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Even Animals Are Machines by Andrés Vaccari

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1649, North Sea. The great philosopher René Descartes carries a heavy heart and a target on his back. Sick with pneumonia, pursued by powerful enemies, he flees by ship to Sweden and a new life. His companion: a sentient android replica of Francine, his beloved, dead daughter.

But the ship’s captain has other plans. Accusing Descartes of sorcery, he tosses the droid overboard, plunging Francine into a bizarre afterlife: a machine graveyard ruled by malignant necromancers.

There, she hacks the dying philosopher’s mind, glimpsing the birth of A.I. in a timestream parallel to our own.

‘Crafted with the same precision and care as the fabulous automaton that is its narrative engine, Even Animals Are Machines is a rare novel of philosophical ideas that also tells an engaging story—luminous, melancholy and charged with real soul.’

—Christopher Brown, Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas and A Natural History of Empty Lots

‘Combining flights of theory and flux schizophréniques of fantasy, Vaccari has produced what so few writers have done in spite of their best efforts: a work of genuinely original and literary science fiction.’

—D. Harlan Wilson, author of Dr Identity, Outré and Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography

‘A marvellous blend of historiography and provocative allegory.’

—Paul McAuley, author of Four Hundred Billion Stars, Fairyland and Beyond the Burn Line

Written in the vein of philosophical fictions, Even Animals Are Machines deploys the diverse armamentarium of avant garde literature and science fiction genre to decode the aftermath of Descartes’s hallucinatory meditations. Enthralling and oracular.

—Reza Negarestani, author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

>> Read an excerpt from Even Animals Are Machines

ISBN: 978-0-6456543-0-1

Cover: Matthew Revert.

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Andrés Vaccari is the author of Robotomy (Saturn Press, 1997), Smoky: Relato de Muerte, Exilio y terror (Borde Perdido, 2022), El Enjambre y las Sombras (EMB, 2018, Regional Narrative Award), Hypercapitalism and Other Tales of Planetary Madness (Wanton Sun 2023) and Suicidados (Diotima 2024). His short stories have been published in Spanish and English, and he’s the author of two stage plays and a multimedia performance piece, Nothing Here But Shadows (2019-2024). Andrés obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy from Macquarie University with a thesis on Descartes and the links between posthumanism and mechanistic biology. He’s worked for universities in Australia and Argentina as a researcher and lecturer, and his academic papers have appeared in many international journals and books. Andrés is also an accomplished musician and the leader of the industrial-gothic collective Machinic Demiurge.

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