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50books_pocWhere Dawn, the first book in the trilogy, exhausted me so much I had to take a break and read other books for a while, Adulthood Rites let me directly to the next book, because I wanted to see what happened next.
Alas, in all three of these books, Butler takes on different aspects of the world, and so in both these books-- but Adulthood Rites in particular-- they ended just as I was getting into things.
In Dawn, (which I reviewed here) Lilith Iyapo becomes the Eve-- or, if you prefer, the Lilith-- to a new species, one combining humans and a tentacled species of space travelers called the Oankali. In Adulthood Rites, Lilith's first male child is kidnapped the human "Resisters" who live on the restored Earth without Oankali help, and decides to help them as best he can when he reaches adulthood.
Alas, Akin-- who was one of my favorite characters in the trilogy-- disappears altogether, merely mentioned in the third book, Adulthood Rites. That book centers on Lilith's first ooloi (third sex) child (Lilith's family gets all the firsts for a variety of reasons). It's the only book in the trilogy to be written in the first person, and it's more interesting for it, though also more problematic. (Whether it's through reading more books by people of color, RaceFail, or just the changing times, I noticed on at least one occasion that the ooloi, when discussing the difficulty humans had in describing hir sex, discussed the issue of Spanish and English genders without addressing gender in any other language, and the races on Earth are primarily English and Spanish, despite the narrative's insistence that there are a wide variety of races and cultures on the planet.) The heteronormativity of the books continue as well-- the only mention of homosexuality is wrapped in with homophobia, and you can tell that 'bisexual' was on the tip of no one's tongue when these books were published.
The third book has the most 'final' resolution; the middle book is almost too brief, and I wanted to know what happened next to Akin and the unusual extended family he created.
They were all well worth reading, and very different than our usual conception of science fiction, in a good way.
Alas, in all three of these books, Butler takes on different aspects of the world, and so in both these books-- but Adulthood Rites in particular-- they ended just as I was getting into things.
In Dawn, (which I reviewed here) Lilith Iyapo becomes the Eve-- or, if you prefer, the Lilith-- to a new species, one combining humans and a tentacled species of space travelers called the Oankali. In Adulthood Rites, Lilith's first male child is kidnapped the human "Resisters" who live on the restored Earth without Oankali help, and decides to help them as best he can when he reaches adulthood.
Alas, Akin-- who was one of my favorite characters in the trilogy-- disappears altogether, merely mentioned in the third book, Adulthood Rites. That book centers on Lilith's first ooloi (third sex) child (Lilith's family gets all the firsts for a variety of reasons). It's the only book in the trilogy to be written in the first person, and it's more interesting for it, though also more problematic. (Whether it's through reading more books by people of color, RaceFail, or just the changing times, I noticed on at least one occasion that the ooloi, when discussing the difficulty humans had in describing hir sex, discussed the issue of Spanish and English genders without addressing gender in any other language, and the races on Earth are primarily English and Spanish, despite the narrative's insistence that there are a wide variety of races and cultures on the planet.) The heteronormativity of the books continue as well-- the only mention of homosexuality is wrapped in with homophobia, and you can tell that 'bisexual' was on the tip of no one's tongue when these books were published.
The third book has the most 'final' resolution; the middle book is almost too brief, and I wanted to know what happened next to Akin and the unusual extended family he created.
They were all well worth reading, and very different than our usual conception of science fiction, in a good way.
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Date: 2009-04-13 02:32 am (UTC)I think the heteronormativity is consistent with the rest of the setting; the Oankali are, after all, doing such things as radically changing the biological makeup of humans, and their basic moral justification for their behavior is "we had to destroy the ecosystem in order to save it". Given the power they have to reshape the planets that they, ahem, colonize, it would be surprising for them not to consider homosexuality an undesirable trait.
It also seems to me that once an SF writer gets interested in alternative reproductive strategies and the social systems that evolve from them (see also, for example, Butler's short story "Bloodchild"), then it's hard not to let heteronormativity sneak in through the back door, because the writer is privileging sex-as-procreation over sex-as-social-bonding.