Between metal and sand comes Mya from Mondo9, the new novel by Dario Tonani

Between metal and sand comes Mya from Mondo9

S for #Sangue and #Sabbia, M for #Metallo and #Morte: with these four hashtags we could summarize the literary saga of Mondo9 by Dario Tonani, but we would be doing a disservice to what is one of the most original creations of Italian speculative fiction. And above all to its creator, one of the most important Italian writers of imaginary literature.

What is Mondo9? A planet hostile to life, at least to what we are used to, almost entirely covered with sand, where huge metal ships, equipped with wheels, plow its expanses, dunes, rocks and chasms. But those of Mondo9 are not normal vessels, useful for traveling from one part of the planet to another, but living beings, equipped with a beating heart and some form of consciousness, even if to guide them you need a crew and , above all, of a commander who is empathically and telepathically one with them.

And a commander is Mya, diminutive of Myhahra, the little girl and then young woman protagonist of the latest novel in the series, Mya from Mondo9 , just published (also in ebook) in the Urania Speciale series for Mondadori and available in Italian newsstands, with the inevitable and wonderful cover by Franco Brambilla, official illustrator of Urania.

At the beginning of the story, Mya is nine years old and lives alone in a pneumosnodo, a sort of lifeboat that was originally part of an immense ship. The little girl was saved by a commander of another ship, very special because she is the only one to be covered with feathers and whose crew is made up of circus performers, traveling to the various ports of the planet. At the same time, Naila, Mya's mother and the protagonist of the previous novel Naila by Mondo9 (Oscar Fantastica, Mondadori 2018 and Urania Jumbo 2021), is constantly looking for her child, aboard the Madrigale. In the background is the Twelve Years Race: an extreme, crazy and grueling competition, where ships, captains and crews jeopardize their existence to seek eternal glory and the economic fortune that would free them from a lifetime infernal.

È Mondo9 is a hellish scenario, because its inhabitants are like twigs in the wind, at the mercy of catastrophic, environmental and natural events, but whose fate is also closely linked to ships, because if one of they stop for an irreparable breakdown or for having slipped into a huge chasm in the middle of the desert there can only be one destiny: death. What Tonani describes is a continuous, obsessive, troubled struggle for survival to a planet that is hostile to life, except for the one that has naturally developed on Mondo9, such as wing squares, huge birds that are in symbiosis with ships or rust eaters. , which as the name suggests are plants capable of freeing the metal, with which all parts of a vessel are made, from rust.

As the reader will have the opportunity to verify, the narrative universe of Mondo9 it involves all five senses: you listen to the screeching of metal, smell the blood, taste the meat of animals, breathe the sand and observe the immense desert of which the planet is made.

Dario Tonani's prose is dense, pressing, able to project his visions into the reader's mind. It is precisely these visions that inspired Brambilla, who illustrated the saga from the earliest stories and, in turn, made numerous drawings, merged both within the novels and in independent volumes.

The saga now it consists of various short and long novels (a bibliography of the saga and of Tonani is at the end of the volume), among which we remember All the worlds of Mondo9 (Delos Digital, 2015), Cronache di Mondo9 (Millemondi Urania n.72 , Mondadori, 2015) and the aforementioned novel Naila by Mondo9. But the reader should not be frightened, every single story can be read independently and is self-contained.

With this saga the Milanese writer has also set some records: the first Italian to appear in the Millemondi di Urania series, also first in the series Oscar Fantastica in the bookstore, always forerunner in the Jumbo series and now, with Mya, the first Italian author in the newly created Special Urania series. Not to mention that the saga has already been translated in the United States, Japan and recently in Russia and that it will soon be fully available in audiobook.

The most savvy reader will recognize in the pages of Mondo9 the inspiration for great literature seafaring, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Herman Melville, up to Joseph Conrad, but the real surprise of Mya di Mondo9 will be the discovery of an unprecedented habitat, a sort of mirror, mirroring the sandy surface of the planet and separated by a thin and unexpected diaphragm . And Mya, of course, will end up in it, like a novel and postmodern Alice in Wonderland.

7.99 € - buy on amazon (Kindle edition) 7.99 € - buy on ibs (ebook)