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The Old Axolotl
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.
In The Old Axolotl (Starość aksolotla) Dukaj created an engaging cyberpunk vision in which human characteristics are taken over by bots. Philosophical reflections on the relationship between humans and technology are a hallmark of Dukaj's prose. This time, he touched upon a new theme – the issue of writing in a new era – and gave us a taste of it at the same time.
Culture.pl
In the great The Old Axolotl (Starość aksolotla), Jacek Dukaj defuses the bomb of technological progress – this book is a peculiar declaration of love addressed to a flesh-and-blood human being.
Piotr Kofta, Gazeta Prawna
