The curved plane of reality meets science fiction in The Interview (2013), set in Udine in 2048. The volume opens with a night-time landscape captured from a bird’s-eye view, reminiscent of certain poetic visions of Gipi, in which the artist’s sensitivity caresses places and spaces cherished in the memory of past experiences. The city is carefully chosen by Fior, who disrupts the reader’s horizon of expectations.

The protagonists of the story are Raniero, a psychologist who is separating from his wife, and Dora, a young patient with whom he embarks on a love affair. Dora is part of the New Convention, a model of a new society based on the principle of “emotional and sexual non-exclusivity”. The reason for the title is revealed in the final part of the book when we learn that the interview is the one conducted with Dora at the age of one hundred and thirty. Welcomed by numerous young people, the now elderly woman is invited to recount the “week of sightings”, when luminous signs first appeared in the sky, initially thought to be “hallucinations of a few” before becoming a collective phenomenon, a prelude to the world of the future, now populated by people who relate to each other using the “telepathic bridge”, already experienced by Dora with Raniero.

The narrative once again intertwines the personal and collective planes, following a pattern already seen in 5,000 km Per Second. However, in The Interview Fior makes a clean break, starting with his technique as he transitions from using acrylic yellows, ochres, blues, and purples to the black and white of charcoal. Fior looks elsewhere for ideas; at Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which aliens are luminous presences and “the sense of the sublime” arises from the contrast created in the description of “a small scene placed before an immense scenario”, but above all, he draws inspiration from the photographs of Francesca Woodward and Cindy Sherman and from the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, particularly The Eclipse.