... often lovely and entrancing ... For being a modestly sized novel, Dark Constellations is practically galactic in the stretch of its narrative ambitions ... small observations are balanced with enormous, paradigm-defining assessments of capitalism, liberalism, technology, medical advancement; Oloixarac lays out bold but lovingly textured descriptions and diagnoses of all these things, and they nearly always sound provocative and artful ... The silly repellency of her sexual descriptions almost acts as a comic foil to the elegant profundity of her conceptual themes, but they still feel a bit like record scratches that pull the mood up short. Luckily, she’s crafted a weird and absorbing cyberpunk tale that can sustain such odd interludes. It ends a bit too abruptly, but the 'what if' tone of the conclusion is thought-provoking in its own right. Dark Constellations should find her a new audience of readers hungry for strange and all-too-plausible tales of our modern, algorithm-driven lives, but it reaffirms a stereotype about brilliant philosophical writers: They often stumble over the dirty stuff.
... what the late Michael Crichton might have written if he had grown up in Argentina and fancied himself a high postmodernist ... a bland novel stuck between genres and ideas, switching between timelines ... It should be fascinating, and at times it is; it is beautifully written, the language limpid and poetic when it needs to be, sparse and rugged when the scene calls for it. But Dark Constellations is ultimately a mess of references, of tried stories, and old tropes pining in their mashedness for pastiche, but never coalescing into anything as artful and intoxicating as the mystery plant at the novel's heart ... two and a half novellas, only one of them remotely intriguing, thrown together in an e-doc and emailed directly to the printer ... the characters are lifeless and drab ... the worst of slipstream and of attempted postmodern experimentality at a time when attempts to be the Pynchon or Nabokov of the '60s are, frankly, boring. The novel does nothing—says nothing unsaid by every movie, TV show, comic book, Twitter thread, and TED Talk since the Patriot Act—and will be a critical hit all the same.
...Dark Constellations is a slim allegory written with a chat forum’s acrid wit ... [with] a provocative core idea: that colonialism was a massive invasion of privacy, and that technology is on track to rival it ... Oloixarac portrays humans as a grabby, greedy species struggling to control as much of others as possible ... The only character in Dark Constellations not interested in controlling others is Piera ... With Piera, Oloixarac seems to underscore the impossibility of stepping away from power in a world in which science overrides ethics ... Oloixarac focuses on the intellectual through line from colonization to technological domination.
... bracingly inventive and occasionally bewildering ... This esoteric, centuries-spanning approach brings to mind David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film The Fountain, though Oloixarac’s novel is far stranger and more challenging than both. If anything, the book’s blend of futurism and natural science feels most kin to the freaky ecological sci-fi novels of Jeff VanderMeer ... The narrative can be inscrutable, especially in its hallucinatory closing stretch, which consists of a lengthy monologue delivered in a jungle palace by a six-foot-tall rat.
Out of all the books I’ve read recently about mass surveillance, I found Oloixarac’s version to be the most chilling, mostly because it adds an extra layer of ick-factor to something that’s already extremely intrusive, using the ancient strands of our biology against us ... Whatever these phenomena or matrix of forms are was never clear to me; I failed to join the dots. Not that it ultimately matters. These 19th-century interludes that thread through the novel, a fever dream of sex and hallucinogenics and weird experiments, contrast beautifully against the straight-laced prose of Cassio and Piera’s story. While I may not have appreciated everything Oloixarac intended with Dark Constellations, as a history of a future that has yet to come to pass I found it equal parts intriguing and terrifying.
... the novel’s ambition is its greatest weakness as well as one of its strengths ... Oloixarac writes with total authority on complex scientific concepts and excels at vividly capturing the mood of a particular time and place, but the intricacy of her world-building often comes at the expense of character development. The wide lens required to encompass multiple lifetimes and continents also has the effect of flattening characters out, preventing the reader from becoming fully invested in them ... The problem, yet again, lies in the book’s ambition: keeping track of a relentless stream of characters, high-level scientific concepts, and the relationships between them proved nearly impossible, and I often found myself looping back to previous chapters to double-check names or reread dense technical passages ... While the individual sections of Dark Constellations don’t necessarily come together to form a successful whole, the book is still an enjoyable and enlightening read ... While the plotlines aren’t entirely resolved, there is no shortage of impressive passages in this novel, and readers are bound to close the book with an appreciation for Oloixarac’s erudition and skill.
... luminous ... Oloixarac is a massive, mysterious talent; her latest novel is an oblique puzzle whose pieces never quite fit into place ... This genre-defying novel blends science fiction with cyberpunk with naturalism to end up with something utterly original.
Though the collected text offers lengthy (and often mocking) commentary on the concerning direction of global politics, each story comes across as wildly disconnected despite an attempt at interconnectivity. With each character’s circumstances throughout history given an evocative and flowery description, the bigger message is often bogged down and left to the reader to parse through with long-forgotten context. Even for readers with fluency in anthropology and shadow politics, this book will bewilder and leave plenty open to question.
