Exogenesis: A Dystopia with Hope

“Blade Runner meets The Benedict Option”

Out of the collapse of Old America rises Lantua, a glittering thousand-mile metropolis where drones patrol the sky and AI algorithms reward social behavior. The most compliant citizens enjoy the greatest privileges, the poorest struggle to rise up the echelon system, and criminals are subjected to brain modification. Birthing and genetic quality are controlled through mass embryonic selection, with fetuses grown outside the body in artificial wombs—a technology known as exogenesis.

But rebellion is brewing…

It’s official! My dystopian sci-fi novel, Exogenesis, has been released by Ignatius Press.

If you’ve been wondering what technology and “the Machine” might be preparing for us, Exogenesis envisions one possibility based on our current trajectory. You can buy it through the publisher Ignatius Press, as well as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other outlets.

Set a couple hundred years into the future, two very different societies emerge from the ruins of old America. One is a Machine mega-city, the other a rural society of traditional folk—the Benedites—who farm the land and refuse to follow one-child regulations.

The Benedites and their penchant for having a lot of children is a problem for Machine civilization, which is obsessively fearful of overpopulation and resource scarcity.

That’s a familiar theme, of course, in our own time. As you read the novel, you will also recognize other themes and threads that have been explored here at Pilgrims, and at related Substacks (e.g., most notably

Paul Kingsnorth

, but also

Jack Leahy

,

Hadden Turner

,

N.S. Lyons

,

FFatalism

,

Caroline Ross

etc.).

“A worthy successor to Huxley’s Brave New World with an added ingredient missing from most dystopian novels – hope.” – Fiorella De Maria, Author

The term “Benedites” was inspired by

Rod Dreher

’s book, The Benedict Option, and the whole idea of the novel presupposes, a bit fantastically, that one day hordes of traditional Christian families will flee into the wilderness to build a parallel society away from technological civilization—and also, even crazier, that some of them will speak Latin.

Well, it is fiction.

And yet, at the center of the novel are real and urgent questions for all of us living in the shadow of the Machine—questions that were posed by one of the novel’s advance reviewers, Richard Shaw, a professor of history at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College, a Catholic university in rural Canada:

This excellent and exciting thriller about the future forces the reader to consider the nature of the present and the long-term impact of our lives, actions and assumptions today. How will historians in the future look at the present when it is the past? What future am I making?

What future indeed? What beliefs and stories do we assume to be true about our lives and the world, and where are these beliefs and stories taking us? Are we conscious of the choices that we make, daily, that move us toward that future?

The two societies that in clash the novel—the Machine-based and the Benedites—are two separate answers to the question of what future we are making, and whose two trajectories we can already see within the cracks of our own society: progressive versus conservative, technological versus traditional, materialist versus spiritual, urban versus rural.

“An expertly crafted page-turner, full of unpredictable twists and turns, and a profound meditation on the loss of family in a world of near-total technological control.” - Jack Leahy, Substack Author

Substack itself is a microcosm of our social bifurcation, a place where some are optimistic about technology and the transhuman fantasies that go with it, while others are deeply skeptical. I belong to the latter group, although I haven’t given up hope for the future.  

Nor does the novel. Another of the advance reviewers of Exogenesis commented that the story has “an ingredient missing from most dystopian novels—hope”.

The “hope” of the Machine is the ideology of transhumanism and technocracy: transcend human nature, and manage society rightly, and all will be well—or all will be hell, depending on your viewpoint.

The hope of Exogenesis points elsewhere: to nature and land, to family and local community, to a spiritual center that is transcendent and rooted in sacrificial love. The Benedites are not a perfect people, of course, and few of us would feel comfortable living in their midst. Like our Amish and Old Order Mennonites, they are very traditional in their views of men, women, and sex.

That said, it’s worth pointing out that the main character of the novel is a strong-willed woman from the city. She even shoots a gun, although there’s not a hint of badassery about her.

“Glimmers with hope: Blade Runner meets The Benedict Option. A vivid read.” David Pinault, Author

In some ways Exogenesis is an update of ideas found in Brave New World; in other ways, the story inverts The Handmaid’s Tale in seeing tradition as a force for good. It is really a novel about the present, disguised as the future, and the hope we need to avoid a dystopia.

I must also confess that one of the inspirations for Exogenesis is my wife, Ruth—I wrote it for her birthday a couple of years ago. As it also happens, Ruth is the author of

School of the Unconformed

, a Substack I recommend and that some of you read, and which has some parallels with my own.

To my paying subscribers, I offer a warm thanks for your support of my writing here at Pilgrims. To free subscribers, if you want to support my writing, you can do one thing now: Buy Exogenesis direct from the publisher Ignatius Press, or Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you buy books. Give it a review at goodreads.com, Amazon, or your favorite platform or book club, and let me know what you think.

Your purchase today will help motivate my continued writing and efforts to envision what our future in the Machine might look like.