"What is it like to be a bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked in 1974. “How do forests think?” asked anthropologist Eduardo Kohn more recently. As we barely understand the totality of our own selves (much less that of another person), how can we even begin to know what it would be like to be a chair, a coastline, a beetle, a virus? Given the state of the world today, thinking about how we think the nonhuman (and other humans) is urgent. Yet any time we think about something, that something is inevitably filtered through our humanness. How can acknowledging the hybrids that are created when we think things help us to better share the planet and, difficult that it may be, better empathize with one another? This essay looks at how humanist writers in the Italian Renaissance worked to decenter the human and, as such, did not conceive of “man as the measure of all things” in the way that many posthuman studies have claimed. Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea Alciato, for example, attempted to “think like” the nonhuman, and in doing so, they consciously created textual nonhumans in their writing through both anthropomorphosis and the more empathic strategy of allomorphosis, in which a writer attempts to “think like” something other-than-human. The textual nonhumans of Renaissance humanism are fascinating creations of minds that sought to bind themselves to the beauties, powers, and mysteries of the nonhuman world in order to become better humans in the here and now.

For the six decades of its life, Italian science fiction has been virtually absent on the shelves of Italian and non-Italian SF readers.  One can find translations into English, for example, of SF novels and anthologies written in Romanian, Czech, Chinese, Finnish, Serbian, Ukrainian, but none in Italian.  It has been consigned by SF scholars to the “ghetto of the ghetto.” Yet, Italy has been producing SF since the 1950s, some of it quite exceptional— notable for its “humanistic” bent, both in the sense of its intensive focus on human realities in a changing world, and in its use of the humanities, that is, its prominent references to a vast canon of literature, philosophy, religious writing, and fantastic imaginings. The infamous pronouncement in the late 1960s or early 1970s by Carlo Fruttero, the editor of the major Italian SF serial “Urania,” when asked why they rarely if ever included works by Italian authors—“it is impossible to imagine a flying saucer landing in Lucca”—was a curious sort of selective blindness shared by much of Italy and, consequently, by the rest of the world.  Flying saucers have been landing in Lucca (although they seem to prefer to hover around Milan, Rome, Venice, Bologna, and Turin) for quite some time, and many of their crafts are magnificent, deserving of recognition and study.