Replay: Growing Roots in a Machine Age with Peco Gaskovski

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Replay: Growing Roots in a Machine Age with Peco Gaskovski

The Wood Between the Worlds

Nicholas Kotar

, and

Peco

May 23, 2024

Transcript

Cross-post from The Wood Between the Worlds

Last week I had the pleasure of being invited to the World Between the Woods podcast. Nicholas Kotar, who is an instructor at the St.Basil Writer's Workshop along with Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau, interviewed me on myriad Machine topics: how my wife Ruth Gaskovski and I first became aware of the Machine (long before it was called the Machine); how novelists experience empathic resonance with society (but are terrible historians); and a good deal of talk about my sci-fi novel Exogenesis, including one of its most chilling lines: Who we are depends on who is watching us. I haven’t done many podcasts, so for those of you who want to see and hear who the “Peco” behind this Substack is, the interview is a good introduction. -

Peco

You probably know

Peco

best from his Substack

Pilgrims in the Machine

, but he’s also the author of "Exogenesis”, an incredible book that belongs in the canon of speculative fiction.

Join me for a wonderful conversation in which Peco and I discuss:

How he and his wife
Ruth Gaskovski
first became aware of how technology encroaches on relationship;
How to retrain ourselves and our polarized societies in the art of engaging in relationship;
How good novelists have an empathic resonance with society and catch the zeitgeist of their time;
How “Exogenesis” is a story about the present disguised as a comfortable dystopian future; and
The chilling phrase from his novel: “Who we are depends on who’s looking at us.”

Get ready for a great conversation set on the border between technologically-oppressive urban sprawl and idyllic pastures where cattle graze.