#1: Dawn, Octavia Butler

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

Dawn is the first volume in a trilogy by Octavia Butler named first Xenogenesis and later Lilith's Brood, the second name being something of a spoiler.

Lilith Iyapo wakes, again and again, in a cold, featureless room. She is interrogated by unseen beings who ask her questions. Eventually, she learns that-- as she had feared-- the Earth has been made uninhabitable by nuclear war, and that-- as she had never suspect-- alien beings have take in the Earth's few survivors. They plan to repopulate the Earth with the few humans left. But they also have other desires, which only become clear as the novel continues.



The aliens want to blend their genetic materials with the humans; it is, they explain, the only way their species can continue. Lilith's confusion and mixed feelings, and her eventual willingness to work with the aliens (Oankali), become the focus of most of the book. The second third or so has Lilith training a small group of humans to inhabit the Earth to come. Things, as they so often do, don't go well, and the book concludes with a pregnant Lilith vowing to do better with the next group she trains.



There are some really nice details here; the multicultural cast, the way the humans initially react to Oankali with horror and revulsion because of their utter strangeness, the way the (never explicit) sexuality is expressed. Oankali have three genders: male, female, and ooloi, and none are dispensable, emotionally or for reproductive reasons.

There are bits that date the book too; rape comes up more often than I think it would had the book been written in 2007 rather than 1987, and homosexuality is only mentioned a few times, generally obliquely. (I am not quite sure what the Oankali would have done with homosexuals; maybe ignored them, maybe incorporated them somehow? But the question is never addressed; the few times homosexuality comes up is in the context of homophobia.)

Overall, it was excellent, but I want a break before I read the next book. Rebuilding humanity always exhausts me.

Comments

Re: homosexuality in Xenogenesis

[sanguinity]

I can see where you're coming from, but the biologism seems very not-human to me. Humans aren't the only species that uses sex for social purposes, but social sex isn't really that common of a trait. Heteronormativity is constructed as if it's biology-centric, but in practice it's so obviously not that it's hard for me to read the Oankali biologism as a similar thing to heteronormativity.

That all the human men in the novel are homophobic about sex with the ooloi strikes me less as "there are no gay men", and more as "emotions are running high, straight men are feeling hugely threatened, and this is a bad time to be out." Plus, maybe, heteronormative selection by the Oankali -- they are the ones deciding who gets to be awake and present, after all. But yeah, that's probably ret-conning on my part as much as anything else, I imagine; just because it can be explained doesn't mean that it wasn't just a plain old oversight on Butler's part.

Re: homosexuality in Xenogenesis

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

I would figure the Oankali would select people who they felt were receptive to their model of family-building, absolutely, but I do think it's an oversight. And in 1987, it was a far more explicable oversight-- I found it far more 'of its time' than deliberately heteronormative. It's amazing how much changed and so quickly, really. (In some respects, at least!)