Synopsis

Ironic, visionary, prophetic, thrilling. Sabina Guzzanti's debut novel. It's 2119, and the situation on planet Earth isn't great... But a group of heroes is fighting to save the future. The year is 2119. After a long series of environmental catastrophes, pandemics, and upheavals of every kind, the survivors have been forced to submit to an unjust but stable regime, loosely inspired by feudalism. Society consists of a hundred million omnipotent billionaires and three billion disenfranchised environmental migrants, grouped in large reception camps on the strips of land spared from rising waters. Among the super-rich, the shareholders of the Consortium of multinationals that control the internet reign supreme. The only ones who oppose the Consortium are the journalists of Holly, the only news outlet conceived and written by humans rather than robots. And when the Consortium is about to unleash a new algorithm capable of eliminating free will once and for all, the few remaining hopes of salvation lie in the hands of Tess, a mistreated editor of a column about kittens... Alongside Tess and Holly's other journalists, we will meet European and New York migrant families, marketing and big data engineers, ruthless shareholders and penniless rich people, children and algorithms, hackers and haters. And they will all be caught up in a chain of events that could lead to the end of the species that has called itself Sapiens... After her successes in theater, film, and television, Sabina Guzzanti makes her debut as a narrator. She does so with a novel that on the one hand draws on great classic dystopian literature (from 1984 to Fahrenheit 451) and on the other tackles extraordinarily modern themes, such as climate change, the concentration of wealth, and dependence on technology. 2119 – The Defeat of Sapiens is entertaining and enthralling, though I hope it doesn't prove prophetic (the references to pandemics were written in 2019!). The literary debut of a great Italian intellectual who, with her customary wit, addresses fundamental questions and provokes reflection.