Talking climate change science fiction in Italy, while Venice drowns

In November, I traveled to Italy for the release of Blackfish City in Italian translation, published by the fabulous Zona42 as La città dell’orca !!

We stayed in my beloved Venice, and our visit happened to coincide with the worst flooding that city has experienced in sixty years. It was sobering and intense to be promoting a book about rising sea levels at the same time as one of my favorite places on the planet is facing an existential threat from record-breaking flooding.

As part of the massive literary festival Book City Milano, we had a release event at the awesome Covo della Ladra bookstore in Milan, where I was in conversation with my editor Giorgio Raffaelli and my translator Chiara Reali. The crowd was huge and attentive, and talking to these two brilliant folks was a real pleasure and privilege.

Click here to watch the full video from the event! 

There’s a great write-up of the event over at Zona42’s website – it’s in Italian, but if Google Translate is to be believed, they say nice things about me! 

We already knew that  Sam J. Miller  was a great author, but we were really pleased to discover a prepared, helpful, very kind person, who made himself available to Zone 42 for a whole afternoon. First the interview with Angela Bernardoni that preceded the presentation (you can read it on Stay Nerd ). Then the meeting at  Covo della Ladra , which began with the parallel reading of English / Italian of a chapter of the novel (and we owe it an infinite thanks to Chiara Reali , as usual , that if it didn’t exist we would have to invent it!), Continued with the discussion on the many themes and suggestions that enrich the  city of orca and culminated in an exchange of questions and answers with the public. Sam J. Miller was as precise, as enlightening, politically explicit and fun.