How to find meaning in a world without imposed limitations

You don’t have to work to have a comfortable life. You don’t have to have a family to procreate. You don’t have to do anything. Intelligent technological environment, virtual worlds of imagination and designer pharmaceuticals provide you with health, entertainment and quieten your self-consciousness. There is just one thing they can’t give you: the meaning of life. Designing the meaning of life for billions of people is something that professionals such as the protagonist - Paweł Kostrzewa - do.

But who will lead Paweł himself out of the desert of nihilism? How is he supposed to direct his own meaning of life?

Every man must have some absolute lines of resistance which make his successes and failures worthwhile.

The most frequently awarded and translated novel by Jacek Dukaj

The story of Ice takes place in an alternative reality in which World War I never happened. It’s 1924 and the Congress Kingdom of Poland remains under the rule of the Tsar and in the Belle Epoque. Warsaw is icebound. Snow storms bury the roads in the middle of summer. Gleissen – unearthly angels of Frost – walk the streets of the city, freezing truth and lies…

Benedykt Gierosławski, a talented mathematician and incorrigible gambler, is sent on the Transsiberian Express to the icebound Irkutsk by the Tsar’s Ministry of Winter. From there he is to set off to search for his father, seemingly able to communicate with gleissen.

Ice shows a world changed at the level of logic: Winter is ruled by the two-valued logic, Summer – by a three-valued one. This change brings consequences on all levels of the presented world and the text of the novel, from the physics to the law, from psychology to religion, to a special form of narration.

The novel has won many literary awards, e.g. the European Union Prize for Literature and the Magnesia Litera.

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The novel which has inspired the Netflix series

Mysterious radiation kills all organic life on Earth. The scant humans manage to make copies of their digitised minds and save them on machines. But what was actually salvaged in the form of zeroes and ones? Was it humans or their pathetic, self-deceiving afterimage?

They take over this world after the end of the world, “living” in bodies of mechs and sexbots. They fight wars, they do politics, they create ideologies and mad religions of metal, they build civilisation after civilisation, life after life, a mankind after the end of the mankind.

Axolotl is a larval state of an animal which never reaches maturity.

Will it ever be possible to return to the larval stage of humanity, to the soft, biologically mortal Homo sapiens? Since the man has been forced to metamorphosise into something different, way more powerful?

An existential novel from the lives of robots.

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This novella inspired Tomasz Bagiński’s Oscar-nominated short animation

Planetoids in the Lévie star system. An accident forces the “Sagittarius” towing craft to seek shelter on one of them. There is however not enough oxygen for all of the people on the craft. Izmir Predú sacrifices himself to save the rest of the crew.

Years pass by and pilgrims keep visiting his grave on the cold, atmosphere-less planetoid. Do miraculous healings really take place there? One of the convalescents founds a church made of crystogen built over Izmir’s grave. But you don’t use crystogen to build with, you plant crystogen – it combines nanotechnology, organic biology and evolutionary algorithms. Therefore the Cathedral grows, matures, blossoms. It’s alive and dead, it’s a building and an organism, it’s a work of art and the act of faith.

Father Pierre Lavone arrives on the planetoid to valid ate the rumours about  Izmir Predú’s sainthood and his miracles, before the planetoids, and the Cathedral with them, disappear forever in the interestellar emptiness.

A universe formed by Aristotle in Jacek Dukaj’s impressive novel

The story takes place in a world where the laws ruling the reality are closer to Aristotle’s speculations about the Form and the Matter, than to Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of physics; in the world which is geocentric, built of five elements, where modern science has never developed, being something fundamentally false. The other inspiration comes from Witold Gombrowicz and his deliberations on the power of form in inter-human relations.

Other Songs is a psychological and adventure novel; it’s a war epic and a philosophical treatise; it’s a virus of the mind which changes a reader’s perception of reality.

Hieronim Berbelek was once a man of strong Form; now he is pining away in the role of a merchant, suppressed and battered. But it will be him who will have to face the biggest threat and mystery: adynatoses, impossible beings – impossible, because devoid of form. There is nothing that can be said about them in truth; they deform the language, thoughts and logic.

How does a human being bestows a Form onto himself? What comes before all will to gain power?

