Klaw: And the foreignness actually could heighten the science fiction.
Sterling: Yeah; it heightens the exoticism of it. I feel like there’s some room for work there because one of the most popular comic book characters in Italian comics publishing, fumetti publishing, is a heroic cowboy named Tex. Tex Willer. Tex has been around for over sixty years.
Klaw: I’ve got a Tex collection sitting on my tablet.
Sterling: If you’re in Italy, Tex looms very large; he’s all over the place, so yeah, this is Italy appropriating stuff from Texas. Even though Tex Willer actually lives in Arizona, it’s not much of an Arizona: spaceships, giant rattlesnakes, Aztec mummies, all the cool fumetti fantasy elements you could possibly want. Fumetti are very powerful within the Italian fantasy tradition. I mean, fantascienza is not exactly equivalent to SF. It doesn’t convey the exact same social function that science fiction does within American society. Fantascienza really is a kind of science fantasy, and it appeals to elements of Italian popular culture that cut through reality at a somewhat different angle. There’s a closeness between crime writing, historical fiction writing, and science fiction writing in Italy that you wouldn’t see in the U.S. People in those genres don’t really hang out with each other a whole lot in the U.S., but within Italian science fiction culture, they’re quite close. They share the same publishers and it’s a proper thing to be Valerio Evangelisti, for instance, and write both historical thrillers and science fiction.
Klaw: Is it much more like it is in England? I know in England writers can jump genres easier than in the United States.
Sterling: A lot of it has to do with the small scale of the language. The markets are not big enough to afford big iron-clad genres. So if you’re a popular writer, and you’re not a literary writer in Italy, then you’re in a class of popular writing, and it doesn’t really matter if you write a murder mystery that has science fiction elements or whatever. It’s just looser. I mean, this bothers people in Italy that are very scholarly, that know a lot about science fiction. In some ways they are scratching their heads over it. “Why are we doing it this way?” But I think that’s a sign of their creative vitality. Others would imagine that Italian science fiction people were super-literary because Calvino’s famous and he was a Nobel Prize-caliber writer. But actual Italian fantasy subculture people are way into SF for its gaudy pop culture aspects. They really like B-movies, horror, scandal stuff, they like the spaghetti western aspects of it because they’re fed up with their high-flown literary writing. They want some stuff with some guts. It’s why Joe Lansdale is a super-popular guy there. Italians don’t want to read a lot of Stanislaw Lem—it doesn’t have enough vitamins in it.
Klaw: It sounds similar to the U.S. fascination with Star Wars. Many of the fans come to it for “its gaudy pop culture aspects.”
Sterling: There’s not vast swarms of Italian fans, and there’s more of a regional variety in Italian society than you would think. Roman fans and Milanese fans are somewhat poles apart—I mean, there are really Roman writers and Milanese writers, and I’m willing to go with that. I’ve been struggling recently to write an Italian story which is for the Roman group, the Connectivist writers. The Roman Connettivismo is much more into cyberpunk than the Milanese guys, so as a Turinese writer, I’m now trying to branch out and do some work which is more Roman, and that’s surprisingly hard for me.
Klaw: Do you have any plans to write another novel-length alternate history in the vein of Difference Engine?
Sterling: My editor for Utopia Pirata, Giuseppe Lippi, has been encouraging me to write a novel. He thought that Utopia Pirata would make a perfectly acceptable novel, but it ends in a peculiar way, because the hero’s going off to join the Manhattan Project with H. P. Lovecraft. So you think, “Well, wait a minute!” Obviously the big trouble’s just now starting, and Lovecraft is promising him, “Join us and we’ll do fantastic stuff!” But I decided to cut it off with that moment, because it makes a statement about the nature, the appeal, of fascism. How lofty and spiritual it is, and how people come to agree with it, like they get hypnotized by the inhumanity of it, and the scope of it. Fascism does have the appeal of science fiction in some ways. As Norman Spinrad pointed out when he wrote his Iron Dream many years ago, which was about Hitler as a small-scale sci-fi writer, there’s this brotherly feeling between certain kinds of political ecstatic cult politics and the “sense of wonder” of reality-bending in science fiction. They both supply a lot of crypto-religious loftiness of “What if it’s really like that?” and “What if we could really…” and then it jumps to “Italians, you have your empire!”
