Book Review: Exogenesis
A Personal Reflection on Dystopian Literature and Peco Gaskovski's Exogenesis
Exogenesis by Peco Gaskovski, Ignatius Press, 2023, $18.95, 331 pp.
Exogenesis is a brilliant dystopian novel that I’m ranking up there with the classics of the genre for its clean prose, compelling narrative, and cultural acuity.
Set 250 years in the future around the totalitarian State of Lantua, the story centers on a female protagonist, Maelin Kivela—a counselor and field commander for the PMD (the Population Management Department for Lantua City)—who is forced to wrestle with the morality of the Lantuan social strategy while struggling to hide a personal secret that threatens her status in the State’s social credit system.
If the storyline sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because Western literature is replete with works offering visions for the best society—and many of its worst forms. Some of these works are prosaic and philosophical (e.g., Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’ Leviathan, etc.) while others are imaginative and fictional (e.g., Bacon’s The New Atlantis and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). Plus, in the last couple of decades, there has been a sharp rise in the popularity of young adult dystopian thrillers (e.g., Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, The Giver, etc.).
Regardless of their form or perspective, all of these works seek to raise (and sometimes answer) one or more of the following perennial human questions: What is man and what is he for? What is the best society or form of government for man? What exactly is society? What is government? What is culture? What is justice? What is good, true, or beautiful in these communities and institutions? Ultimately, what is reality?
When an imaginative work exploring the perennial questions of the human condition represents a world or place that is “inordinately superior to the present world,” it is deemed utopian literature. Similarly, when such a work “manifests exaggerated versions of some of its unsavory aspects,” it falls to its sister genre of dystopian literature.1 Both of these genres are part of the same literary family but where utopian literature tends to function as satire critiquing contemporary life and society, dystopian literature is less satirical and functions more like fantasy or science fiction to accomplish the same goal.
Although utopian literature has conceptually had a long history in Western literature, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) is often considered the father of the genre, since he ultimately named it and qualified its characteristics when he critiqued European society in his satirical novella, Utopia, published in 1516. More took his title from a clever combination of two Greek words, eutopia and outopia, which mean “good place” and “no place,” respectively.2 More’s work is more or less a synthesis of classical travel literature, medieval political philosophy, Christian pietistic and communal ideals, and humanistic rationalism (e.g., Euhemerus’s Sacred History, Lucian’s A True History, Plato’s Republic, etc.). Although Utopia is less known by contemporary readers, works like those mentioned previously (i.e., New Atlantis and Gulliver’s Travels) are notable examples of More’s offspring.
The dystopian genre (“bad place”) arose out of utopian satire and reflects on utopian ideals gone very badly. Formally, dystopian literature represents “a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected into a disastrous future culmination.” In other words, dystopian literature depicts hell on earth.
During the twentieth century, at least four variations or types of dystopian fiction seemed to emerge. Author and philosopher, Darren Allen, identifies the four sub-genres of dystopia as follows:3
Orwellian (exemplified by George Orwell’s 1984) where “society is ruled by an autocratic totalitarian party or elite group that limits choice through oppressive means such as repressing speech and suppressing minorities.”
Huxleyan (exemplified by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) where “society is ruled by democratic, totalitarian, capitalist, and/or technocratic systems. A surplus of choice is offered as control and is realized through desire, debt, narcotic, technical necessity and implicit threat of violence.”
Kafkaesque (exemplified by Franz Kafka’s The Trial): where “society is ruled by bureaucracy. Bureaucratic ‘red tape’ is the form of control that is used to frustrate and dehumanize citizens of a society through pointless affairs. Here we find a state of affairs which permits and encourages those systems that demoralize society, especially those who threaten ‘management.’”
Phildickian (exemplified by Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, the 1968 novel that was the inspiration for Blade Runner (1982) directed by Ridley Scott). In this framework, society is ruled “by replacing reality with abstract totalitarianism, or rule by disengagement. The conversion of social spaces such as classrooms, offices, markets, and even prisons into ‘immersive’ online holodecks with positive and negative reward systems for participants.”
Of course, there are hybrid frameworks that combine elements of these variations, but the point of recognizing them is to anticipate how society can be (or is being) manipulated and to what end. Exogenesis represents a true hybrid of dystopian types, employing elements of all four while leaning heavily on the Huxleyan.
Exogenesis’s State of Lantua is a thousand-mile metropolis that stretches from old Boston to old Chicago and depends on artificial intelligence to operate as a technopoly. From the seats of one of its gunships or hovercrafts, the city appears to be a vast web of lights that is either “a glittering diadem upon the head of North America—or else a hooked blade jammed into the eastern flank of the continent” (46). The Lantuanians, with all the luxuries and social benefits that come with their valued citizenship, view it as the former. But the latter is certainly the perspective of the oppressed minority, the homesteaders outside the city in the remote Lantuan Territories. These are homesteaders, mostly colonies of Mother Earthers, obscure and zealous Zhangs, and the more prominent Amish-like Benedites.
