L'Ultima Terra Oscura (The Last
Dark Land)
Nord, 1989 - "Cosmo Argento" n. 105 
Premio Italia -
Award for best sf novel of the year
The whole trade committee from Gafai, a Country with whom diplomatic relationships are
into a specially delicate stage, disappear inside the Savastrom.
The Doma, who rules Alwayr
in symbiosis with Artes, the Leader Machine, claims
that he doesn't know anything about it, even if Savastrom
is the immense Palace-Maze-Mountain where he lives, and into which any decision
is made. Moreover, he affirms that the committee never existed.
From these premises originates a running history, passing through the
labyrinthine Savastrom's different levels to end up
on the wind-lashed
From Mauro Gaffo's preface:
The novel's focus is the game of power amongst the Doma
- in symbiosis with Artes, the leader machine - and Bessier, a fierce conqueror who wants to seize the
Non-Death's secret. But it's impossible to describe, albeit with broad strokes,
this novel's plot. In fact, we see unveiled different layers of double-crossing
that, sometimes, remind a spy-story thriller where, till the last pages, you
can't guess whomever shall be the winner and what is
his real purpose.
We could talk about an "hard science
fiction", recalling hard-boiled detective stories, that pays attention
also to a barren, deteriorated, polluted environment where natural elements
always show up as hostile presences, and technology is hardly able to survive,
after its past splendour.
The other novel's interest focus is the interaction between the two main
characters: Dolane the Magician - this way are labeled the few people still able to interface with the
leader machines - and Phails the Mercenary.
Throughout the quest along the different storeys inside Savastrom
- the centre of power - far to Lower Stinge, we
witness their moving friendship beginning and growing up; when the story comes
to its end the whole maze-like intricacy of plots and counterplots is unraveled, every enigma
solved, any obscure detail finds its explanation.
Even André Malraux's motto, hauntingly marking
the different adventure's phases: "Death doesn't exist: I do exist, who
am dying."
Cielo 19 (Nineteenth Sky) -
"Pulp"
n.5 (1983) - novel
(Cover by Giuseppe Festino)
The
rebirth of the world from which life into our Galaxy originated. It belongs to the Federation's series.
Cover by Marco Patrito
)
Mu Age's Tales
Before Atlantis, when the Sun would rise from West and set into East.
Stories published into "Pulp" n.8 - 1984
L'Ultima Luna di Jaminat - L'Erede -
(Jaminat's Last Moon - The Heir - Ori's House - Time Dust)
Stories published into "Pulp" n.14 - 1986
(Jaminat's Dreamer - Dawn
of Revenge - The Giants' Walls - Anvernel the
Forgotten - The Prophecy's Shadow *Dawn
of Revenge was published also into "Enciclopedia
della Fantascienza", Fanucci 1985*).
Unpublished histories - 1999
Verrā un Uomo dal Nord -
(A Man Shall Come From North - The Road to Van - Man of Light - The
Shrine on the Verge of Nothingness - The New Conquer - A Shattered Stars' Sky -
The New Kingdom - Where Abysses Are Filled - Time's Ending)
Gli Eredi della
Luce (Heirs of the Light)
The complete Mu Age's Tales
Nord,
October 2001
The Tales constituting this novel went along my life as an author for
many years, having been written in different sets and times. The idea to
realize what could be called a "forgotten ages' fresco",
nevertheless, would follow me since my teens, when I first fell in love with
the remote past of Earth, and its ancient civilizations' heritage, preserved
into popular Legends, Myths, and Religions.
Crucial was my discovery of an extraordinary book: "Hamlet's
Mill", by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, a 500-pages
essay study on myth and the structure of time, where you can find the memories
of Peoples and the messages from Faiths' Holy Books (Bible, Rg-Veda,
Voluspā, Mahabharata, Book of the Deads)
wonderfully expounded and confronted along a guideline - a shining guideline -
that tries, with the utmost patience, coaxing thousand rivulets of a broken
memory to merge into a common path leading beyond the Curtain...
" ...according with the blunt and vivid imagery of Scandinavian
peoples, the sad, legendary hero Amlodi's
distinguishing trait was his possession of a fabulous mill, whose grindstone in
its good times produced peace and plenty. Later, in declining times, the mill
grinded salt; nowadays, fallen to the bottom of the sea, it grinds rock and
sand, originating the Maelstrom: a wide vortex deemed to be one of the doors to
the Realm of Deads. These images, taken as a whole...
portray an astronomic process, the Sun's age-long shifting through the signs of
Zodiac; its proceeding marks out the world's ages, each one amounting thousands
of years. Each one comprising an era into the world's history, and a Twilight of the Gods: the huge structures collapse...
floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world..."
With these terms de Santillana, into his
"Hamlet's Mill" foreword, paves the way for a study of Memory: every
civilization, either extint or alive nowadays, keeps
memory of a cataclysm - or several ones - that changed Earth's semblance,
reversing its axis. Even in Kumulipo, Hawaii Polinesians' cosmogonic myth, we
can find lines saying: "In the time when Earth warmed / in the time when
skies turned over / in the time when Earth was overshadowed / so the Moon could
shine bright / the time when Pleiades sprang up."
This way, from an ensemble of emotions important for me, demanding
nothing more than freely fancy, the Mu Age's Tales
and The Heir of Light were born.
Eighteen stories, actually, eighteen chapters in a novel; they start from
what - nowadays - we call legends and ancestral fears, like a sky full of
shattered stars, a sun rising not eastward but from West, and a not-fortuitous
event - running into an asteroid - reiterated and maybe repeatable into our own
future.
An event that can
drain the vessel of Time, and spins the Great Wheel round a new turn, during
which the Myth (History?) of Atlantis shall be born... but, about this, many
others more already wrote.
Because, as one of my characters shall state in the end of the Tales, the
Humankind's real tragedy is oblivion.