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The Montecristo Project: Science Fiction and Its Power
Why literature is a subgenre of science fiction
A deliberately provocative subtitle to open a frank and sincere discussion:
good science fiction has nothing to envy in other literary genres, and in any case “the genre does not make the monk.”
Premise
The Montecristo Project is a science fiction novel set in the Tuscany of the near future, mostly in Livorno, Pisa, and, of course, beneath the Island of Montecristo and in the Tuscan Archipelago.
More precisely, it is Hard Science Fiction: science fiction with a strong technical and scientific foundation, based on several current theories.
Some people, when they hear the phrase “science fiction novel,” wrinkle their noses a little, perhaps thinking of some noisy film with unlikely space battles or stories about alien monsters abducting beautiful Earth girls. But that would be the equivalent of judging the entire history of cinema on the basis of some pulp movie watched half-distractedly — and I am not talking about Quentin Tarantino’s masterpieces.
As if that were not enough, we also have mainstream writers who criticize the genre in italian newspapers after openly admitting they do not know it — so much for intellectual honesty. I think it should be obvious, to anyone who has read this far, that no genre is ever all the same — and that applies to every form of artistic expression — and that there are masterpieces of science fiction, just as there are “good” works and others that are “less good.”
The issue is even more basic: those who use the concept of “genre” to draw rigid boundaries between what is or is not “real literature” may be hiding deep personal insecurities behind an aura of false critical authority. A work should be read for its intrinsic value, not for the label attached to it.
Good Science Fiction and “Reality”
Good science fiction has great power: it makes us think and reflect on absolutely real and current problems, sometimes from a more open and deeper point of view than much literature that calls itself “realistic” — and that, in any case, is never entirely realistic: a story is always narrated; it is not an objective chronicle. Not even a newspaper article is, however hard its author may strive to be balanced.
I have always found amusing the position of those who pontificate about the human inability to perceive the fundamental essence of reality, as philosophy first, and then biology and neuroscience, have shown, while at the same time claiming that “true art” must be tied to reality. A slight oxymoron, don’t you think?
The essential difference lies in science fiction’s intrinsic ability to go beyond what we see and experience every day, an ability linked to the very nature of this speculative genre. To quote what has now become a classic of cinema: “We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt…” (Interstellar, 2014). In this line, Cooper, the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s film, describes a world that has given up on the future: it has given up on science fiction and, not coincidentally, on science as well, and merely tries to survive by staring at its shoes.
These are aspects I personally find in many depressing mainstream literary works that receive so much praise and win numerous awards. But staring at one’s shoes and feeling sorry for oneself is easy, it is comfortable. Less comfortable is imagining new situations and worlds, alternative realities that force us to step outside our “comfort zone” and change our perspective on the world. Good science fiction is often uncomfortable.
When I wrote the original short story from which I later developed the novel The Montecristo Project, in 1993, artificial intelligence was a subject for specialists, almost unknown to the general public except through examples read and seen in science fiction: from HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the first two Terminator films, through the Matrix saga. In general, in stories where an artificial being displayed awareness, things did not end particularly well for humanity: the vision was — and to a large extent still is — dystopian, and it perfectly represented one of the deepest and most atavistic fears that still grips most of us: fear of the different, the inability to accept it — which, not coincidentally, is the trigger for the war against the machines in Matrix. After all, the first novel universally recognized as science fiction, dating back to 1818, ultimately deals with the same subject: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.
This does not mean that the problem of AI is not real. On the contrary, it is far more real now than it was only a few years ago. Since the public release of the first version of ChatGPT in November 2022, this fear has exploded across broad segments of the population, often encouraged by questionable marketing methods employed by the very companies developing today’s LLM systems (Large Language Models), such as ChatGPT itself. Those who know the field understand very clearly that we are still far from artificial consciousness; we do not even know whether it is truly possible. But the real problems we are facing with today’s machines — far more complex and subtle than an open confrontation would be — are no less serious or worrying, both socially and culturally.
Well, countless science fiction authors had already tackled, analyzed, represented, and turned these problems inside out, because good science fiction does not make predictions: it prepares us for the future.
And those who read science fiction know this.
Dystopian Science Fiction…
The history of science fiction literature offers us several masterpieces in which one or more negative aspects of technology or society are amplified and pushed to the extreme, until they create a substantially terrible world — even if at times a fascinating one. Among the most striking examples are George Orwell’s 1984 — yes, it is science fiction, however desperately some may try to deny it — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, all the works of Philip K. Dick, historically the writer most exploited by Hollywood on these themes, and one who would have a great deal to teach the champions of “true reality” — if only they read him. And then there are films such as Blade Runner or Brazil, and the already mentioned Matrix.