This awesomeness covers a lot of political shabbiness. When you study how fascism was actually carried out as a practice, there was this massive, ecstatic life with the huge rallies and the flowers and the sacrifice and the noble fall and the martial ardor and all that, but at the same time fascism was really a grimy little favor-driven society. It was not a prosperous society. You really had to depend on the party boss to get you all kinds of favors, and to get your children educated, to buy a house. You had to ingratiate yourself with this one-party state. There was this tremendous loftiness on one scale and on another there was this pathetic, grimy quality that robbed people of dignity. These two aspects feed off of one another in a remarkable way. It took me a long time to figure it out. I was very polite about fascism because being a Texan trying to quiz Italians about fascism was exactly like being an Italian and going up to Lansdale’s hometown and asking about the KKK: “So, white hoods, eh? What were those made of? What did they burn the crosses with?”
Rick: (laughing) “Why do you think I should know?”
Sterling: Yeah. Especially in Turin, which is very much a city of the left and was bitterly opposed to Mussolini for most of his reign. The Turinese really suffered a lot under the fascist regime. The wounds have faded away; the new generation knows very little about it, but it was degrading and painful for a lot of people, so I didn’t want to tread on their feet. On the other hand, fascism really was one of the most successful social innovations that Italy has ever had. You think of Italy as the birthplace of the Renaissance, but fascism spread over all of Europe very quickly and had followers in every society, including Britain and the U.S. It was a super-influential political philosophy, and the embers are not that far below the surface because people don’t understand its allure.
Klaw: The book ended there because sometimes when you push something, like the whole thing with Lovecraft, it’s in danger of becoming so absurd that you lose sight of what you were trying to do in the first place.
Sterling: Yeah, it’s difficult to handle that. Lovecraft actually interests me a lot because he’s such a lively figure now. He’s in both Modern Library and Library of America. People are writing all kinds of Lovecraft pastiches, and even guys in the American Right Wing like to talk about Lovecraft. Cthulhu runs for president every year and it’s always funny. Lovecraft’s really coming into his own as a literary figure. I can easily imagine writing a Lovecraft fascist parody that would be horrifying in kind of a Thomas Ligotti vein, where Lovecraft really is a fascist, and he’s taking over Providence and kicking all of the Italians out, or whatever Lovecraft would have done if anyone had ever given him political power.
Klaw: Well, you wrote a Cthulhu story.
Sterling: It was about nuclear disarmament talks where all of the nuclear disarmament stuff is actually Cthulhu mythos horrors. It was called “The Unthinkable.”
Klaw: I seem to remember you being very proud of the fact that you got to be in the Lovecraft Circle.
Sterling: I took Lovecraft quite seriously and still do. I actually know a lot about Lovecraft and his methods. I’ve read all his letters. He’s influential in a lot of ways. People make fun of him, but for the wrong reasons. They don’t understand why someone like Michel Houellebecq would write about Lovecraft and take Lovecraft very seriously. Houellebecq is probably the most prominent French novelist working righ
t now and a big Lovecraft devotee. He’s written scholarly works about Lovecraft from a very metaphysical point of view. It’s all on Cosmic Horror, and the emptiness of this, that, and the other. So I think I could have continued the Pirate Utopia story, but I would have had to write it in a Lovecraftian vein. I don’t really like writing cosmic horror all that much, and I really wouldn’t have wanted to spend that much time under Lovecraft’s skin, as it were. Lovecraft actually did work for Houdini, and Houdini did work for the U.S. Secret Service, so it’s not that far-fetched to imagine Lovecraft involved with the espionage community. Ghost writer. Propagandist. Dirty tricks artist. I could easily imagine Lovecraft as a psychological operations guy, a Psy-Ops guy, because he’s very erudite and surprisingly charming. People talk about him as if he were an emotional basket case, but they’ve never read his letters and realized how many people were relying on him for pep talk. For most people in Lovecraft’s circle, he was Uncle Theobald, a figure of strength. He was very much an inspirational and an avuncular figure, someone to trust. He couldn’t earn a living, but nobody could—times were quite tough.
