The Cartographer of Uncharted Waters
A Reflection on Peco Gaskovski's Exogenesis
Navigating the passages between books and being
Dear friends,
Last fall, as I planned my reading for 2025, I asked my readers for recommendations. My friend and fellow writer, Ruth Gaskovski, suggested a book written by her husband. I hadn’t heard of the book, but Ruth and her husband Peco were voices I trusted. Here are my thoughts on Exogenesis.
I've navigated through Peco Gaskovski's Exogenesis several times since it landed on my desk. I initially read for story, finding myself swept into a future America split between two incompatible visions of human flourishing. I marveled at Gaskovski’s craft, the manner in which he weaves complex philosophical questions into narrative without losing the human pulse at the book's center. I returned to the book time and again as someone who has spent decades watching technology reshape the Navy, rural communities, and family life—finding myself unsettled by how prescient this "warning fiction" feels.
Exogenesis arrives at a moment when artificial intelligence dominates headlines, genetic screening becomes routine, and we're collectively asking whether our technological capabilities are outpacing our moral imagination. Gaskovski, a psychologist and writer whose Pilgrims in the Machine newsletter has consistently examined technology's impact on human flourishing, brings both intellectual rigor and storytelling grace to questions that feel increasingly urgent: What happens when we can engineer not just our tools, but ourselves? And in the act of such creation, what do we become?
Set several centuries hence, the novel presents a divided America where two societies have crystallized around fundamentally different answers to these questions. In the high-tech megacity, children are conceived through genetic optimization and raised in state institutions, while algorithms monitor every aspect of human behavior. In the traditional farming communities, families remain intact, technology stays limited, and old ways of understanding human purpose persist. Between these worlds moves Maelin, our guide through the philosophical and emotional terrain where these visions collide.
Exogenesis signals its ambitions early: this is speculative fiction that uses world-building as a moral laboratory. Gaskovski makes it clear that we're in “warning fiction" territory—extrapolative storytelling that asks us to examine the trajectory of our present choices.
The book's title telegraphs the central concern: exogenesis, the hypothesis that life on Earth originated elsewhere in the universe. Gaskovski uses the concept metaphorically to explore how technological civilization might birth something so different from natural human existence that we become aliens to ourselves. The promise is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin or Kim Stanley Robinson—speculative work that takes ideas seriously while never forgetting that ideas must be lived by actual people.
This promise is kept remarkably well. The novel succeeds because it refuses the easier path of pure allegory or pure adventure. Instead, it commits to the more demanding work of showing how large moral questions play out in the texture of daily life, in the choices individuals make about love, family, and meaning.
Gaskovski's prose is elegant and precise without being ornate, capable of handling both intimate character moments and expansive philosophical territory. His sentences have the measured quality of someone thinking carefully through difficult questions, never rushing toward easy answers.
The novel's structure serves its thematic concerns through layered revelation. We begin with Maelin's personal crisis. Gradually, we come to understand how her individual struggle reflects larger civilizational tensions. This allows Gaskovski to explore his themes without falling into the common sci-fi trap of reducing characters to mere idea-carriers. Maelin remains compellingly human throughout. Her internal conflicts drive the narrative even as they illuminate broader questions.
Most impressive is how the author handles exposition. Rather than info-dumping about his imagined future, Gaskovski reveals his world through lived experience, conversation, and reflection. When we learn about genetic optimization or algorithmic surveillance, it comes through characters grappling with these realities in their daily lives, making the speculative elements feel organic rather than imposed.
The dialogue deserves particular attention. Gaskovski has an ear for how people talk when they're working through fundamental disagreements—the way conversations about technology and values can be both intimate and cosmic at once. His characters speak like real people wrestling with real questions, not like mouthpieces for competing ideologies.
The novel's central thematic architecture rests on a deceptively simple question: What is essentially human, and how much of it can we change before we become something else entirely? But Gaskovski approaches this question from multiple angles, creating a kind of philosophical kaleidoscope.
The high-tech society represents one answer: humanity is fundamentally material, improvable through engineering, and best served by maximizing individual choice and technological capability. Children are optimized before birth, families are restructured for efficiency, and algorithms handle moral decisions. This isn't presented as a dystopian nightmare but as a logical extension of contemporary values—personal autonomy, scientific progress, and technological solutions to human limitations.
The traditional communities offer a competing vision: humanity has essential characteristics tied to natural processes, family structures, and spiritual dimensions that resist technological manipulation. Here, children are born through natural pregnancy, families remain intact across generations, and moral decisions emerge from community wisdom rather than algorithmic analysis.
