Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities

Daniel A. Finch-Race is an Assistant Professor in Geography in the Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna. Emiliano Guaraldo is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. Marco Malvestio is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature in the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Padua.

Introduction: Greening Italian Science Fiction – New Approaches to a Long-Lasting Genre

Daniel A. Finch-Race, Emiliano Guaraldo, Marco Malvestio

Section I: Science in the Anthropocene

Herbert Pagani’s Mégalopolis: A Rock Opera between Dystopian Science Fiction and Ecological Utopia

Eleonora Lima

Cultural and Ecological Extinction in Primo Levi’s Science-Fiction

Michele Maiolani

What Kind of Science? Italian Science Fiction Writers against the Economic Boom

Daniele Comberiati

Section II: Visions of Extinction

Ecofeminist Care at the End of the World: Collaborative Survival in Niccolò Ammaniti’s Anna and Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s L’isola delle Madri

Raffaella Baccolini and Chiara Xausa

Barbarism, Animalization, and the End of the World: Fantasies of Regression and Mutation in Italian Science Fiction

Simona Micali

A Post-Apocalyptic Garden of Eden. Marco Ferreri’s Il Seme dell’Uomo

Emiliano Guaraldo

Section III: Urban Landscapes and Industrial Capitalism in a Rapidly Changing Country

Industrial Wonders and Pitfalls in Émile Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera en l’an 3000 (1846) and Agostino della Sala Spada’s Nel 2073! (1874)

Daniel A. Finch-Race

Spaceships in the Anthropocene: Peter Kolosimo and the End of (Our) Times

Marco Malvestio

Uncanny Spaces in Inhuman Times: The Art of Giacomo Costa

Matteo Gilebbi

Against Eco-Fascism: Space and Place in Tullio Avoledo’s Furland

Florian Mussgnug

Section IV: Posthuman, More-than-Human, and Interspecies Relations

Green Traces: Vegetal Imagination in Italian Science Fiction from Gilda Musa to Solarpunk

Enrico Cesaretti

Bonsai Children, Enchanted Gardens: Nature as Artifice in Paolo Zanotti’s Dystopian Fairy Tale

Valentina Fulginiti

‘All We Need is Love’?: Eros, Agape, and Koinonia in the Time of Mass Extinction

Danila Cannamela

Eco-Horror: Human-Animal Encounters in Italian Science-Fiction Films

Robert A. Rushing

Solarpunk, or rather Solartivismo: An Interview with Francesco Verso

Arielle Saiber