Overture to a Brave New World – Utopian Ends, Dystopian Means: Transhumanist Biopolitics in Paolo Mantegazza’s Italian Proto-Science Fiction Narrative The Year 3000
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The proto-science fiction novel L’anno 3000 , written by Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) during the fin-de-siècle 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 Le Monde tel qu'il sera (1846) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Mantegazza’s novel thereby marks an early historical turn from a utopian to a dystopian science fiction narrative.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".