What elevates the book beyond simple binary thinking is its exploration of the costs and benefits of both approaches. The high-tech society achieves remarkable reductions in disease, inequality, and social conflict—but at the cost of what residents of traditional communities would recognize as fundamental human experiences. The traditional communities preserve continuity, meaning, and natural human relationships—but potentially at the cost of healing, opportunity, and individual freedom.
Through Maelin's journey between these worlds, Gaskovski examines how individuals navigate the civilizational choices they face. Her personal struggles with identity, belonging, and purpose become a lens for understanding the broader tensions between technological possibility and human limitation, between engineering solutions and accepting mystery.
Reading Exogenesis produces a complex emotional response that mirrors its thematic complexity. There's the intellectual pleasure of encountering serious ideas handled with sophistication. Then we find ourselves experiencing a deeper unease as the fictional scenarios echo contemporary debates about genetic screening, artificial intelligence, and family structure.
The book generates productive anxiety—the constructive discomfort of recognizing difficult choices that require active moral engagement. Gaskovski never lets us settle into easy answers or comfortable distance from the questions he raises.
Most powerful is the novel’s ability to evoke empathy for characters committed to fundamentally different visions of human flourishing. Even when we might disagree with particular choices, we understand the values and concerns that drive them. This emotional generosity prevents the book from becoming polemical and keeps us engaged with the human stakes of technological change.
Exogenesis challenged my assumptions about technological progress. These ideas continue to resonate months after my first reading. My Navy experience taught me to appreciate how technology can solve complex problems and save lives. I've seen firsthand how satellite communications enable rescue operations and how advanced navigation systems prevent maritime disasters. But Gaskovski's novel asks harder questions about the cumulative effect of technological solutions on human experience itself.
The book's treatment of family structure affected me as a father. The high-tech society's approach to child-rearing—genetic optimization followed by institutional raising—represents the natural endpoint of contemporary trends toward maximizing parental choice and professional expertise in child development. Seeing it extrapolated to its conclusion illuminates the true costs: the loss of the unpredictable gift of unengineered life, the elimination of the formative experience of raising one's own children, the reduction of family bonds to convenience rather than commitment.
Reading about Maelin's struggle to understand her identity across these two worlds deepened my thinking about cultural transition. My own movement from naval service to rural Tennessee involved navigating between different value systems and ways of life. While less dramatic than Maelin's journey, it gave me experiential insight into how individuals process the civilizational choices that the larger society collectively makes.
Exogenesis positions itself within the tradition of philosophical science fiction which includes Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Kim Stanley Robinson's climate fiction. Like these works, it uses speculative elements as tools for examining contemporary moral and social questions.
However, Gaskovski brings a distinctly contemporary sensibility to these classic concerns. Where earlier works often focused on political systems or environmental crises, Exogenesis grapples with biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and data surveillance—the specific technological challenges of our current moment. The novel feels relevant alongside recent non-fiction works like Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus or Carl Benedikt Frey's The Technology Trap, which examine similar questions from scholarly perspectives.
The book also connects to a growing body of work that takes religious and spiritual perspectives seriously without requiring readers to believe. Authors like Marilynne Robinson, Paul Kingsnorth, and Rachel Held Evans have explored how traditional spiritual insights might inform responses to contemporary challenges. Gaskovski contributes to this conversation by showing how technological and spiritual worldviews create fundamentally different approaches to questions of human purpose and flourishing.
Several threads from my broader reading experience found new connections through Exogenesis. The book's exploration of genetic optimization resonates with debates raised in Michael Sandel's The Case Against Perfection about the ethics of genetic enhancement. Its treatment of algorithmic surveillance connects to Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and its analysis of how data collection reshapes human behavior.
But the novel also illuminated connections I hadn't previously recognized. Reading it alongside my recent engagement with Marcus Aurelius's Meditations highlighted how questions about human nature and moral living persist across technological epochs. The Stoic emphasis on what remains within our control finds new relevance as algorithms increasingly shape our choices and genetic engineering expands the realm of biological possibility.
The book's examination of competing approaches to family and community also connects to themes I've been exploring in my reading about rural life and traditional communities. Works like Wendell Berry's essays or Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option examine how intentional communities can preserve alternative values within technological society. Exogenesis extrapolates these tensions into a future where such choices become civilizational rather than merely personal.
Exogenesis succeeds brilliantly at its primary ambition: using speculative fiction to illuminate moral questions about technological development that feel both urgent and underexplored in contemporary discourse. Rather than offering easy answers about whether technology is good or bad, Gaskovski provides a framework for thinking about the human costs and benefits of specific technological choices.
