Police-sanitary surveillance and control in cyberpunk Granada.

Who is behind the spirit or drug of invisibility, which has caused so many chosen blackouts – a euphemism for suicide –? That is what agent Santos Ololquiaga is investigating, from the Harmonization and Hygienization Department of UniComplex, the organization that dominates the world through neurochips of well-being and health, or rather of localization, surveillance and police-sanitary control.

All the people who have been blacked out by their own choice have something in common: they have been through DumDum, a studio-laboratory for recording and remixing psychovisions – mental visions, daydreams, sound-visual hallucinations that can be shared and marketed – run by Antonio Vigo in Granada. With the help of the pharmacist Ruth Rull and the complicity of Voight (also called Stein), Vigo uses, installs and sells anti-surveillance devices that deworm the brain and make it invisible, thus avoiding control technology. Once the effect of the drug has worn off, those who have been injected with it feel that they are being watched again by the neurochips and develop an insurmountable withdrawal syndrome.

In his search for those responsible for the invisibility drug, Santos Ololquiaga will reveal an internal struggle within UniComplex, where not only control is at stake, but also the way of exercising it: it is impossible to avoid the fear of being turned off at any moment.

DumDum, estudio de registro is a journey into a cyberpunk universe with the hallmarks of Justo Navarro, «one of the great Spanish prose writers of the last decades» (Antonio Lozano, Librújula): the relationship between memory and imagination, the figure of the double and unreliable narrators, control and surveillance systems and an atmosphere of suffocating intrigue, with music and the city of Granada as a background landscape. Like the best science fiction, DumDum, estudio de registro manages to make us wonder at the presence of that which, while not familiar, is nevertheless recognizable.

«Discreetly, book by book, without exhibitionism or fanfare, Justo Navarro has become one of the most valuable and unique voices in contemporary Spanish narrative» (Ignacio F. Garmendia, El Día de Córdoba).

«Whatever they are about, there is always a pattern in Justo Navarro's novels that guides them. That pattern is the writing, creating atmospheres and human types that are somewhat hazy, comfortable in a certain existential indeterminacy" (J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip, Babelia).

"Justo Navarro is an author of challenges. And it is fortunate for his readers that he is so" (José María Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC).