Farris, Clelia
Entry updated 12 May 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1967- ) sf author from Italy who has won multiple awards for her work. Farris's interests are wide ranging, resulting in stories and novels about everything from Genetic Engineering and soul-transference to the Colonization of Other Worlds and Time Travel. The recurring motif of murder investigations (see Crime and Punishment) perhaps reflects her early interest in psychology, while the major presence of water (flood or drought) must be linked to Sardinia's position as the second-largest island in the Mediterranean. Though she mostly writes in Italian, Farris frequently includes Sardinian words and expressions in her stories, reflecting her life in a land which has a complex history of conquests, most notably by the Spanish (1321-1720), but also by the Romans, Arabs, Austrians, and ultimately the Italians (in 1861).
In an interview with Samovar (18 December 2017 web), Farris noted that she turned to writing novels after receiving her degree in psychology. A year after entering her first novel into a writing competition, she won her first science fiction prize: the Fantascienza.com award for Rupes Recta (2004), a story about the hunt for a killer on the Moon (the title refers to a linear fault in the southeastern part of the Mare Nubium). Farris's next novel, Nessun uomo è mio fratello ["No Man Is My Brother"] (2009), set in a future Indonesia where one is born an Executioner or Victim and the former can kill the latter without punishment, won the Odissea Award. A uchronic Egypt (see Ancient Egypt in SF) is the subject of Farris's next two linked novels: La pesatura dell'anima ["The Weight of the Soul"] (2010), which won the Kipple Award in 2011, and La giustizia di Iside ["The Justice of Isis"] (2012). In La pesatura dell'anima, an Egypt pulled between biotechnological progress and ancient beliefs about the soul must navigate the not very foolproof process (governed by the Seven) by which innocent souls are exchanged for those of the guilty in the afterlife. The latter novel considers what might happen if a detective is forced to replace a murdered member of the Seven and the remaining members of the group uncover a region filled with monstrous creatures produced by early efforts at genetic engineering.
Farris's next novel, La madonna delle rocce ["The Madonna of the Rocks"] (2014), set on a hostile alien planet, considers how a new human colony might deal with the same problems as the first humans – food shortages, disease, etc. This time, though, reproduction is going to look very different. Necrospirante ["Necrospirants"] (2016), a finalist for the prestigious Urania Mondadori Award, features humans who have evolved to live in Earth's harsh desert conditions (see Climate Change) and can survive on small amounts of blood that they suck from living creatures (see Vampires). They are eternal but have forgotten how they became what they now are. Her most recent novel, I vegumani ["Veg-humans"] (2022), revolves around a small farming collective threatened, like most of the region, by severe drought. While most refugees are moved north, the members of the Astarte collective choose, instead, to explore radical alternative methods – including cloud seeding and the development of a sun cream that merges human and plant genetics – to help humans adapt to a changed land.
While only one of Farris's novel-length texts, I vegumani, has been translated into English so far, many of her short works have appeared in Anglophone publications. Some of them are collected in Creative Surgery (coll 2020 trans Rachel Cordasco and Jennifer Delare). "A Day to Remember", like I vegumani, is concerned with climate catastrophe, though this time it is a flood that nearly wipes out civilization. "The Substance of Ideas", set in a kibbutz, images that two friends have discovered a hidden, watery cache of sea urchins that, when eaten, drive people mad. In "Holes", a self-aware AI attempts to become human, while in "Secret Enemy", a man must tend to a difficult patient through a mirror.
Time is a major motif in several other Farris stories. The long history of Sardinia and its conflict with antiquities dealing in the modern world is the subject of "Gabola", while "Rebecca" (where Bluebeard meets Daphne du Maurier) features a woman trapped in a room in her ex-husband's house, where experiments in Physics have also trapped her in time, from which she is desperately trying to escape. "Another Place" and "The Words" are also concerned with temporal manipulation; in the former, two sometime-lovers, trapped in a timeless and placeless limbo, conduct an experiment to break free; while in the latter, the twin daughters of famous physicists travel back in time to try and save Anne Frank (see World War Two). [RSCo]
Clelia Farris
born Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy: 19 August 1967
works
- Rupes Recta (Milan, Italy: Delos Books, 2004) [pb/Edoardo Belinci]
- Nessun uomo è mio fratello ["No Man Is My Brother"] (Milan, Italy: Delos Books, 2009) [pb/]
- La pesatura dell'anima ["The Weight of the Soul"] (Torriglia, Italy: Kipple Officina Libraria, 2010) [hb/]
- La giustizia di Iside ["The Justice of Isis"] (Torriglia, Italy: Kipple Officina Libraria, 2012) [na/]
- La madonna delle rocce ["The Madonna of the Rocks"] (place not known: Delos Digital, 2014) [ebook: na/]
- Necrospirante ["Necrospirant"] (place not known: Delos Digital, 2016) [ebook: na/Danielle Gay]
- I vegumani ["Veg-humans"] (Rome, Italy: Future Fiction, 2022) [pb/Dayana Montesano]
collections
- Creative Surgery (Greenbelt, Maryland: Rosarium Publishing, 2020) [coll: trans by Rachel Cordasco and Jennifer Delare: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry