Zbierzchowski, Cezary
Entry updated 17 July 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1975- ) Polish author, a graduate of the University of Warsaw. From 2005 to 2010 he was a regular columnist and critic for the Online Magazine Creatio Fantastica.
Most of Zbierzchowski's fiction, including his two novels to date, forms a loose Future History commonly known as the Ramma universe, named after a country in a Parallel World whose apparent advances towards Posthuman Transcendence and Singularity repeatedly generate new forms of social disintegration and existential catastrophe (see End of the World). Individual stories range from intimate studies of damaged Memory and Identity (see Psychology) through Cyberpunk to planetary Military SF; recurring concerns include the instability of the self, the permeability of reality, AI, technologically mediated Immortality, and the consequences of humanity acquiring powers it is psychologically or morally unprepared to control.
He made his fiction debut with the story "Innego nie będzie" ["There Will Be No Other"] (March 2004 Ubik Fantastyka). A conceptual overture to his entire Future History, it introduces the Ramma sequence, describing an apparent Disaster in which more than 100 million people simultaneously die, the victims being those who possess "souls". Its central conceit literalizes theology as speculative science: God (see Religion) is a material, self-aware form of information, dispersed through selected human minds and eventually departing Earth once a critical mass is reached. The story is a satire of the media's inability to recognize events outside its existing conceptual framework, fusing metaphysical (see Metaphysics) speculation with materialist sf that Zbierzchowski would develop in his subsequent works.
Zbierzchowski has since published over a dozen genre short stories in Nowa Fantastyka, Science Fiction and various anthologies. His book debut was Requiem dla lalek ["Requiem for Dolls"] (coll 2008). His first novel, Holocaust F (2013), was well received, earning him the Jerzy Żuławski Literary Award, the Sfinks Award and the inaugural Reflektor Award for emerging writers in the Nowa Fantastyka Awards. The second novel in the Ramma sequence is Distortion (2019).
These two novels, despite being set in the same universe, nevertheless differ markedly in scale and method. Holocaust F is a baroque, increasingly metaphysical story of the End of the World narrated principally by Franciszek Elias III, a centuries-old member of a corporate dynasty whose consciousness is repeatedly transferred between evolving replacement mediums. The civilization surrounding him has been transformed by a neural network permitting the direct exchange of memories, emotions and thought (see Telepathy); its corruption produces mass psychosis and the emergence of a quasi-Hive Mind of altered humans popularly understood as Vampires. What initially resembles a violent Cyberpunk extrapolation of social networking consequently expands into a much larger meditation on Identity, Immortality, AI, free will and the nature of reality itself. The novel repeatedly complicates any simple opposition between human and Posthuman: while Elias retains biological continuity while repeatedly changing bodies, his Android partner Luiza behaves more recognizably humanly than her partner. As the narrative progresses, not merely political institutions but apparently stable distinctions between individual and collective, artificial and natural, physical and metaphysical begin to collapse, culminating in a cosmological vision of interacting worlds and realities.
Distortion, set earlier in the same universe, initially seems radically different: an immersive work of Military SF narrated by Markus Trent, a reservist corporal deployed with "stabilization" forces to an occupied territory, who records his experiences in letters to his estranged young son. Its depiction of insurgency, military bureaucracy and the progressive brutalization of occupying soldiers evokes the twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The apparent war novel, however, gradually becomes Horror and metaphysical sf when Trent's unit occupies an outpost built above an incomprehensible, possibly Alien object, capable of manipulating perception and behaviour. The resulting titular "distortion" is simultaneously perceptual (see Perception) and moral, as the soldiers become increasingly unable to distinguish external manipulation from the psychological consequences of War.
Both novels are linked by a consistently pessimistic (see Optimism and Pessimism) concern with the instability of human identity and agency when confronted by technologies, intelligences and systems operating beyond individual comprehension.
Zbierzchowski's most notable work outside the Ramma universe is his Near Future full-cast audiobook drama Chłopi 2050, czyli Agronauci w czasach katastrofy klimatycznej ["Peasants 2050, or Agronauts in Times of Climate Catastrophe"] (2020) inspired by a WWF report on Poland in 2050. Set in a near-future Polish village and in dialogue with the Polish classic Chłopi ["The Peasants"] (1904-1909, 4vols) by Władysław Reymont, it depicts rural life transformed by Technology – Robots, exoskeletons, drones, water scarcity, massive greenhouses – Climate Change, migrants, and Ecological politics.
His work is generally understood by critics as continuing a national tradition of both Hard SF and Sense of Wonder-style Fabulation associated with such writers a Jacek Dukaj and Marek S Huberath; the destabilization of reality and identity also recalls Philip K Dick, while the distrust of technological and ideological systems that promise human Transcendence, combined with elements of Military SF and epic-scale world-building, recalls the works of Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and Peter Watts. [PKo]
Cezary Zbierzchowski
born Sierpc, Poland: 3 May 1975
works
series
Ramma
- Requiem dla lalek ["Requiem for Dolls"] (Warsaw, Poland: Fantasmagoricon, 2008) [coll: Ramma: pb/]
- Requiem dla lalek ["Requiem for Dolls"] (Warsaw, Poland: Powergraph, 2008) [coll: exp of the above with 3 additional stories: Ramma: pb/Rafał Kosik]
- Holocaust F (Warsaw, Poland: Powergraph, 2013) [Ramma: pb/Rafał Kosik]
- Distortion (Warsaw, Poland: Powergraph, 2019) [Ramma: pb/Rafał Kosik]
individual titles
- Chłopi 2050, czyli Agronauci w czasach katastrofy klimatycznej ["Peasants 2050, or Agronauts in Times of Climate Catastrophe"] (Poland: Storytel, 2020) [audiobook: na/]
links
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