When Pola Oloixarac’s debut novel, Las teorías salvajes (Savage Theories), was published in Spanish in 2010, the response from certain critics was brutal. Who did she think she was to write so ambitiously—incisively—satirically about Argentine academia? She should deliver something more suitably feminine in the future.

She’s done no such thing in Las constelaciones oscuras (Dark Constellations), a visionary sophomore novel that charts a course between 19th-century biologist and explorer Niklas, Argentinian hacker Cassio, and talented young scientist Piera, who penetrates the subterranean laboratories of surveillance technology’s brightest bros circa 2024. Witty, wild, and profound, Dark Constellations will expand your idea of what a novel can do.

Oloixarac corresponded with Kirkus via email in the following interview.

What does the term “dark constellations” refer to?

The Incas called “Dark Constellations” the starry formations in the night sky. Like the Greeks, they created stories and saw animals engaging in fights, loves, and myths—but their storytelling was based in observing the dark clouds, instead of connecting the dots of the bright points in the sky, like the Westerners do (Orion, etc). And for a good reason. The Southern skies are much darker than the skies in the Northern Hemisphere, and the Milky Way (which they called Mayu, river) feels incredibly near. I thought the dark constellations were a beautiful way of thinking about the relationship between noise and information. It’s an inverted paradigm of how meaning arises. How does meaning and information arise in our age? DNA research and massive surveillance are two of the forces changing our paradigms. Knowledge is much more connected with observing patterns than with the “trial and error” epistemology focused on imperturbable laws inherited from the Greeks. And, interestingly enough, the Incas had a knowledge system based on tracking patterns. My book is not about the Incas; it’s about hacking and surveillance and DNA research, but putting together those things meant also exploring and looking at those things from a different point of view. To inspect our times we can choose to connect the things that shine, or to dive into the dark.

In an interview you gave in 2015, soon after Dark Constellations was published in Spanish, you said, “I wanted to make the biography of a character who at the same time was like the biography of the Internet.” Would you please explain why?

The arrival of the internet created a consciousness, or a certain kind of consciousness. There were many evangelists of this birth: media gurus like Tim O’Reilly spread the idea that our interactions, connected, were bringing forth a higher sense of intelligence; that humanity, by sharing their thoughts and collaborating online, was evolving into a new interconnected being. Now the tide is turning: what used to be “emerging intelligence” is now perceived as a form of madness (Trump, Brexit). It started with a very community spirit, and now is not so cute anymore; it’s the youngest face of the military industrial

Whatever are our moral feelings about it, the internet is this consciousness that we all make together and that we are starting to get to know. It’s alive, and for this reason I wanted to create a bildungsroman of the internet. Cassio is a hacker born in the early 80s who starts hacking satellites and training his virus-making skills in BBS, which were forums before chats and Facebook. His path in the world of capital leads him to a start-up, and then he’s poached to work in a massive data gathering endeavor lured by one of his rival hackers/idols, Max Lambard.

Speaking of heady combinations, Dark Constellations is a stimulating blend of various genres. What were some of the influences, literary and otherwise, that informed your writing?

I was really into the adventures of plant hunters and naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries. The explorations of Cooke, Spruce, von Martius, Agassiz and Hercule Florence. Not a lot of Darwin, because he loathed South America, and I didn’t find his scorn to be productive. His keen scientific eye disappears when he goes South: He says men are cannibals without having seen them, and that there are giants; good bird watcher, but terrible anthropologist. While I was reading this, I came to realize that the Google mapping of total reality is very connected to the naturalist frenzy of the 19th century. We think about innovation with the same positivist faith in progress as people had in the 19th century. TED talks are part of this élan, where the American dream meets exponential acceleration of tech as motor of happiness and wealth. So I was reading about American tech startups, and books like Virolution, a strain of Darwinism that poses virus as vectors of evolution.

