Introduction

Historical signature of the cinema weekly magazine Film Tv, which he edited from 2013 to 2017, Mauro is a consultant selector of the Venice International Film Festival and teaches Genres Cinema at the University of Insubria Studies. Author of If it goes on like this - Cinema and Dystopian Science Fiction (2022), Heart and Steel - Martial Arts in Cinema (2019) and the first Italian monograph dedicated to polar (French Detective Cinema, 2003). He has published various essays in collective books, particularly on French and genre cinema.

From Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the Blade Runner and Mad Max sagas in all their derivations, to the Matrix and cyberpunk, an analysis of the science fiction cinema that has most successfully transformed the vision of a future worse than the present into imagery. In constant comparison and dialogue with the major literary authors of the strand (Jack London, George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and others), a journey through the evolution of perhaps the most contemporary genre, as demonstrated by Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovych's dystopian narrative in his film Atlantis (2019). Broken down by topic, the text considers collective fears such as the nuclear threat, epidemics, technophobia, and environmental catastrophe that films over the course of nearly a century have been able to elaborate on and recount. A special appendix is reserved for the dystopias of writer Valerio Evangelisti, to whom the book is dedicated.