Genesis by Bernard Beckett

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, April 2009: If robots began to self-evolve, learning to feel and create as we do, what traits would set humans apart--and help us survive? Beckett isn't the first to dramatize this question, and his Genesis pays subtle homage to his predecessors (including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick). But his near-future tale feels unique, and oddly credible. As the young historian Anax endures an examination by the Academy--an order of philosopher-rulers as imagined in Plato's Republic--we're brought up quickly on a catastrophic backstory: accelerating climate change, dust storms, rising fear and fundamentalism, the Last War, and the rise of a new Plato, who builds an island republic and seals it behind a Great Sea Fence. Plagues decimate human populations outside, while the Republic's surveillance society (thick with shadows of Huxley, Atwood, and Moore) flourishes under the Orwellian motto "Forward towards the past"--until it falls to forces led by the young rebel Adam Forde. The Academy interrogates Anax on Adam's period of imprisonment with the most advanced android of his time, and we witness their vicious sparring on the virtues of men and machines, the nature of consciousness, and what gives any life worth. It may not sound gripping, but Genesis reads like a thriller to the last word, propelled by the power of ideas longing to be unleashed. --Mari Malcolm

Product Description

Set on a remote island in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ridden world, this electrifying novel is destined to become a modern classic.


Anax thinks she knows her history. She’d better. She’s now facing three Examiners, and her grueling all-day Examination has just begun. If she passes, she’ll be admitted into the Academy—the elite governing institution of her utopian society.


But Anax is about to discover that for all her learning, the history she’s been taught isn’t the whole story. And that the Academy isn’t what she believes it to be.


In this brilliant novel of dazzling ingenuity, Anax’s examination leads us into a future where we are confronted with unresolved questions raised by science and philosophy. Centuries old, these questions have gained new urgency in the face of rapidly developing technology. What is consciousness? What makes us human? If artificial intelligence were developed to a high enough capability, what special status could humanity still claim?


Outstanding and original, Beckett’s dramatic narrative comes to a stunning close. This perfect combination of thrilling page-turner and provocative novel of ideas demands to be read again and again.



About the Author

BERNARD BECKETT, born in 1967, is a high school teacher based in Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches drama, mathematics, and English. Genesis was written while he was on a Royal Society genetics research fellowship investigating DNA mutations. The book has already received international acclaim, including two literary prizes in Beckett’s native New Zealand. Rights to Genesis have been sold in twenty-one countries.