Fantascienza come genere mediale e fantascienza come genere sociologico. Un case study: la demografia nella Sf

Science-fiction – especially in its dystopian versions and narratives – from being a visionary anticipation of the future has, over the past few years, become almost an “exact science” that photographs the continuous metamorphosis of the present. Social science-fiction, as opposed to “positivist and neo-positivist” science fiction (permeated with optimism regarding a future of progress, and a sense of wonder regarding technical-scientific advances), seems to have largely demonstrated the “goodness” of several of its precursor insights and its validity in terms of a narrative strand that serves as a seismograph of the tensions and moods of different eras. From Orson Welles to Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, social science fiction has provided, in narrative form, a whole series of (often prescient) interpretative keys to social criticism, and has effectively investigated the conflicts of human societies (with interpretative insights sometimes similar to the frames elaborated by the historical sociological field of conflict theories). With regard to the imaginative becoming predictive capacities of social science fiction, after outlining its basic characteristics and overall framework, this article sets out to analyze a theme present in various writers of this strand (from Asimov to Ursula Le Guin): that of demography. And one of the most frequent responses to demographic issues coincides with the choice of dystopian political regimes inspired by technocracy – as in the case of the colonization of outer space and other planets in search of resources and solutions to overpopulation. This article therefore sets out to analyze the «demographic question» as an exemplary case study of the narrative mechanisms of social science-fiction, with particular reference to Italy in the historical period from the 1960s to the 1980s and the figure of Lino Aldani (1926-2009), a national pioneer (and theoretician) of “humanist science-fiction”.