A novella and a few short stories by an Italian author, first published in 1979. I had no idea what to expect. It's certainly different from other SF from this era I've read, much "softer" than the works of big names like Asimov, Pohl or Delany with their huge influence on the genre. Despite being definitely science fiction - we visit the Mars, a corporation-owned planet and an post-apocalyptic earth in these stories - Aldani doesn't put much emphasis on future technology. Much more important is character psychology, the stress on the human psyche under unusual conditions and how people deal with it. Usually, that dealing is not pretty, but, for example, the story that takes place on Mars could just as well have been set in any other isolated location where a group of people are on their own. In exploring these psychological extremes, Aldani also gets pretty creative with his language; from a diary format that gets more and more disturbing to stream of consciousness, he often mixes several narrative techniques in one short piece - with great success. Either that, or the German translation of the Italian original is simply brilliant.
But, of course, there's something else typical for the era: the blatant misogynism, manifesting in the way how women are not necessarily portraied in a stereotypical or non-flattering way, but that they don't appear at all. The cast is exclusively male - one protagonist has a (far away) wife that gets mentioned in passing, another finds a lover in what must be the worst, most uninspired "romance" I've ever read. ( )