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Overture to a Brave New World – Utopian Ends, Dystopian Means: Transhumanist Biopolitics in Paolo Mantegazza’s Italian Proto-Science Fiction Narrative The Year 3000

2025· book-chapter· en· W7126035530 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Manfred Milz

Bibliographic record

VenueEdinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicItalian Fascism and Post-war Society
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBiopowerDystopiaNarrativeTranshumanismSkepticismSubject (documents)MetisRhetorical questionArtificialityIdeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The proto-science fiction novel <italic>L’anno 3000</italic> , written by Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) during the <italic>fin-de-siècle</italic> in Italy, is the subject of this examination. In what constitutes quintessentially the extrapolated conclusion of his life and work as a physiologist, neurologist, psychologist, anthropologist, and parliamentarian, Mantegazza offers, in response to the most urgent needs of the recently founded Italian nation, a biopolitical blueprint for an apparently ideal future society. In this chapter, the linkage between factual anamnesis gathered from medical and political practice on the one hand and novelistic trend-forecasting on the other, is scrutinised from Mantegazza’s explicit evolutionary perspective. To enhance the perfectibility of humans, his reform program foresees the rigorous implementation of synthetic nutrition, combined with psychopharmacological essences, recreation, prosthetically enhanced multisensory immersion, birth control (dysgenic interventions), and social hygiene through mutual cognitive transparency. The discourses between the uncritical male progress-enthusiast and his wife, a sceptical female counterpart, however, dhoe that a persistent promotion of the reciprocity between scientific and moral progress paradoxically leads, in its execution, to its negation. Epistemologically situated between Émile Souvestre’s <italic>Le Monde tel qu'il sera</italic> (1846) and Aldous Huxley’s <italic>Brave New World</italic> (1932), Mantegazza’s novel thereby marks an early historical turn from a utopian to a dystopian science fiction narrative.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.908
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.251
Teacher spread0.229 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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