past generations and underrepresented in
contemporary literature. Through imagin-
ing the future and unburdening the past,
Wang vividly captures the now.
Alison Wellford
Cedar Crest College
Pola Oloixarac
Dark Constellations
Trans. Roy Kesey. New York. Soho Press.
- 202 pages.
Dark Constellations is a slim novel that
takes on large questions about evolution
(both biological and technological) and
interspecies hybridization. Stretching
from the Canary Islands to Argentina and
from 1882 to 2024, Argentine author Pola
Oloixarac’s mind-bending story forges
connections between a nineteenth-centu-
ry plant biologist exploring the properties
of a hallucinogenic plant and a twenty-
first-century Argentine hacker, who uses
his understanding of computer viruses to
undermine a massive state-sponsored sur-
veillance program.
Narrated in a detached way that seems
at once mystical and scientific, this story
about the transformations of terrestrial
life and their consequences for human-
ity’s future jumps back and forth between
the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries,
inviting the reader to recognize time as a
fluid dimension, fluid (according to this
story) like the barriers between insects,
plants, animals, and machines. Just as
plant biologist and explorer Niklas Bruun
discovers and experiments with Crissia
pallida (and writes in his journals about
“secret pacts between species”), so does
hacker-genius Cassio Liberman Brandão
da Silva explore the furthest reaches of
the developing internet of the 1980s and
’90s to ultimately arrive at a hypothesis
of viral mutations and human-machine
interaction. When he teams up with co-
worker Piera to develop a biological virus
that can jump into and control machines
(such as surveillance cameras), the reader
can understand what Piera means when
she thinks about “the biological cycle of
technology” and its ecosystems.
But Dark Constellations is about more
than hypotheses and experiments and the-
ories about what unites disparate species. It
is also about the history of political tensions
between Brazil and Argentina, the stratifi-
cation of classes in South America and the
world at large, power dynamics between
the sexes, the rise of techno-elites in majorcities, and mass surveillance on a global
scale. Indeed, this novel raises so many
issues that, at times, it seems overwhelmed
by them. Even one of these subjects could
provide enough fodder for novels double
the size, and that is what makes Dark Con-
stellations at once fascinating and frustrat-
ing. It is most certainly ambitious but too
short to address everything that the author
brings up and attempts to tease out.
These burgeoning ideas, which make
the novel a kind of verdant analog to its
own subject matter, are rendered in beauti-
ful English by Roy Kesey, whose transla-
tion reveals the complex layers of scientific,
mystical, and technological vocabulary that
Oloixarac so fearlessly wields. The author’s
analytical approach to the similar vocabu-
laries of biological and technological sys-
tems—her examination of how words like
“penetration,” “viral,” and “exchange” com-
mingle in certain contexts—make Dark
Constellations a wonderfully bizarre mix of
scientific treatise, hallucinogenic history,
and cyberpunk thriller.
Rachel S. Cordasco
Madison, WisconsinReimagining a Place
for the WildEd. Leslie Miller & Louise Excell with
Christopher Smart. Salt Lake City.
University of Utah Press. 2018. 352 pages.Arranged in four thematic parts, Reimag-
ining a Place for the Wild is a collection
of essays and narratives that ranges across
disciplines and occupations. It includes
contributions from a diverse group: natu-
ralists and ranchers, environmental law-
yers and easement agents, writers and
biologists. Some of these authors approach
the issue of wildness from opposing angles,
but all are genuinely concerned for a sus-
tainable and wild North American West.
Though the collection is unmistakably
regional, many of these same concerns are
repeated wherever civilization and nature
must coexist; this book appeals to a muchWORLDLIT.ORG 87