The Sixth Day and Other Tales

Science fiction is not what one would think of first when the name Primo Levi comes up. A trained chemist, he wrote mostly non-fiction - both in his professional space and memoirs as a Holocaust survivor. It is the latter that introduced me to his writing - his recollections are vivid and terrible and powerful. Which makes this collection even more surprising. I knew it is fiction (although the publisher called it fantasy for some reason) and I knew it is very different from everything else I had read by him but it still managed to surprise me.

If you are looking for beautiful writing and/or thrilling stories, look elsewhere. The collection contains 23 sparse stories - the longest is 17 pages and most of them are much shorter than that. show more 2 of them are what would be called 10-minutes play these days; the rest are prose ones. Most of them talk of a future Italy - with scientific advances showing the timeline (although as most SF of the 60s and 70s, some of them sound outdated now - while others are almost prophetic). The rest are set in different places and times - from Levi's version of the story of the Golem of Prague, through the title story set at the 6th day of Earth's creation according to the Bible) to an indefinite future where most of humanity seems to require assistance in surviving (the pair of stories dealing with that show the same event from two different perspectives which adds to the depth of the story but it all sounded a bit off for some reason - especially the viewpoint of the pilots). These two stories are not the only ones that are linked - there are also 6 stories which follow a narrator (with a habit of getting in trouble) and a salesman from a futuristic corporation that creates gadgets (some sounding like things we do have now, some... not so much) through their working relationship. They are not printed one after the other but dispersed throughout the first part of the book. I wonder if the Italian edition had them split like that.

The book as a whole is in an old-fashioned style of science fiction which I tend to enjoy - even if not all stories worked for me as well as others (mainly because some felt like a vignette or a partial idea and less as a complete story), the collection was worth reading - it is quiet and almost meditative in places and surprisingly fresh for its age.

There seems to be another collection of Levi's science fiction stories in English and I think I will read that one as well at one point. He is still not a name I would think of when thinking about science fiction but he is readable. show less

Some sci-fi some not. Some really good some just O.K.

Levi, Primo Translations into English.