but the things that can go wrong with them seem almost more comprehensible than the things that can go wrong with a human body sometimes, from a certain perspective.
It's just like, yeah, I mean, I don't know. It is interesting to see that, and the robot saying, "Well, there could be an advantage to using a structure like this." Yeah, I don't know. It was pretty effective in that way, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's interesting, because one story I am reminded of that isn't exactly like this, but kind of has a similar way of really defamiliarizing the human body and looking at the way that human beings are constructed in a really interesting way is—I can't think of the name of the author, but the story "They're Made Out of Meat," which is about a conversation between two aliens who are talking about how absurd it is that there are beings made of flesh that are controlled by electricity going through meat. And they're kind of grossed out by the concept of what human beings are. And that does kind of remind me of this story.
But I think what you were saying, JM, looking at it in a positive way, is a little interesting. I feel like it is typically this other way of, when we do think of the human body from a distance, it's usually like, oh, it's kind of gross. We don't like thinking about our bodies and how the human body works. But here, you have mechanical beings who are typically, of course, seen as the optimal form. And I think even with sci-fi, you have stories of human beings wanting to become mechanical, and human beings creating mechanical beings that are soon to be their superiors and stuff like that.
To have these mechanical beings then turn around and say, well, this is the optimal way that an organism could be, is just a really interesting concept. So I think that is kind of unique to the story, even if the twist you can see pretty much from the beginning.
JM:
Yeah. And that kind of description of biology rendered mechanical—I mean, it almost makes you think of "Frankenstein" as well, right? You know, what's going to happen now, I guess, now that we have our humanoid prototypes? How's the experiment going to go? Well, we won't know, I guess. Or maybe we will.
Nate:
Maybe we already do.
Yeah, I guess here we are, right?
JM:
We've survived ADAM, that's for sure.
Nate:
Yeah. Well, cool. Yeah, you can read this one on our Blogspot. This is an original translation. I don't believe it has been translated into English before now. So check that out. Again, it's very, very short. It'll probably take you five minutes to read.
And maybe in the future, we'll be digging more into the '60s Italian stuff. There's a couple other Italian stories which you can read on our Blogspot. We've already talked about Renato Pestriniero's "One Night of 21 Hours," but you could also read Gilda Musa's "30 Columns of Zeros," which also came from that same purchase that I got in Rome, which we haven't discussed yet. But hopefully we will in the future sometime, because that's actually a really, really cool story.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Gretchen:
I would be interested.
JM:
Yeah, I'm sure we'll return to Italy at some point. But for now, where are we going? South America?
Nate:
Yeah.
Bibliography:
Barbieri, Daniele - "Ricordando Sandro Sandrelli" (2018) https://www.labottegadelbarbieri.org/ricordando-sandro-sandrelli/
Biblioteca di via Senato Fondazione - "Fondo Fantascienza" https://bibliotecadiviasenato.it/patrimonio/fondo-fantascienza/
Jarok, Andrea - "1963/1968: la nascita del fandom"
Proietti, Salvatore - "Un viaggio nella narrativa di uno dei padri della fantascienza italiana" (2010) https://www.fantascienza.com/13483/la-scienza-l-assurdo-e-i-mille-mondi-sandro-sandrelli
Sandrelli bibliography at fantascienza.com https://www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/autori/NILF14680/sandro-sandrelli/
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