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An essayistic journey around the most fascinating issues of contemporary civilisation

The technology of writing has created human civilisation. Thinking through writing means thinking in symbols, ideas and categories. It gives the direct access to what’s others’ innermost: their emotions, experiences and the sense of “I”.

In the essays in After Writing Dukaj describes humanity at the edge of a new era. New technologies for the direct transfer of experiences – starting with a phonograph to television, the Internet and virtual reality – lead us inexorably out of the domain of writing. Step by step, unnoticeably, we get disaccustomed from a human as we knew him from literature – from a subjective “I”.

What are the consequences of this process? How to create art, philosophy, politics, science without an “I”? Is religion – and therefore an idea of transcendence – possible for people unable to think about what they can’t see, can’t hear, can’t touch?

After Writing is an essayistic journey around the most fascinating issues of contemporary civilisation – all the way to its limits and the limits of humanity as we know it.

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Fictions exploring extremes of national ideas

This volume brings together the novel Xavras Wyżryn and three short stories: Gotyk (Gothic), Sprawa Rudryka Z. (The Case of Rudrik Z.) and Przyjaciel prawdy (A Friend of Truth).
An atomic raid on Moscow. The trial of a one-twelfth of a tyrant. A thought experiment of a rational antisemite. Cabbalistic Coronation Conspiracy in the still-partitioned Polish Republic.

In these four works, differing in style, convention and historical era, Dukaj shows the disappearing of the borderline between war and terrorism, wisdom and faith, man and nation, hero and monster.

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A space opera to end all space operas

The 29-th century. Humankind is one of many civilisations in the Milky Way following the same, inevitable road of Progress: from biological forms implied by the evolution, to digital beings (AI and immortal digital minds), still limited by the physics of our universe, to beings not limited by it, created thanks to scientific knowledge about the changing of the laws of physics.

The iron logic of Progress defines your place in the hierarchy of knowledge and power. A traditional, biological Homo sapiens is placed at its very bottom, as a relic and at the same time a sanctity of the Civilisation.

In this kind of world Adam Zamoyski appears, a 21-st century astronaut resurrected from a wreck of a spaceship. For some mysterious reason the biggest post-human and post-physical powers fight over him.

The novel has been compared to such science fiction works as Neal Stephenson’s Anathem or Greg Egan’s Diaspora.

A haiku-novel about reading the world and about transience of life

The twilight of the samurai culture and the birth of contemporary Japan. Life, science and war – painted with a light brush of words – are presented in a narrative following the structure and the spirit of haiku.

Towards the end of the 19th century Emperor Mutsuhito is visited by an emissary of the Country That Isn’t to forge an alliance based on the discovery of a metal lighter than air. In Hokkaidō shipyards a gossamer fleet of the Imperial Sky Navy is being built. And all of it is described in secret calligraphy by Kiyoko, a daughter of a Samurai who had rebelled against the rules of reason and democracy.

Empire of Clouds is a novel about the relationship of language and writing with reality, about an illusion of “I” of a Western man, about traversing of meanings between minds and cultures, and about the art of pure experience.

Place two experiences one next to the other, and you create a meaning which did not exist in each of those experiences on their own.

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The role and the power of literature in the era of direct transfer of experiences

Nowadays, when we read Heart of Darkness, we read a different book than the one Britons read in 1899. The same sentences unlock new experiences in us. For different keywords befit readers who are further and further removed from the world and the culture of the original.

Everything needs to be changed so that what is the most important – the experience prescribed by the author – can remain the same. Transfusion of darkness – or Joseph Conrad writing Heart of Darkness in Jacek Dukaj’s head – is a courageous literary project and at the same time a thought experiment. It’s also a meeting of two literary giants competing for the attention of a contemporary reader.

‍I’m not a translator. I’m the author of Joseph Conrad writing Heart of Darkness for the 21-century readers.

A futuristic family saga

The story takes place in Green Land, which used to be Greenland. It has a steppe climate and it is in fact the last enclave of the old-type humankind in the world after the technological revolution, devouring and turning all matter into a medium of digital processes.

The protagonist comes to an old astronomer, and that marks the beginning of the boy’s journey towards adulthood – through love, marriage, fatherhood, betrayal, grief and compromises. At the same time he journeys towards the stars, towards his integration with extensa which is expanding in the far-away star system.