A long sequence of pessimistic science fiction stories has thus taken on the social role that tragedy had in ancient Greece: a reminder, a warning about the possible consequences of an uncritical use of scientific discoveries or new social trends, which have often influenced our imagination and our choices in many different fields.
A “useful” application of science fiction’s speculative abilities, and certainly one of its most socially influential narrative formulas.
…or Utopian Science Fiction?
Conversely, science fiction that leaves hope open for a better future — such as, for example, the Star Trek saga — can be considered “utopian.”
Personally, however, I prefer to define it simply as “non-dystopian,” because utopia may appear to us as an excessive simplification; the same simplification, I would add, that can sometimes also appear in a dystopian vision.
When writing The Montecristo Project, I personally made every effort to create a future world with problems different from our own — sometimes extreme and sometimes not — a heterogeneous and varied world that echoes the complexity of our current reality without overembroidering it. What I hope I have succeeded in evoking instead is one of the aspects of science fiction that has always fascinated me most deeply: the sense of wonder.
The ability to be amazed is something we see, in a somewhat naive form, in children. But, if we think about it, also in those who do scientific research.
The loss of this attitude in many adults is sometimes linked to the way our brains work: for evolutionary reasons, they tend to seek simplicity, to settle into habit in order to survive in a state of minimum effort. At other times, it is the result of an “excess of experience” that convinces us we know everything about life and leads us to shut its various aspects into separate little boxes; but this pattern of thought has the same origin as the first.
Maintaining the ability, the talent, to be amazed is a matter of training, if you like.
In one of the most beautiful passages of Watchmen — another masterpiece of science fiction, this time in comic-book form — the brilliant Alan Moore, aided by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, gives us a perfect example of how even a semi-divine being such as Doctor Manhattan can fall into the trap of trivialization. After a long discussion — on Mars — with his former girlfriend Laurie Juspeczyk, who tries in vain to convince him that the human species should be saved from nuclear self-destruction, it is only when she discovers the identity of her father that he changes his mind. He remembers how every single human life is a “thermodynamic miracle,” in which an enormous series of unlikely factors results in that specific, unrepeatable person.
“…but the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles, that they become commonplace and we forget them,” Doctor Manhattan says at the end of this memorable and moving scene. In truth, we would not even need science fiction to be amazed: it would be enough to look around us a little. But good science fiction knows how to awaken that talent in us, even when we have forgotten it.
Science and Science Fiction
Here is another apparent dichotomy, fueled by a certain Italian mentality that opposes humanistic thought to scientific thought while proclaiming the superiority of the former over the latter. The connection may not be immediately obvious; and yet, very often, those who do not appreciate scientific thought have only an approximate and simplistic idea of it, viewing science as a sort of monolith made of layers of certainty, in sharp opposition to anything involving speculation or imagination.
One simplification leads to another, in short; but science almost always begins with speculation and imagination. Albert Einstein himself stated, in a letter to the mathematician Jacques Hadamard, that he first thought in images, signs, and sensations, which he then translated into scientific concepts and formulas. In many advanced research environments, such as MIT in Boston — as Professor Bruno Coppi told me when I worked with him on the communication related to his Ignitor project for nuclear fusion — researchers are largely both readers and writers of science fiction.
This should make us think.
Is a country where science fiction is not particularly loved perhaps also a country where science is not particularly loved — and vice versa?
Italy is in fact one of the European countries — among the founding members of the EU, no less — that invests least in universities and research, and the success enjoyed by certain figures preaching entirely anti-scientific theses, even among those who flaunt a high cultural level — only apparent, because those who do not understand scientific thought do not possess authentic culture — does not bode well.
By contrast, in another great country that has been forcefully emerging on the world stage in recent years, China, the government itself encourages the writing and reading of science fiction — within the limits it establishes, of course; the important thing is that it does not challenge the system — believing it to be a genre capable of “stimulating imagination and creativity in young people” and also a “tool for spreading scientific thinking.”
This, too, should give us pause.
In The Montecristo Project, science is a protagonist. That came naturally to me, since I am both an enthusiast and an occasional science popularizer. Moreover, the authors who shaped me often adopted an approach in which the scientific aspect is not merely a means to build the plot, but often the very purpose of the story itself — and this has always fascinated me deeply. One need only think of a novel such as Rendezvous with Rama by A. C. Clarke.
Science Fiction and Power
The paragraph on China in the previous section gives us a starting point for reflecting on this aspect. Science fiction is a “powerful” genre for the reasons discussed so far, and it often has a complicated relationship with established power. But it does not need to convey an explicit political message: science fiction is revolutionary in itself, because it is capable of overturning our perspectives on the world.ù
And that can be very annoying — not only to governments and institutions.
