Marco Della Corte
Trenta giorni

One of the recurring elements in science fiction, as well as in the debate regarding the development of technologies, and even in common thought, involves a great fear that has become deeply rooted: the fear that machines will soon replace humans in every field. The theme is even more relevant today not just applied to production systems but when we talk about the military sector: the idea of invincible armies of androids programmed as perfect war machines is increasingly becoming a stereotype. Yet, this is somehow an already outdated and surpassed vision in favor of new old ideas with even grotesque connotations that evidently never faded away.

After all, the idea that a soldier is just cannon fodder is also outdated: today, the soldier has specific skills and a comprehensive training from every point of view. We are talking about people who are capable of making tough decisions in real time, evaluating every circumstance and possible consequence and doing so with relative discretion: all things that no machine, no matter how advanced, will ever be able to do. Because the variables are infinite and do not pertain only to a rational sphere but also an emotional one. Then, let's be frank, what sense would there be in waging a war without soldiers.

Thus, this novel by Marco Della Corte published in 2001 within the sci-fi series “Cosmo” by Editrice Nord and titled “Trenta giorni” (Thirty Days) presents us with a theme that is not new but is relaunched here in a dystopian future where the world is once again divided into two opposing parts (the Euro-American Alliance and the Asian People’s Union) in a revisited version of the Cold War, tensions, and arms race. Professor Roberto Terana, born in Barcelona, Spain and one of the leading authorities in the field of genetics at an international level, is appointed head of a secret project by the Alliance (the “Adam” project) and develops what should turn out to be the decisive weapon to win the war: a perfect, ruthless, lethal, intelligent soldier born from the evolution of a human being with the aid of genetics.

Of course, something goes wrong, the security systems fail, and what was supposed to be a weapon to win the war will instead prove to be something that cannot be controlled by any party involved and whose mere existence will trigger an acceleration of the gravity of events until the total disaster. Yet, once again, the existence of the human being, just when it seems to have reached its end, perhaps continues to exist precisely in the completion of a grotesque and frightening work. Renewing itself in a way incomprehensible to us, almost impossible to accept, as many times the behaviors of our children indeed can be. Probably because we are not good “parents” or because, as my father always says, being a parent is the hardest job in the world.