Since about 2091 A.D., Lantua has reigned as “the undisputed queen of the continent”, and for the duration of its incumbency, “her sixty-million citizens enjoyed the glories of her wealth and peace” (46). But the wealth and peace of its citizens depend on their full participation and commitment to the State’s social credit system, which is derived from its threefold strategy to manage the people who live both inside and outside the city. As is true of all the dystopian paradigms, the State of Lantua manages the people by controlling “the seed of their bodies… the seed of their lands… [and] the seed of their minds” (7).
Those in the city are subject to constant surveillance from cameras and drones, systemic propaganda, indulgence of desires, a promise to rise in social status for good behavior, and threats of social demotion for deceit, dereliction, or defiance. Additionally, citizens have ready access to an ample supply of psychedelics and cyclohexanone-derived anesthetics for controlling feelings and emotions, especially for creating disassociation from trauma.
Most monstrous of Lantuan practices, however, is its population management strategy. Children are birthed by exogenesis, a process where sperm and egg are united in a petri dish to form hundreds of embryos. These are matured in biopouches, analyzed by their DNA for characteristic probabilities, and cataloged as individual profiles. Guardians review the profiles for characteristics they want to propagate (i.e., features, IQ, longevity, etc.) and an embryo is selected (along with a couple of backups in case there’s a problem); the rest are destroyed (chemically dissolved into compost). The chosen embryos are raised to fruition, artificially “birthed,” and then raised in care homes where the guardians can visit and “parent” their children. Lantuan philosophy is appalling if not chilling for its proximity to our own reality.
The profile embryos… belonged first and foremost to the Lantuan state, which had created the technology of exogenesis that gave them life and grew them to fruition. They belonged secondarily to the guardians who provided the sperm and the eggs… The State of Lantua staunchly resisted the production of any surplus population when possible. (245)
Those outside the city are arguably better off, but only marginally so. They are also surveilled by drones, rewarded or punished through control of their access to seed to plant their crops, and are regularly propagandized: annually recruited with incentives to emigrate to the city and start over with luxuries and a new identity. Their population management is quite harrowing in that the youth are regularly protocoled (i.e., percentages of pubescent teens were selected for sterilization so the Benedites remain a minority population). An epigraph at the beginning of the book taken from the fictional A History of the Early Benedites by Gidwyn Klüg explains the Benedites’ fundamental place in the story:
As the Old World collapsed, radical followers of the Christian religion fled the cities and sought security in rural areas. Here, like the old Amish, they formed small agrarian communities centered on traditional family and religious practice, and used limited technology in their daily lives. They called themselves “Benedites”, a name whose origin is unclear but could be connected to “Saint Benedict”, a holy man from the Roman age. Some of the Benedite sects even adopted the Classical Latin language as their native tongue—a linguistic feat that remains a marvel to this day. The peculiar ways of the Benedites might not have troubled the new State of Lantua, which developed in parallel with them, were it not for one thing: the Benedite tendency to have large families. This tendency was regarded as a grave threat to population management, and triggered the first mass sterilization policies.
Without going deep into the details so as not to spoil the story, the inciting incident takes place when the protagonist, Commander Kivela, is ambushed in the Territories while protocoling the breeding population of the Benedites. In the aftermath of the ambush, a chain of events and encounters unsettles her confidence in the very system she has worked to preserve. She has an especially moving experience when she encounters her own babies—still embryos in biopouches, but moving, live babies nonetheless—and realizes all of them will be destroyed and turned to compost—except for the one she chooses.
The plot is fairly simple and admittedly lacks a bit of the complexity that gives fantasy and science fiction the texture and architectural depth necessary for authentic believability. Even so, the simplicity works to the novel’s advantage such that the reader feels the story’s ethical gravitas. Plus, suspended belief came easily enough given the plot moves quickly, the characters are credible, and the moral tension is genuinely irresistible. The story carried me along such that I finished it in only five or six sittings—a real accomplishment given my usual habit is to read only a few pages at a time from roughly 20 or so books during a single sitting.
The book’s biggest draw is its uncanny relevance to our current situation. The novel demonstrates a keen awareness of our present anxieties about anti-humanistic technologies which even now threaten to draw modern society into a hard technopoly. Through the pervasive use of biotechnology, the exponential proliferation of AI, obscenely intrusive digital surveillance, and the continual erosion of embodied relationships—especially that of the nuclear family (if such a concept even exists anymore)—the “civilized world” is quietly surrendering to algorithmic governance. Gaskovski’s vision is more proximate and unsettling than Huxley’s Brave New World, which, in this writer’s opinion, was much closer to the mark than Orwell’s chilling 1984. For what it’s worth, I heartily recommend Exogenesis.
M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015), 413.
Abrams and Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 413-414.
Darren Allen, “Four Kinds of Dystopia,” Films for Action, 2017 https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/four-kinds-of-dystopia/