THE DEEP ONES: "One Night of 21 Hours" by Renato Pestriniero

"One Night of 21 Hours" by Renato Pestriniero.

Discussion begins March 5, 2025.

First published in Interplanet 3 (1963).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1057795

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Different Realities #4

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://archive.org/details/night-of-the-id-also-known-as-one-night-of-21-hours-...

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?12175
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renato_Pestriniero
https://www.fantascienza.com/catalogo/autori/NILF14184/renato-pestriniero/
https://tinyurl.com/332d7ym7

I don't think the translation did this one any favours, but I doubt I'd liked it all that much if I'd been able to read the original Italian either.

I did wonder where the fog came from on a planet somehow all sandy desert.

I was able to set aside the science. I enjoyed this story. I found the ending a bit less than typical. Or I have not read or remembered enough. I think a bit more paranoia build up would have really made this one atmospheric. It was a bit jumpy at times. Still, overall I enjoyed it.

More paranoia might have helped, yes.

The beginning gave me a tinge of déjà vu, but the rest of the story didn't seem familiar, so it probably unconsciously reminded me of something else I've read at some point.

This seems inspired, though not imitative, of the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. But, then, maybe I was just primed to see that since I rewatched it the night before I read this.

>RandyStafford Please remind me if that one involved the Id made manifest.

>6 SRB5729: It's the one with ancient alien technology providing the technological means to create forms out of thought. Said aliens forget about their long buried subconscious, the id, and destroy their city in a night when the instrumentality creates the famous "monsters from the id".

That's the background. The actual plot is sort of a retelling of The Tempest and a scientist gaining access to the alien technology. Death ensues.

I read this in a translation by Francesca Coppola and was included with the Radiance Films Blu-ray of Planet of the Vampires.

Although at first the story reads like a copy of golden age pulp science fiction, it goes in a direction I don't think the pulps would approach. Well, maybe Weird Tales might have done. Despite the heavily Freudian central idea, the effect is not a million miles from Clark Ashton Smith's stories - both the more decadent contes cruel kind of tale, and the science fantasy stories that emphasise the alien-ness of alien worlds (a thread which can be followed in European and Soviet science fiction too. Stanislaw Lem for example.