Dark Constellations

Dark Constellations by Argentinian literary star Pola Oloixarac is a visionary novel that races from the world of 19th-century science to an ultra-surveilled near future. It explores humanity's quest for knowledge and control, while 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. He rides 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. Yet, 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.