The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (21 page)

Figures:

1. Now We're Dying
   
2. Dead Man's FAQ
   
3. Melancholy's King
   
4. Hammering in Tokyo
   
5. Diving into the Dream
   
6. Horus Rising
   
7. Our Lady of Paradise
   
8. Joyful Clock of the Void
   

Ex-librises:

1. All that lives must die, passing through steel to eternity
   
2. Oh body! my homeland! thou art like steel
   
3. Would you like to know more?
   
4. Death is not the end
   
5. Would you kindly… kill!
   
6. Bots may safely charge when the man guards them well
   
7. Of gods and bots
   
8. The show must go on
   
9. The sky above paradise was the color of television, tuned to an axolotl channel
   
10. So mech created man in his own image, in the image of gadget created he him; child and child created he them
    
11. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
    
12. War, war never changes
    
13. We will be friends until forever, just you wait and see
    
14. Man is our business
    
15. One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star
    
16. All those worlds will be lost, like tears in rain
    
17. The truth is out there
    
18. Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth
    
19. The mech is not enough
    
20. Remaining time unknown
    

this Polish writer

author of novels, novellas, short stories, essays

worldbuilder, storyteller & idea man

at the limits of humanity, reason & language

practices his art of the great narrative & immersive fiction

Notable works:

The Cathedral
, in which you investigate the sainthood of an astronaut who has died on a distant planetoid, and now his Cathedral grows around you from the seeds of nanotechnology on the site of an ancient cosmic mystery;

Black Oceans
, in which you wage Economic Wars through memetics, AI, genetically engineered telepathy and viral precognition, while running for your life through the streets of New York City in a gothic augmented reality;

Extensa
, in which you lead the peaceful country life of a farmer in preindustrial Green Land, while simultaneously being the cosmic-scale invasion thousands of light years from Earth, intimately linked to moons, planets and starships through the quantum entanglement of neurons;

Other Songs
, where Aristotle was right, there are no atoms, just five elements, Form and Matter, the Sun circles the Earth, man’s habits build his virtue, and you must will yourself up to the habits of a great
strategos
in order to face the formless chaos of Those That Cannot Be Described;

An Ideal Imperfection
, in which you are resurrected in the 29th century in a posthuman world of metaphysics, multibodied identities, cosmic AIs, multiple alien and human civilizations converging toward one mode of existence, and every player in this game of powers wants to steal the secrets of the universe buried deep in your memory;

Ice
, in which an otherworldly metal from the Tunguska Meteorite possesses logic-changing properties, and its impact has turned the Russian Empire into a land of the two-valued logic of Winter, where the philosophy of history is the new physics, it’s the year 1924, and you’ve just boarded the Transsiberian Express along with Nicola Tesla, tsarist spies, aristocrats and industrialists, and all the while you know you don’t exist;

The Crowe
, in which you are a little boy during Poland’s Martial Law of 1981, the monstrous Crowe has snatched your father in the middle of night and now you have to save him, to find him in the hypnotic labyrinths of this dark fairy-tale – a small boy in the concrete wonderland of a totalitarian nightmare;

Line of Resistance
, in which you are immortal, young and safe, living in endless free luxury, while the looming shadow of the Technological Singularity eclipses all human desires and aspirations, and the last possible endeavor for man is the creation of meanings for his life: his lines of resistance.

Jacek Dukaj was born in 1974. He lives in Krakow, Poland. Currently he is working on his next novel entitled
Recursion.

More at:
dukaj.pl/eng

Stanley Bill grew up in Perth, Australia. He first went to Poland as an English teacher, and then spent almost a decade in the country. He has translated various works of fiction and non-fiction from Polish into English, while also publishing academic articles on Polish literature and writing a blog, “Notes from Poland”. He is currently Lecturer in Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.