Klaw: Why use Lovecraft as opposed to a European figure of the time?
Sterling: I think it’s me tipping my own American hat there. The political message there is that “it can happen here,” in the words of Sinclair Lewis who wrote a famous warning about fascism in American society. It wouldn’t be called fascism if it were to happen here; I think Lewis is right to say that it would arrive wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross under American circumstances. Fascism is an attempt to make politics metaphysical and poetic that actually ends up creating a lot of crippling difficulties for people in their everyday lives. You can’t aspire to this level of cosmic glee, I guess you would call it, and actually do normal stuff like bake bread, deliver the mail, clean out the plumbing, be nice to your mom, volunteer down at the old folks’ home. None of that mundane life compares to, like, Conquering Libya, so everything is weirdly distorted.
I think the Italians are somewhat given to that, they did more or less invent it. It does have a lot of roots within their own society and their own society is super-influential in some ways. They’re a very culturally inventive people. So it was a pleasure to write this because I really felt in some ways I was getting something off my chest. Just like: Why is Rijeka like Rijeka? This little town with so much trouble packed into it. In some ways they were wise because they were also the first anti-fascist city. The people of Rijeka were the first to just get fed up. Knock it off! We just can’t handle it any more. They chased the fascists out of their town, basically. They never did the same thing again in Rijeka. Even when their town was taken over by fascists in the war, they weren’t particularly enthusiastic about it. They were like the first carriers of a disease, and after that sorrow they were like, “Oh, lord. I don’t want to hear about it.” Even today there’s something jaded about them. It’s as if they got it out of their system in a major way. I could easily live in Rijeka. There’s just something cool about the Adriatic. It’s like Galveston in a lot of ways: run-down cool old buildings, palm trees, lots of oranges, lots of fresh fish.
Klaw: No hurricanes, though.
Sterling : They’ve got some heavy weather. They don’t have hurricanes, but they have mistrals. They have earthquakes. A lot of earthquakes in the Adriatic. It’s a turbulent part of the world, but Rijeka’s pretty peaceful now. It’s not a big town. They had a lot of stuff piled up on top of them that they just couldn’t…nobody could have dealt with that burden. They went through the whole gamut of it. Strange business for them. One wishes them well. I do spend a lot of time there. We’re fond of them. I feel like I owe them a debt in some way. I don’t blame them for what happened to them; on the contrary, I kind of admire them for their ability to get through life without having to make huge claims for themselves.
Klaw: Was Pirate Utopia your way to bring attention to the region’s history?
Sterling: I don’t know. Is Difference Engine a way to call attention to the difference engine? Yeah, and in fact that book did call a lot of attention to the difference engine, Lady Ada and her computers. The Babbage legend is now part and parcel of our common discourse. The Babbage computer project was a lot smaller and more obscure than the really very serious and sinister political developments that went on in Rijeka. It’s a political warning for an era of daffy political excess, which is what we’ve got. Our politics have lost touch with conventional reality.
“We will find abstract equivalents for all the forms and elements of the universe, and then we will combine them according to the caprice of our inspiration.”
The quote is from the Futurist manifesto written in 1915 by artists Fortunato Depero and Giacomo Balla, a document the pair titled with hyperbole typical of their avant-garde colleagues, The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe. When you look into the history of the Futurists one of the first things you notice is a singular lack of modesty or restraint, so the idea of planning an artistic reconstruction of the universe was a natural extrapolation of the most energetic of all the art movements that enlivened the 1920s.
