Dark Constellations

Description

Argentinian literary star Pola Oloixarac’s visionary new novel races from the world of 19th-century science to an ultra-surveilled near future, exploring humanity’s quest for knowledge and control, and leaping forward to the next steps in human evolution.

Canary Islands, 1882: Caught in the 19th-century mania for scientific classification, explorer and plant biologist Niklas Bruun researches Crissia pallida, a species alleged to have hallucinogenic qualities capable of eliminating the psychic limits between one human mind and another.

Buenos Aires, 1983: Born to a white Argentinian anthropologist and a black Brazilian engineer, Cassio comes of age with the Internet and becomes a prominent hacker, riding the wave of transformations brought about by distributed networks, mass surveillance, and new flows of globalized capital.

The southern Argentinian techno-hub of Bariloche, 2024: A research group works on a project that will allow the Ministry of Genetics to track every movement of the country’s citizens without their knowledge or consent, using sensors that identify DNA at a distance. But the new technology contains within it the seeds of a far more radical transformation of human life and civilization. In a novel of towering ambition, Oloixarac’s complexly intertwining stories reveal the power that resides in the world’s most deeply shadowed spaces.

About the Author

Pola Oloixarac nació en Buenos Aires, en 1977. Estudió Filosofía en la Universidad de Buenos Aires y es autora de las novelas Las teorías salvajes, traducida a seis idiomas, y Las constelaciones oscuras. En 2010 fue elegida entre los mejores narradores en e spañol por la revista Granta y recibió la beca de Letras del Fondo Nacional de las Artes. Escribió el libreto de la ópera Hércules e n el Mato Grosso, representada en el Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón en 2014 y en Nueva York en 2015. Ha recibido becas del International Writing Program en Iowa, Banff, Yaddo, Amsterdam Writer in Residence y Dora Maar, entr e otras. Colabora con artículos para The New York Times, entre otros, y edita la revista bilingüe digital Buenos Aires Review.