Extensa is a futuristic family saga, full of nostalgia and child-like wonderment with the strangeness of the world. It tells a story not only of a relay race of the generations of ancestors, but first and foremost of the very last generation, upon whose departure there will be no more generations, because there will be no humankind.

A collection of short stories by Jacek Dukaj

The book opens up with the novel Linia oporu (Line of Resistance) and contains short stories: Oko potwora (The Eye of the Monster), Szkoła (The School), Król Bólu I pasikonik (King of Pain and a Grasshopper), Crux, Serce Mroku (Heart of Darkness), Aguerre w świcie (Aguerre at Dawn), Piołunnik (Wormwood).

A magical fairytale about a December night in 1981, when the communist dictatorship introduced martial law in Poland

Alice travelled through the Wonderland, while Adaś starts on a journey through a city  straight from a dark dream of the Polish People’s Republic. Lost between cruel allegories in the form of the Screechers, the Spooks, the Merrymen, the Positionists, the Rook-Soldiers, the Boobies and the Zompors, he is looking for his father kidnapped from home by the Crowe.

The Crowe is the most recent history of Poland framed into a surprising and extravagant form of a fairytale for children and grown-ups, built of non-obvious associations of a young boy traumatised by History. It’s a dream about a lost childhood and a poisoned youth, full of language games and phantasmagoria.

The book also consists of rhyming songs full of absurd humour as well as mad, colourful illustrations by Jakub Jabłoński.

The novel has been adapted for the theatre by Jerzy Bielunas in the Kamienica Theatre (2010) and by Jan Peszek in the Wrocław Puppet Theatre (2011). There is also an educational board game based on the book.

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A coming of age story about a world in which the last and only science of humans  is archeology

All that can be, had already come to existence. From the very beginning of the universe, countless civilisations of various intelligent species have discovered and created everything  that was there to be discovered and created. Now, after billions of years, all that can be done is digging up the ruins of long-gone powers and stealing their treasures.

Zuzanna’s father is the archeologist of alien civilisations. The biggest corporations and most powerful countries on Earth have for many years had access to the cemetery of non-human arts and technologies – known as City – but they keep the truth about it away from the masses; for a long time humankind’s discoveries have not been the discoveries made by humans, but loots brought back from xenoarcheologists’ expeditions. Zuzanna’s father has disappeared during one of those expeditions. Now, on her eighteenth birthday, she receives a parcel containing a key to City and mysterious instructions from her father.

The Plunderer’s Daughter takes the readers on a stroll along the streets of Infinity, to the prehistoric City – the reflection of all cities ever built by humans and non-humans, in this universe and the former ones, the treasury of all wisdom and the arena of struggle between the Powers.

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High concept science fiction with the air of religion and metaphysics

A collection of eight early short stories by Jacek Dukaj: Ruch Generała (The Iron General), IACTE, Irrehaare, Muchobójca (Flykiller), Ziemia Chrystusa (Christ’s Earth), Katedra (The Cathedral), Medjugorje, and In Partibus Infidelium.

The famous Katedra has inspired Tomasz Bagiński to create an animation which was nominated to the Oscars. Irreehaare, created a long time before Matrix, presents humankind imprisoned in the VR multiverse. Christ’s Earth describes an attempt to conquer an alternative reality in which Christ didn’t die on the cross, didn’t resurrect, but started the Kingdom of God on Earth.

The common denominator of most of the stories are religious themes presented in the context of technological progress.

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Cyberpunk noir

Mid 21-century, USA of late capitalism. The economical stratification is reflected in the biological stratification: genetic engineering allows the rich to sculpt their bodies and design their offspring. Economy is the domain of Als who fight wars against each other in multilayer models of markets, incomprehensible to humans. Most of the functions of the state have been privatised. Most of interpersonal relations are ruled by a strict protocol: if you are a member of the elite, you can be sued for a face you pulled, a gesture you made, a thought you had; freedom is only for the unsculpted destitute.

Politician and lobbyist Nicholas Hunt feels in his element in this world. At least until the moment when he starts suspecting the Earth is penetrated by the Aliens. And their invasion takes place in the domain of human mind: behaviour, fashion, trends.

Meanwhile the biology of Homo sapiens and the humanity itself have also become just a question of fashion.

The novel has inspired a 2008 film directed by Tomasz Suski, called All Secrets.

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