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Miguel Lorenci
Madrid
Martes, 14 de enero 2025, 16:11
"Humanity is on the path to suicide as a species, but perhaps there is hope," believes Rosa Montero (Madrid, 71 years old). This is also a central theme of her new novel, 'Artificial Animals' (Seix Barral), the fourth and final book in the series about the humanoid clone Bruna Husky, an android in decline. "It's a dark novel with a bright ending," warns the author, who blends thriller and police intrigue with existentialism and science fiction without confining herself to any specific genre. Set in Madrid in 2111, it concludes the tetralogy that began with 'Tears in the Rain' and continued with 'The Weight of the Heart' and 'The Times of Hate'.
"These are not realistic novels, they are not dystopian, and they do not depict a catastrophic future," the author clarifies. The latest book is an exploration of identity and the uncertain future that the misuse of artificial intelligence may bring. According to the narrator, this represents "an evolutionary error," as stated by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. "It is the darkest and most twilight of the four novels but with a hopeful ending," she insists. "The intrigue is distressing and suggests a possible and probable danger for many, but it reaches a consoling and almost luminous conclusion about the meaning of life," she says.
"Homo sapiens has been on Earth for 300,000 years, but in the last 70, it has faced extinction three times: first with nuclear energy, then with global warming, and now with artificial intelligence," which Montero sees as a "more than real" threat. "A non-human superintelligence has been created that now educates itself. It will be far superior to ours and so powerful that I don't know how we will control it," she ventures.
Identity is another central theme of a narrative that questions "how we construct it in a liquid, decaying, and free-falling world like the one we live in." "It's about discovering what we are and, above all, how many we are," proposes the writer. Convinced that "writing is a way to lose the fear of death," she believes she has achieved this with this novel written "on fire."
"To be or not to be, but to be what" is the crucial question for Montero, who turns the Hamletian doubt on its head. "We die without knowing who we are. We try to be what our parents want first, then what our environment wants, and finally what our partner wants. We are all many, but I want to die knowing who I am, and this novel has made things a bit clearer for me," she rejoices.
She believes that "broken personality" is one of the signs of the battered modernity. "Wherever this rupture occurs, totalitarianism, Islamism, and extremism of any kind grow, all tyrannical and violent ideologies like the rising far-right, which first offers that sense of belonging by opposing a contrary," she highlights.
"We are in a crisis of democratic credibility, yes, but even so, the worst democracy is preferable to the best dictatorship. There is a legitimate criticism of democracy, but there are many people without truthful information, manipulable, many of them anti-system, who are exploited by figures like Trump," the writer asserts. "What is happening now we already saw with the Third Reich, and if we don't reform democracy, we are doomed," she predicts.
"People now feel that democracy does not speak for them, does not defend them. They see that they have become poorer, and their children will be even poorer when those responsible for the crisis not only paid nothing but have become richer than before. There is a legitimate criticism from all those who vote for Trump, those who vote for the German far-right," she lamented.
"Now we are in chaos. We are committing suicide as a species, but perhaps there is hope, and we can reinvent ourselves and live with each other. Either we all save ourselves, or none of us do," she assures. "Despite everything, I believe in the strength of life and the adaptability of human beings."
For Montero, today's mass immigration is just "the beginning of a tsunami that will only grow with global warming and "for which building walls is useless, because it is foolish and ethically questionable."
"Novels are dreams with open eyes that you don't know where they will take you," says the author, who has written this novel with the same passion as her previous ones. "This series is not a secondary branch of my literature. It is written with the same rigor as the others, and it is indeed an innovation in the sense of existence," she warns. She promised not to kill Husky in the fourth novel, and she has kept her word. "You shouldn't linger with characters," she says.
Montero has been distanced from the day-to-day of journalism for many years, yet she still maintains her love for a profession she would recommend to a loved one. "Being a reporter and chronicler is wonderful. It puts you in touch with the world and teaches you a lot of things. The profession is in crisis, of course, but it will always be necessary: democracy cannot be reinvented without strong media," she concludes.
Her mind never stops, and with this tetralogy of Bruna concluded, whose television series has been thwarted, she already has a contemporary fantasy trilogy in the works "in which there will be no dragons."
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