Some characters were inspired by my hacker friends and people I met in the Buenos Aires hacker scene in the late 1990s. I had always seen them as novel characters. The Buenos aires hacker scene was pretty powerful, giving rise to some of the first professional penetration testing groups; it was quite competitive—more sophisticated than the Brazilian scene—that was more focused on stealing credit cards than in the scientific, romantic side of hacking, getting into the jungle of numbers and coming back with an exploit.

I cultivated a certain sci-fi mood. I love classic sci-fi, but I’m not very scholarly about it. My latest crush is Nnedi Okorafor’s books, and I love Gibson, Vonnegut, and Ballard. Ellen Ullman is also a favorite. I like Charles Stross’ ideas but I also feel ejected from his books; the writing feels sloppy. Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island was also part of this sci-fi mood.

Does one of those influences happen to be Lacan—or am I hallucinating?

It’s funny that you say that. Did you know that in Buenos Aires there are more psychoanalysts per inhabitant than any other city in the world? People in Buenos Aires are literally surrounded by Lacan-heads. So we all go through Lacan at some point, it’s a rite of passage. I don’t feel specially connected to him, but he might be lurking somewhere. I do like the theory of you hallucinating, too. :)

I wanted to think about writing the way the information sciences would describe a human being. My personal experiment was trying to see how humans work under a gaze that is counting their likes and seeing them as fluxes of semen and blood and capital, as trajectories. Thinking about humans like flux diagrams but making it sexy. Ha! That’s what I wanted to do.

Dark Constellations features three sections, or tracks, and Piera’s track is my favorite. (Her withering personal theory on concentrated testosterone is enough to make me love her.) Would you say a little bit about how she evolved?

While I was writing the novel I worked in a technology startup, doing the texts and publicity. I lived for a while in Bariloche, where there’s a nuclear and space center, and then I spent a couple years in San Francisco, heart of Silicon Valley, so I got to know a few “women in tech” working in these testosterone-driven ecosystems. The Valley’s myth that anyone can have a great idea and innovate in a garage is, well, like the stories the Incas told each other looking at the dark figures in the sky. At a talk at Stanford, Peter Thiel said the next 10 companies to watch fell within a 5-mile range from where he was talking; 10 years later, he calculated the range was maybe 50 miles away from Palo Alto. It’s a miniature, male dominated world.

I made friends with these women, and they told me their stories and, most importantly, they communicated to me a certain mood. Their demeanor was alert, seductive, very sharp, and I started to see them as cats. Cats roam among us humans with an air of entitlement and fear, similar to what many women in tech experience on a daily basis. Any mistake, like falling off the chair, they turn it into a form of elegance. So my other big inspiration for Piera were my cats Gmail and Charlotte. I adopted them in Bariloche and then we moved with them to San Francisco.

When you write fiction, do you feel constrained by anything other than the bounds of your imagination?

I like to live aware, and to write aware. By this I don’t mean to please the American white industrial complex of political correctness. On the contrary, I know that a black character or a lesbian character mean things, and their deployment is case sensitive. It’s very Elizabethan, in the sense that our contemporary life is packed with meaning, like a “chain of being” of our cultural references, Which are very dense, and we, as contemporary readers of a maelstrom of information, are well-trained in perceiving those layers. So I like writing working with those layers, putting them into play. I don’t need to shun them; I don’t like acting coy around them either. I feel really free when I’m writing, to be honest.

Why do you write?

In a time of fake news, fiction is where the truth becomes apparent. Fiction is necessary to tell the truth—this I borrow from Ricardo Piglia, an Argentine writer I admire. Imagining the future is the most important task right now. After living in San Francisco for a few years (I was there just two weeks ago), I think I’ve seen the future close enough to fear it quite a bit. But of course, fear is not an interesting feeling if left to its own devices. Writing is the spaceship to escape condescension, decency and society, and fear. I realized recently that I don’t really function unless I write. I can subsist, but my mind darkens if I don’t write. That realization changed my life completely, because I have a small child, and they take time. So now I protect fiercely my daily writing time. I write because it’s my island, and because I’m doing it all the time, and also because I read, and reading is the ultimate luxury there is.

Megan Labrise is the editor at large and cohost of the Fully Booked podcast.