*I consider myself fairly hip about Italian futurismo, but I never before heard a whisper about a futurist space-travel novel in 1921 involving a genocide on Jupiter.
http://www2.hum.uu.nl/congres/futurisms/abstracts.htm
Kyle M. Hall (Harvard University): Poetics, Politics and ‘La fine del mondo’: Volt’s Futurofascist Apocalypse
"Vincenzo Fani Ciotti, known to history under his Futurist pseudonym ‘Volt’, strode into Futurism relatively late, publishing his parole-in-libertà collection Archi voltaici in 1916 after meeting Marinetti earlier in that same year. After several manifestos published in various Futurist vehicles, including La teoria sociologica della guerra, he was moving beyond a strictly Futurist stance when he published what would later be described as a “romanzo di fantascienza futurista”, La fine del mondo, in 1921.
"Dedicated to Mussolini, this book utilized little of the poetics typically associated with the Futurists in favor of a fantastic development of Futurist political thought. Looking to the year 2247, Volt applied Futurist ideas on war to what he saw as the logical conclusions that would arise from the Treaty of Versailles. This is no utopia, as Volt sees the positive capacities for human development being stifled by a secular world government that would prevent intergalactic space colonization rather than eradicating the native inhabitants of Jupiter. Our sickly hero, imitating the tuberculosis that would take Volt’s own life at the age of thirty-nine, takes it upon himself to clear the way for the conquering and colonizing of Jupiter, blowing up the world parliament and himself in an apocalyptic explosion that leaves no doubt as to the necessity of conflict in the human experience. This paper examines the way in which Volt mixes Futurist ideology with a more traditional poetics that looked beyond the avant-garde towards a popularized Fascist politics that would soon bear itself out in the coming decades."
