I was so eager for my summer holiday that I forgot to post a note that I had gone fishing for a good part of August. In reality I ate other people’s fishing, in particular in Crete– I wonderful place to catch rays and fish. I made a point of taking “non-academic” reading with me, but in my world no such thing exists. Even reading for “pleasure” entails a desire to learn something. For recreational reading I prefer sci-fi, and for many years cyberpunk has done the trick. In fact, I first read Neuromancer in 1985 while visiting my parents in Hawaii (who lived there during those years). It was a strange contrast between the cyberpunk cowboys of Gibson’s cyberspace and the bamboo forests and snorkeling that accompanied the read. Nonetheless, Gibson’s vision of multinational corporations, sprawl and Japanese technology somehow offered an interesting context for viewing the complex global interconnections of Hawaii with its Asian neighbors.
While in Crete I finally dove into the work of Octavia E. Butler, an African American sci-fi writer who I’d heard a lot about, but had not found the space or time to read since I started my PhD work. To get acquainted, I chose a collection of three novellas, Lilith’s Brood (originally published as the Xenogenesis trilogy). The collection proved to be absolutely perfect for both my bonding with the primordial waters of the Mediterranean and my current interests in ecology. I won’t spend too much time summarizing the story (you can get a good one at this wiki page), but I’d like to just to give a flavor for why this is such an important book.
The story begins 250 years after a global war has destroyed most of Earth’s civilization. An alien race of DNA traders, the Oankali, has salvaged surviving humans with the hope of blending with them in order to evolve their species. The Oankali are truly alien to human eyes and sensibilities– they violate most human taboos about race, gender and sexuality. They are also a purely ecologically-driven race whose guiding ethic is “life,” but they lack a morality that respects the rights of other races. That is, they will do anything to blend and mesh with a new race, even if it means destroying it. They do so through a genderless class called the Ooloi, who are masters of DNA manipulation and sexual seduction. The Ooloi are a mix of shaman and midwives who enable mating and propagation to occur. They are gentle but merciless manipulators. They will do anything to make sure the Oankali can ravish Earth, essentially eating and digesting it with their organic, living spaceship entities that are self-contained “planets” and are self-sustaining in outer space.
There are human resisters who refuse to mate with Oankali, but they do so on grounds that reveal how irrational and superstitious people can be. Butler uses the human resisters as a foil to criticize our “hierarchical” flaw that allow males to dominate through violence. Nonetheless, Butler is nuanced in that the Oankali are not depicted as morally pure either. The “constructs,” who are human-Oankali hybrids, seem to possess the middle ground between the ecological sensibilities of the aliens and human heart. This dynamic provides an interesting discussion point for Haraway’s cyborg theory. Butler also achieves something where other science fiction fails: her protagonists are not white males, but multiracial females, “feminist” males and are sometimes genderless. Through the ooloi she is able to show how gender and sexuality are in fact constructed, not normally the province of white, heterosexual sci-fi.
‘Nuff said. I’m wondering if any of you have also read Lilith’s Brood and what you thought about it.
