Dark Constellations, Paperback/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 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 is a fiction writer and essayist. Her novels, Savage Theories and Dark Constellations , have been translated into eight languages. She wrote the libretto for the opera Hercules in Mato Grosso , which was staged in Buenos Aires's Teatro Col n and New York City, and her fiction has appeared in Granta , n+1 , and The White Review , among others. Her pieces on politics and culture have appeared in The New York Times and on the BBC. She currently writes a weekly column in Perfil . She splits her time between Miami and Buenos Aires.