The 1984-like atmosphere of post Genoa seemed to plunge the country into a song by The Clash: Know your rights.46 If the poetics of Evangelisti were close to heavy metal, Riccardo Pedrini’s–aka Wu Ming 5 (the collective of writers Wu Ming was born from the ashes of the situationist Luther Blissett project)–was a direct offshoot of punk. Pedrini came from the experience of squats, redskins’ movement and was the guitarist for the bolognese punk oi band Nabat.47 Pedrini, until then, an essayist and historian of radical youth movements, after having written in 2000 Libera Baku ora, for the independent publisher Derive e Approdi, a dystopian novel that mixes Philip K. Dick and Noam Chomsky in 2001 published Havana Glam (Fanucci48), a novel that is set in an alternative 1970s world where David Bowie is a communist sympathizer and has a “Cuban period” instead of a “Berlin period”. This causes some turmoil in Havana, as the Cuban intelligence suspect the rockstar of being a US infiltrator from the future.
Havana Glam runs in parallel to the second historical novel by the Wu Ming collective, “54” 49, a novel that tells different and convergent stories set in 1954 in which, at the end, some characters, disgusted by the turn of political Italian events, decide to leave Italy and go to support a certain Cuban lawyer, an Argentine doctor and a handful of guerrillas on their way to Cuba.
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The issue of immigration, from the end of the Nineties, has become a huge social issue in Italy. Governments, whether left or right, were unable to deal with the issue while post- communist Europeans, Asian and African masses of desperate people fleeing from hunger, war and dictatorships sought to enter Europe through its ports on Italy’s Mediterranean shores. The question of otherness became and ever more pressing metaphysical question. The shadow of an alien invasion was invoked by a number of right-wing parties, while the government opened detention centers, called CPTs in Italian, which were little other than lagers where immigrants were detained (and theair legal and human rights suspended), while waiting for identification and expulsion.
Fazi in 2006 published the essay by Tommaso Pincio ( a pseudonym that refers to Thomas Pynchon) entitled Gli alieni. Dove si racconta come e perché gli extraterrestri sono giunti fra noi (Aliens. Which tells how and why the aliens have come to us), an essay that clearly alluded to the immigration situation, which was followed in 2008 by a sci-fi hard boiled novel that echoed the same issue, Cinacittà, where Rome in the near future will be colonized by China.51
In 2009 Massimo Gardella, published Il quadrato di Blaum (Cabila Edizioni), an interesting mix between Isaac Asimov and George Orwell. Nowadays Gardella is an appreciated and sofisticated crime novel author.
On the dark side of the moon, in 2010 Gianluca Casseri, a minor fantasy author and essayist and neo fascist militant of CasaPound52, wrote with Enrico Rulli, the novel La chiave del caos,53 with a preface by Gianfranco De Turris, the critic that always looked on sci-fi and fantasy as a right wing literary phenomenon that deals with symbols and tradition. Some months later, Casseri, driven by the sense of honor of a hero that defends his land from an alien orcs invasion, or better: driven by hate and xenophobia, killed two boys from Senegal in broad daylight in Florence with a .357 magnum and then committed suicide. It wasn’t either hyperreal or super real, it was the brutal truth, reality once again knocked hard at the doors of unconscious. Continua a leggere
The first book that won the Urania prize was Gli universi di Moras by 
On line il capitolo 47
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