A gripping, provocative and darkly ironic manifesto for those disillusioned with the contemporary world of science.

Literary fiction

Eight years after the successful debut of his novel Love in the Time of Global Climate Change (already translated into ten languages), Josef Pánek once again uses the figure of a scientist in his third novel—a scientist who is at odds with the system of impact factors and H-indices. The narrator/protagonist is derailed by a sense of humiliation when a prestigious journal refuses to publish one of his key articles. Subsequently at a conference he eschews the normal academic behaviour and finds himself caught in an endless cycle of drunken escapades, attempting to explain to random passers-by in Dublin what is wrong with the system which rules over science and pre-programmed academic careers. The chain of absurd situations entertains throughout the novel, while at the same time laying bare not only the fragility of the scientific ego, but also the ridiculous state into which the ostensibly prestigious system of academic conferences and publications has fallen. Rather than expanding the realms of human knowledge, it serves to construct stardom and careers which can, at any moment, suddenly collapse.

Josef Pánek (1966) received his masters and PhD in Prague, after which he worked in Norway and Australia before returning to Czechia. He debuted with a collection of short stories entitled The Opal Digger (2013). His second book, Love in the Time of Global Climate Change (Argo, 2017), won the Magnesia Litera, Czechia’s highest literary honour, in 2018. Argo has also published his novel To Them, I Am God, a swirling stream of obsessive thoughts and existential disillusionment, all unfolding in Bergen—a city where it is perpetually gloomy and dark.