I still remember my astonishment when I first read The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt. Weapons that work only for defensive purposes, placed on the social scale by the Weapon Shops, an organization that does not intend to oppose or replace the current government or the great commercial corporations, but merely to limit their capacity for control. Beyond the somewhat naive aspects of the plot — no technology can be kept secret for decades or centuries — the concept is intriguing and, in a sense, may have anticipated by many decades what today are non-criminal hacker groups on the Net, the only ones capable of standing up to the hunger for control of governments and Big Tech companies. Not to mention all the cyberpunk novels that, starting with Neuromancer by William Gibson, influenced the imagery of so much cinema and television; but here we are still talking about the surface, whereas I am interested in emphasizing the deeper and more radical aspect.
Science fiction is capable of questioning our very perception of reality — and in this Stephen King remains the undisputed master — of projecting us into inconceivable and alien worlds, of suggesting ways of perceiving time and space that are completely different from our own yet no less fascinating and stimulating, as in Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life,” from which Denis Villeneuve’s magnificent film Arrival was adapted. It can provoke us with burning issues, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Or make us imagine ourselves millennia from now, transhuman beings so changed as to be unrecognizable, as in Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder.
What good science fiction cannot do, however, is leave us peaceful, wrapped in our comforting little convictions, which defend us from the complexity and absurdity of an inconceivably enormous universe, of which current science knows only about 5%. Expanding our vision makes us uneasy; thinking about what surrounds us unsettles us; reflecting on the meaning of our existence and on existence itself places us in an uncomfortable position.
And, as I have already written, science fiction is uncomfortable: it has the power to knock us off all our pedestals, and many of us want to be left in peace, whether we occupy a position of power or not.
Science Fiction and Stubbornness
Passionate people are often stubborn people as well, and science fiction enthusiasts are no exception. And since in our country, Italy, we enthusiasts feel slightly belittled by the publishing and intellectual world, it should come as no surprise if we sometimes react with poorly concealed irritation to certain attitudes of the cultural establishment, whatever it may be.
Naturally, no one expects everyone to like science fiction.
It is a matter of personal taste, of reading or viewing habits, of greater or lesser sensitivity to certain symbols and subjects. What is not acceptable, from anyone, is an uncritical contempt for an entire genre based on prejudice and poor knowledge of the subject.
I can understand “science fiction does not interest me,” even though I consider the ability to change one’s mind a sign of intelligence; but I cannot accept “SF is stuff for kids” or “real literature is tied to reality.” The first position is naive; the second is paradoxical.
And let us not even mention childish theses such as “science fiction has failed in its purpose because it did not predict the future”: the framing of the argument is so wrong on every level that it is not even worth answering, because the question is badly posed — and in any case, it is not even true.
So I stubbornly continue to read, watch, and write science fiction, even though, as a strong reader and a lover of cinema and television series, I appreciate many other genres as well. Although my first “creative” vein was musical, as anyone who has read about me elsewhere knows, this project in which I believe and to which I have devoted so many years has eventually come to include everything else too, particularly music: over time, I intend to create a sort of soundtrack for every single chapter I have written.
Returning to the story of how The Montecristo Project came to be, since I grew up with a powerful science-fiction imagination — even though, until the birth of my son, I had never thought of becoming a writer as well — the project gradually became the “main” one, outside my human relationships and the work with which I bring home my salary.
So I stubbornly carried the dream forward — at that point a purpose, an intention — until I received an email from the personal assistant of the then-president of 20th Century Fox Italia, Osvaldo De Santis, inviting me to send them a script for a science fiction film or series.
I was over the moon, in short.
From Intention to Action
I set to work with great determination: a fifteen-page science fiction short story could certainly not be turned into an entire screenplay; the story had to be expanded and deepened.
I thought I would begin with the origins of the Montecristo Project, two years before the narrative of the short story, embedding that story halfway through the book and then carrying the plot forward through the second half. In practice, I intended to write two War and Peace-sized books joined together: why do you always have to overdo it, Edoardo?
Very soon I realized I had bitten off more than I could chew, and I scaled the plan down to far more reasonable proportions: for the time being, I would write a prequel and stop at the event of the original story. New characters began to appear, along with new subplots.
Everything was becoming more complicated.
The Arrival of StoryMill
It was 2010.
From the beginning I used Apple’s Pages to write, which was very convenient thanks to its automatic synchronization feature: I could create text on the move on my iPad and then find the updated file at home on my Mac. At a certain point, however, I felt the need for more complete software for creative writing, something that could manage characters, locations, timelines, and so on.
I looked around, asked for advice, and tested StoryMill — indeed, I used it for a few months. Until I realized that it was too limiting for me. I needed a customized solution… and in the end, I chose to create it myself.
