SOURCE: “Prometheus Unperturbed,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 23-29, 1990, p. 1271.

In the following review, Gordon provides a mixed review of the science-fiction stories comprising The Sixth Day.

The Sixth Day is a collection of Primo Levi's science-fantasy stories taken from Storie naturali (1966) and Vizio di forma (Formal Defect, reviewed in the TLS of October 2-8, 1987). They explore the sometimes awful, sometimes comic consequences of science's interference with the natural order, and their light inventiveness provides a fascinating counterpoint to the sombre tragedy of Levi's major autobiographical works. Nevertheless, many of the underlying concerns of the latter remain valid here. He continues to probe the limits of the human and the humane, by way of acute observation, deduction and hypothesis, so that he could fairly claim that “between the Lager and these inventions, a continuity, a bridge exists: the Lager was for me the greatest of all ‘defects’ … the...