A dystopian novel about the culture of death and the reality of God’s grace

Maelin Kivela lives between two worlds.

She is a citizen of Lantua, a mega-metropolis that rose from the ashes of the United States, a technological utopia where one’s cooperation with government policies determines one’s financial and social status through government-awarded echelon points. It is also where one’s problems can be dreamed away through the ritual use of psychedelic drugs under the guidance of a neuro-guru. And where women have been freed from the physical and psychological demands of childbearing. And with predictive AI displaying the future of dozens of embryos, allowing life partners to choose the child with the greatest probability of developing the traits they desire while the remaining embryos are hygienically disposed of.

But Maelin is also a senior counselor for Lantua City’s Population Management Department. The PMD oversees the reproduction rates of the rural Benedite communities, a backwards fringe whose members believe in God, marriage between one man and one woman, and natural childbirth. They have separated themselves from what they consider Lantua’s excesses. The PMD imposes a strict population policy on the Benedites, allowing just enough children so that the communities can provide the food the city needs while sterilizing the rest.

Maelin oversees one of the sterilization teams and also has the authority to offer any Benedite who wants to leave their restrictive society a place in Lantua City.

Exogenesis by Peco Gaskovski is a dystopian novel set an indefinite number of years in the future. But the scenario it depicts is frighteningly plausible to any Christian paying attention to the signs of our times. The Benedites read as a kind of Catholic Amish, with a revived Latin in the place of Pennsylvania Dutch. These characters have very much taken the lessons of The Benedict Option to heart.

On the other side is Lantua City, a liberal utopia, with the social credit system of Communist China and a child-rearing philosophy that is part IVF nightmare and part totalitarian reading of Plato’s Republic. For, of course, any children allowed to come to term in the city’s plastic wombs are raised by state experts and not by their biological parents.

Most of the story is told from Maelin’s point of view. She did not, for me, start as a sympathetic character. She is honestly convinced she is doing the right thing. Sincere, but sincerely wrong. Yet as the story goes on, it becomes clear that Maelin is haunted by a mistake in her past, a mistake that haunts her present when a Benedite resistance group attacks the sterilization mission Maelin leads.

In the fallout that settles around her, we learn that Lantua City is no utopia but a tightly regulated, repressive regime, with no pity and no forgiveness for mistakes such as Maelin has made. As the drama unfolded, I found myself rooting for Maelin as she uncovered who had been lying to her and why. Gaskovski especially excels at portraying how his heroine discovers the truth behind the lies she has told herself and discovers a truth that threatens the entire society she lives in.

To a large extent, the story of Exogenesis is the story of the conflict between two diametric anthropologies, opposed at every turn—a Christian theory of what it means to be human versus a postmodern liberal theory. If I were to write such a story, I would have chosen to focus on the Benedite community, and especially the Benedite resistance to Lantuan totalitarianism. It’s important to note, however, that Gaskovski tells a better story than I would write by focusing on the point of view of one of the “bad guys.” Maelin’s reaction to the events that spiral out of control around her underlines all the more forcefully how Lantua City is not the paradise its public relations department might promise it to be. The moments of Maelin’s awakening to reality are among the most powerful scenes in the book.

Exogenesis is a haunting glimpse into a future world that seems disturbingly plausible when social media announces, on a regular basis, the next and newest designer baby startup. Imagine a cross between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and C. S. Lewis’ NICE, and you get something close to Lantua City. Lewis’ book, I think, was a warning, calling us to examine how much of NICE’s philosophy has extended into our own sphere. That Hideous Strength as a whole offers a myth to combat NICE’s anti-myth.

Gaskovski’s novel is less of a call to self-examination and conversion, and more of a call to evangelization. I suspect that most of us have Maelins in our own lives: people who have bought fully into the spirit of the age, or at least who have come to terms with it. Yet somewhere, deep in their subconscious perhaps, or buried in a choice they made in their past, lies a seed of dissatisfaction with the world as it is.

Stories such as Exogenesis remind us that no one, even someone who appears to spout the party line of the Culture of Death the loudest, is beyond redemption. Each of us has those voids and questions within us that God longs to fill with His grace and love. Can we let God use us as agents of conversion in a world that all too often is hurting without realizing that it’s hurting, much less why?

Exogenesis: A Novel
By Peco Gaskovski
Ignatius Press, 2023
Paperback, 331 pages