"A Tranquil Star" by Primo Levi: SF, or pretentious BS?

[elfs]

I recently read "A Tranquil Star", a short story billed as "science fiction", written by Primo Levi in 1978 and published in The New Yorker, available in the online edition. Levi is best known for his fictional accounts of life during and after the Holocaust. He wrote SF fitfully, unsuccessfully and most of it has never been published in the United States.

"A Tranquil Star" reminds me of so much of what's wrong with writers who believe that you can get away with "science fiction as metaphor" without knowning enough, without reading enough, science fiction to appreciate the tropes. It becomes hard to sell to either market.

The story is very short; you could read the whole thing in ten minutes. After reading it through twice it becomes obvious what Levi is trying to do, making an analogy between a supernova destroying a solar system and one man's quiet desperation balancing the rough outlines of his family life and the clearer outlines of his career, and how the two intersect one day-- in one paragraph, in fact.

In the end, "A Tranquil Star" is neither SF nor pretentious bullshit; it's a high-literature meditation on our inability to speak clearly about things outside the human scale, and our equally poor capacity to work within that scale. As such stories go, it is not poorly done, although it has an awkward late 70's sensibility that just barely manages to dodge the ambience of new wave. It's problem is that it invokes that ambience in the first place. Billing it as science fiction weakens it by attracting the wrong audience and repelling the intended one, and the editors at The New Yorker ought to have known better.

Comments

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Probably because it WAS written in the seventies.
Primo Levi's accounts were, unfortunately, not fictional. As far as I know his short stories are the only fiction he's written in his life - all the rest is very strictly autobiographical.
He did not write SF as you would understand the concept, he wrote SF because he was a reader, but it was marketed in the same category as, say, Borges' stories. Moreover, he was never a writer by trade. He kept his day job as a chemist until he retired in due time. Nor was he unsuccessful, unless you measure success as "having won a Hugo in the US." He was extremely popular, extremely well-regarded, and considered strictly mainstream.

IMHO, he never wrote a line of pretentious bullshit in his life.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Wow, Anna, hi. I'm touched.

I did mention that the story was written in 1978. My problem is not with the story itself, but with it's marketing; by describing it as "a science fiction story," the editors at The New Yorker did it a disservice.

[engineerinhell.livejournal.com]

I daresay (quote, link to source, some analysis and commentary in my latest entry (http://engineerinhell.livejournal.com/26783.html)) that the reason it was billed as SF is because the translator of the story is also an editor for The New Yorker, and doesn't appear to read (much less like) SF. And she said it was SF. Or, rather, "a sort of science fiction", which amounts to the same thing.

I must agree, billing it as SF was a Bad Thing. Or, at least, a Not-Very-Good Thing. Should they have known better? I'm not sure. It's not like they're likely to attract people to their staff who'd frequently read SF, at least based on the contents of this week's issue.