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Loading... Dark Constellations (original 2015; edition 2020)by Pola Oloixarac (Author)
Work InformationDark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac (2015)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.  Alan.M | Apr 16, 2019 |  no reviews | add a review
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"Canary Islands, 1882: Caught in the 19th-century wave of scientific classification, explorer and plant biologist Niklas Bruunis 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 demonstrates the skills and personality that will make him one of the first great Argentine hackers. The southern Argentinian techno-hub of Bariloche, 2024: Piera, on the same research group as Cassio, studies human DNA. When the Estromatoliton project comes to fruition, the Argentine government will be able to track every movement of its citizens without their knowledge or consent, using censors that identify DNA at a distance"-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)863.7Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (2.7)
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Wikipedia in English
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OK, up front honesty: this isn’t generally the kind of book I would read, but I’m also a big fan of world literature and so was keen to read Argentinian author Pola Oloixarac’s second novel. It’s a hard book to pin down; part science fiction, part ‘techno-thriller’, part historical fiction. I’m not totally sure it worked for me, or that I ‘got’ what it was about.
Shifting in time from 1880s explorers in the Canary Islands, to 1980s Buenos Aires, to a techno-hub in southern Argentina in 2024, the book mixes the stories of explorer and botanist Niklas Bruun and Cassio, a tech genius who becomes involved in a company’s efforts in DNA tracking and surveillance. It is primarily a book about ideas, about exploring beyond the boundaries of human knowledge and into worlds of hallucinatory drugs, the dark web and the future of human evolution. It is certainly a big, bold novel full of allusions and nods to various sci-fi authors from the 20th century. Oloixarac’s narrative style is quite detached; there seemed some (deliberate) distance between the reader and the characters and events in the book, and whilst I got used to this, I didn’t quite feel that the book engaged me fully. It’s not really a character-driven story, although we do see Cassio’s development from precocious teenager to forty-something code genius. In many ways the overall arch of the book reminded me of a David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’ with its scope and interweaving of stories.
The final part of the book, set in the near-future, is a troubling vision of the powers of the state and the transformation of human life and identity going forward. The tech company Cassio works for, Stromatoliton, has created sensors to detect DNA, thus enabling the powers that to be to track its citizens at all times. So, for that, it is a timely and ambitious novel. Well-written, certainly, but its style is a little detached, and the characters not really fully rounded enough for me to overly care about them. For those who lap up this kind of novel it will probably blow them away, but it left me a little cold, and more than a little confused at times!
(With thanks to the publisher for an ARC of this book.) (