Energy—especially of the machine variety—sets the Futurists apart from some of the more inward-looking and formulaic Modernists working before and after the First World War. There’s no Expressionist angst to be found in the artists and writers who celebrated the “cleansing” value of modern warfare, but all the avant-gardists of the period share with the Modernist writers the sense that everything which had seemed fixed in the Nineteenth Century was now to be examined afresh: questioned, broken apart, then either discarded or pieced together in startling new forms. Pirate Utopia isn’t the first book I’ve worked on which has mined this fervid decade for artistic potential, but the graphic novel I spent most of the 1990s creating with David Britton, Lord Horror: Reverbstorm, pastiches the styles of the Cubist and Expressionist painters, especially Picasso, along with borrowings from the Bauhaus designers. Pirate Utopia forced me to look much more closely at the Futurists than I had done before.
The Futurists may have desired a reconstruction of the universe but Futurist painting still involved the very old and very traditional application of oil paint on canvas. Luigi Russolo, Umberto Boccioni, Tullio Crali, and others are all exceptional artists but their paintings—blurred and nebulous as many of them are in their depiction of speed and movement—can’t easily be coopted by a designer looking for black-and-white images. Fortunato Depero, on the other hand, was a designer and illustrator as well as a painter, and it’s his bold, often cartoon-like graphics which I’ve adapted for many of the illustrations in this book. While most of Depero’s contemporaries remained wedded to their canvases, Depero attempted to live up to his manifesto by bringing his own brand of Futurism to textile design, furniture, stage sets, tapestries, children’s toys, even sketches for Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurist Cooking. (To make “Chicken Fiat,” fill a chicken with ball bearings, roast it, then serve with whipped cream.)
Depero’s later work, some of which involved advertising design in Italy and magazine illustration in New York, featured hand-drawn Futurist alphabets, a set of which provide the headings in Pirate Utopia. Depero’s print work extended to radical page layouts (the Futurists eagerly trampled on several centuries of Italian typesetting tradition) which he presented in Depero Futurista (1927), a book whose heavy card covers were bound together with a pair of brashly utilitarian nuts and bolts. The page design of Pirate Utopia alludes to some of Depero’s layouts although there’s nothing here that’s quite as wild as the Futurists were when they exploded the conventions of book design. Depero’s art is probably best known to modern Italians via his many Campari ads, and his design of the Campari Soda bottle which is still in use today. The Soviet avant-garde would have scorned the use of art in the service of capitalism but Depero declared, somewhat presciently, that “the art of the future will be largely advertising.” And to extend an imaginary debate, he might also have noted that Soviet art was
in any case merely advertising for the Revolution. To his credit, Depero’s advertising work retains his angled and spiky Futurist stylings, and some of the Campari ads and magazine designs have also been adapted for illustrations in this book.
Elsewhere in the book there’s a nod to Soviet Constructivism on the cover, with colours, letterforms, aircraft formation, and a flag-waving crowd that suggest the propaganda posters of the period. If this seems at odds with the Futurism within, consider it a hijacking (or pirating) of the graphics of a rival ideology (in addition to being a request from the editors…), just as Secondari pirates (or hijacks) the Lancia-Ansaldo IZM from the unfortunate Communists. That armoured car is accurately depicted, incidentally, as are the Caproni bombers on the cover and inside the book. The title spread is adapted from a cover design by “Golia” (Eugenio Colmo) for a children’s book, Ipergenio il disinventore (1925) by Giovanni Bertinetti. Golia and Bertinetti lived in Turin, where their book was also published, so in addition to being a splendid piece of industrial illustration there’s a connection with Secondari’s home town.
One of the pleasures of working on Pirate Utopia was discovering more about the historical as well as the aesthetic background. I was familiar with the exploits of Gabriele D’Annunzio (The Prophet) via Philippe Jullian’s biography, less so with other characters such as Guido Keller (The Ace of Hearts) who was as spirited in our timeline as he is in the fictional one. And I was delighted when I realised that the Art Witch was the remarkable Marchesa Casati, a woman whose vast fortune was disbursed in part by commissioning portraits from every artist she met, Depero among them. I hope her kohl-eyed ghost appreciates my attempt. Many of the smaller graphics—the Hungarian radio logo, the Fiume postage stamp—are authentic items, as is the flag of the short-lived Republic of Carnaro whose motto translates as “Who is against us?”
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