Book 9

[tala-tale.livejournal.com]

Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler.

This is a three-in-one reprinting of Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. From the back cover:

Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is ressurected -- by miraculously powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irrisistible need to heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: their own children.

I was really torn about this trilogy. The Oankali are fascinating, I loved the notion of triads with a male a female and a neuter instead of the typical human dyadic pairing, and the relationship between the Oankali and the humans is complex and engaging.

At the same time, the central conflict of all three books is essentially that humans have a strong, atavistic aversion to the Oankali, and object to the idea of being slowly hybridized "out of existence." Not only does the ultimate resolution (the neuters of the next generation, the constructs, apparently just smell so good that they're irresistible) not really seem to me to actually *address* the fundamental objections of the humans (basically, biochemistry overrides all other objections and now everyone's in love), but those objections seem a little overstated to me, especially given Butler's setup.

Humans can, and do, get over their aversion to the Oankali. They even fall in love with them. Given all the wonderful things the Oankali can do, most of which are the result of their basic biology, I'm honestly not sure that, when paired with the Oankali ability to soothe and attract using airborne chemicals, humans would actually have resisted so long. At the very least, I would think that there would be at least some humans who actively embraced the idea of merging with the Oankali, in addition to those who did so reluctantly and guiltily or fought to the death to avoid it.

The books' heavy reliance on the idea of the supremacy of biology in determining behavior meant that Butler ultimately completely sidestepped actually having to explore and resolve the psychology of the humans -- in a lot of ways, they're portrayed as somewhat angst-ridden breeding stock; their objections and concerns are never taken seriously by the Oankali, and ultimately I didn't feel like they were taken all that seriously by Butler, either.

Despite that, there was something very engaging about the exploration of what happens when two cultures whose fundamental experience of the world is completely different meet up -- and what happens when one of those cultures is so much more powerful that, even as they claim to want to embrace the other culture, they override its essential identity with utter certainty that they're in the right.

I guess ultimately what I struggled with was the tension between the very likable characters and the completely inevitable victory of paternalism -- other than smelling really good, and acquiring the ability to shape and reshape themselves which is provided by the human genetic predisposition to cancer, the constructs seem to be much more Oankali than human (which makes sense, since they're constructed by Oankali neuters, not humans). Despite their claims that humans are possibly the most intelligent species they've ever encountered, the humans are never really portrayed as anything other than less-than, somewhat misguided, and... delicous.

On behalf of my species, I'd like a little more than that!