Dark Constellations
by Pola Oloixarac
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...