A little-known gem of utopian/dystopian fiction published in 1919 tellsthe story of a eugenically engineered society of the future. It is the year 2218. In "Villautopia," the capital of a Central American nation, thestate selects young, biologically desirable citizens to act as breeders. Embryosare implanted in males to increase a flagging population rate, and the offspringare raised in state facilities until old enough to choose their own, nonnuclearfamilies. Sterilization of children with mental or physical abnormalities furtherensures the purity of the gene pool. Written two years before Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and twelve years beforeAldous Huxley's Brave New World, Eugenia recounts the story of Ernesto, who at age twenty-three is selected as a breeder. Celiana, his thirty-eight-year-old loverand an accomplished scholar, is deemed unfit for reproduction. To cope withher feelings of guilt and hopelessness, she increasingly turns to marijuana, andher scholarly productivity declines. Meanwhile Ernesto falls in love with a fellowbreeder, a young woman named Eugenia-but the life they ultimately choose isnot quite what the state had envisioned. Taking up important challenges of modern society-population growth, reproductive behavior and technologies, experimentation with gender roles, and changes in family dynamics-Eugenia is published here in English for thefirst time. Sarah A. Buck Kachaluba and Aaron Dziubinskyj provide a criticalapparatus helping readers to understand the novel's literary genesis and genealogyas well as its historical context. Arising from its twentieth-century origins, yetremarkably contemporary, Eugenia is a treasure of speculative fiction. | Eugenia by Eduardo Urzaiz, Paperback | Indigo Chapters