At the exact moment when the astronaut lost on Mars (The Martian by Ridley Scott) arrives on our screens, NASA announces that on the red planet some salty water streams can run on the surface?
The University of Rome welcomes 15.000 people for the opening of the Maker Faire, the international exhibition dedicated to innovation, with the artisans of the future dealing with robots and drones?
The astronauts from Interstellar reach the most remote planets in search of “another Earth”, passing through black holes and wormholes?
The ghost of pandemic haunts books and movies on the echo of the Ebola virus? Dinosaurs are cloned and make their comeback in the restored funfair of Jurassic World?
Very well. These will be the topics of the third appointment with the Futurology Meetings that Trieste Science+Fiction has scheduled for five days (from the 4th to the 8th of November) in the conference hall of the prestigious Palazzo Gopcevich. It confirms how well the feedback between reality and fiction works, between the science of astrophysicists, biologists, technologists and the imaginary of writers and cinema makers. In this direction you will find the relations of Paolo Molaro from the Astronomic Observatory of Triest, Carlo Fonda from ICTP with his 3d printers, Stefano Liberati from SISSA, the general director of ICGEB Mauro Giacca and the “dinosaurs hunter” (fossils!) Flavio Bacchia, further demonstration
of the interest shown by some of Triest’s international scientific institutions for our Festival. Besides science, there will of course be literature and cinema, in a rich interweaving of ideas and intellectual challenges. Futurology, we were saying, the speculation of today towards the future, as in the lesson told by great visionaries such as H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov. As in Bruce Sterling who will be the honour guest of Trieste Science+Fiction, the writer from Texas now living in Turin who has been one of the “fathers” of cyberpunk and who will receive the Silver Urania for his carrier (and who will also present his collection of short stories “Utopia pirata”, just edited by Urania with
the transparent alias Bruno Argento). Once again the magazine by Mondadori will come into the limelight with the extremely popular steampunk epic “World9”, the rusty and merciless planet created by the imagination of Dario Tonani with the illustrations of Franco Brambilla (both will a end the Conferences of Futurology). And the two ex aequo winners of last year’s Urania will be in town as well, Francesco Verso and Sandro Ba isti. Giuseppe Lippi, curator of Urania, will describe the 60 and more years of this collection following his essay “Il futuro alla gola” published by Luigi Cozzi. And Triest will also celebrate another anniversary: the half a century activity of Alfredo Castelli, fi y years of stories and mysteries by a great writer of comics. Those interested in cinema shouldn’t miss the appointments with Enrico Azzano and Andrea Fontana, authors of the volume dedicated to the beautiful fantasy animation of Miyazaki and Takahata; the fantasy-horror worlds of Alberto Marini; and the appointments with Andrea Chimento and Andrea Pesoli, who will talk about the first social-dictionary of cinema.