The novel's technical achievement lies in its balance of accessibility and sophistication. The philosophical content never overshadows character development. Neither does the story avoid the intellectual complexity its themes demand. This balance makes the book valuable as literature and as a contribution to the broader cultural conversation about technology and human values.
Perhaps most importantly, the book demonstrates how fiction can serve as a moral laboratory in ways that purely analytical or journalistic approaches cannot. By showing us characters living within different technological arrangements, Exogenesis allows us to experience the human implications of abstract choices about genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and social organization.
The novel's power emerges from how successfully it integrates its various elements. The technical craft—elegant prose, careful pacing, layered revelation—serves the thematic exploration of competing visions of human flourishing. The philosophical content gains emotional weight through Maelin's personal journey, while her individual struggles illuminate broader civilizational questions.
This integration extends to how the book connects speculative elements to contemporary realities. The genetic optimization and algorithmic surveillance that shape the fictional future extrapolate from technologies already emerging in our present. This gives the novel's "warning fiction" quality genuine weight—we're not reading about impossible futures but plausible extensions of current trends.
The book also successfully bridges literary and popular fiction sensibilities. Readers seeking intellectual engagement will find serious treatment of complex questions, while those looking for a compelling story will discover characters and conflicts worth caring about. This accessibility expands the potential audience for the important conversations the book wants to foster.
Exogenesis contributes to several important ongoing conversations. Within science fiction, it demonstrates how the genre can engage contemporary technological questions without falling into either techno-optimism or dystopian despair. The book shows a path toward speculative fiction that's intellectually serious and narratively satisfying.
More broadly, the novel advances cultural discussion about biotechnology and artificial intelligence by focusing on human rather than purely technical considerations. Rather than asking whether particular technologies will work, Gaskovski asks whether they will serve human flourishing—and what definition of human flourishing we should use to evaluate them.
The book's treatment of religious and traditional perspectives also makes an important contribution to cultural discourse that often marginalizes such viewpoints. Without requiring agreement with traditional positions, Exogenesis shows how they raise legitimate questions about technological development that purely secular approaches might overlook.
Exogenesis succeeds as both literature and cultural intervention because it provides tools for thinking about choices we're actively making rather than merely imagining distant futures. The genetic screening, artificial intelligence, and data surveillance the book explores aren't science fiction scenarios but present realities expanding in scope and sophistication.
This gives the novel continuing relevance as these technologies develop. Rather than becoming dated as particular predictions prove accurate or inaccurate, the book's framework for evaluating technological choices remains valuable. The questions Gaskovski raises—What do we want to preserve about natural human experience? How do we balance individual choice with communal wisdom? What role should efficiency play in moral decisions?—will remain pertinent regardless of specific technological developments.
The book would be valuable for anyone grappling with questions about technology and human values, but particularly so for readers who want to engage these questions seriously without predetermined answers. Parents considering genetic screening, professionals working on artificial intelligence, policymakers regulating biotechnology, and thoughtful citizens trying to understand the implications of technological change would all find insights worth considering.
Exogenesis ultimately suggests that our technological choices are too important to leave to technologists alone, yet too complex to resolve by simply rejecting innovation. The book calls for the kind of patient, careful moral reasoning that considers both the possibilities and the costs of reshaping human nature through technological means. In a cultural moment often characterized by polarized reactions to technological change, this measured approach offers a valuable alternative—not the final word on these questions, but an essential contribution to conversations we cannot avoid having.
Reading Exogenesis convinced me that it represents the kind of thoughtful engagement with technological questions our moment demands. It's warning fiction in the best sense: not prophecy of inevitable doom, but a call to moral attention while we still have choices to make.
I am thrilled to announce Exogenesis by Peco Gaskovski is my 2025 Book of the Year!
Order your copy of Peco’s book here: Exogenesis
Also, check out my previous interview with Peco at the link below.
Here are my previous selections as Book of the Year:
2024 - The Requisitions by Samuél Lopez-Barrantes
2023 - The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
2022 - A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
2021 - Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield
2020 - The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Here’s to the books that take us beyond the shelf and into deeper waters,
Matthew Long is a writer and retired sailor living in rural western Tennessee.
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Matthew, what can I say, this is a marvelous, insightful review that demonstrates deep engagement with Peco's novel. Thank you so much for sharing it with your readers and selecting it as your book of the year! I hope that it may prompt some more people to discover this gem :)
This is a first-rate, in-depth review, Matthew. How rare it is to come across a single work - a novel, no less - that seems to do it all: to engage the reader deeply in story and lesson, raise questions so pertinent to where we are and where we're headed, offer new perspectives on technology's costs to humans, and offer you as reader the opportunity to discern its direct relationship to your own life. That any one book can do these things as well as you describe them is quite an achievement for an author.