The Year 3000
A Dream
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
First published in 1897, The Year 3000 is the most daring and original work of fiction by the prominent Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza. A futuristic utopian novel, the book follows two young lovers who, as they travel from Rome to the capital of the United Planetary States to celebrate their “mating union,” encounter the marvels of cultural and scientific advances along the way. Intriguing in itself, The Year 3000 is also remarkable for both its vision of the future (predicting an astonishing array of phenomena from airplanes, artificial intelligence, CAT scans, and credit cards to controversies surrounding divorce, abortion, and euthanasia) and the window it opens on fin de siècle Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1897, Mantegazza (1831 1910) offered a fanciful utopian speculation about the year 3000, imagining a unified Europe, world peace, an elimination of illness, and sophisticated technology. Readers follow a couple Paolo and Maria through a Dante-esque tour of this would-be future, exploring differing governmental models and taking a methodical look at the finance, health, and culture of the civilization of the future. Some of the technologies Mantegazza predicted include CAT scans, credit cards, and airplanes, and his forecast for societal attitudes toward divorce and abortion are decidedly ahead of his time. Jacobson's translation is strong, even if Mantegazza is more interested in presenting his ideas than in crafting a work of literature. While Mantegazza's more controversial views on, say, eugenics, can be off-putting, the book is a neat exercise, more for its ideas than its artistic value.
