Helpless lust and unreasoning anxiety were just part of growing up

Here we are at the third and final book of Butler's Lilith's Brood/Xenogenesis series.  I originally typed down that I liked this one best, but I don't know if that's the case.  The first book, Dawn is probably my favorite.  It not only provoked the most emotion from me, but I was surprised by it.  It never went the way I anticipated, I connected with Lilith more than I thought and overall it was a nice surprise.  Imago wasn't as good as Dawn but by this point I had connected with the characters and become more familiar with the alien Oankali that I found myself missing them when I finished the book.

Just as the point of view changed in Adulthood Rites, so it changes again in Imago.  The Oankali aliens are made up of 3 sexes: male, female and ooloi, which has no sex.  Butler says ooloi does not directly translate into English but can mean: "'Treasured stranger.' 'Bridge.' 'Life trader.' 'Weaver.' 'Magnet.'" (526).  Males and females cannot mate without an ooloi.  When new Oankali or construct (part Oankali, part human) children are born until they mature they don't have a sex and can become any of the 3 sexes.  Normally I try to avoid plot details in reviews because really, you can read those anywhere.  In this case understanding of what ooloi is is necessary to understand the main character Jodahs, who becomes a construct ooloi.  This is the first book that takes place in the first person, although I commented in my review of Dawn that I kept forgetting that it wasn't actually from Lilith's PoV. 

The aliens in the first two novels remain completely alien.  Even in the second novel, when Akin, the Oankali male construct is the main character, they were still separate.  By having Jodahs become the main character and to put the story in his point of view in the first person I was able to connect with the characters, to understand them in a way that I wasn't able to before.  I would say my lack of empathy with Akin from Adulthood Rites is a problem with Butler's writing but it's clear that this was her intention.  I learned more of Oankali via Akin but not enough to understand their motivations, for them to not seem so alien anymore. 

I mentioned above the different translations for the word ooloi and Lilith tells Jodahs that "magnet" is the definition she prefers.  "People are drawn to ooloi and can't escape...the chemical bonds of mating were as difficult to break as the habit of breathing," (526).  What you learn once you see the world for Jodahs point of view is the ooloi don't capture humans but are just as drawn to humans.  Ooloi literally cannot survive without their mates and something about this detail made them seem more relate-able.  Other ooloi would tell Lilith about the connection but it never seemed true.  They were always so seemingly disconnected from everything. 

I just realized I said that the ooloi would tell people about their attraction but that it didn't seem true, that it seemed like a lie.  But the Oankali do not lie.  They may not tell the truth but they don't lie.  Butler uses the Oankali to examine the human experience and I wonder if my disbelief about what the Oankali actually meant is based on my own experience is that people lie all the time and why should I believe this alien?  Even when Butler sets up the Oankali to be so completely different I still understand them based on my own experience and obviously (in case you thought I was from another planet) that is the human experience. 

I have enjoyed the Lilith's Brood trilogy and I would recommend it even if you aren't a sci fi fan.  I'm not typically.   The story is well written and doesn't expect you to be a sci fi fan to appreciate it.

Title quote from page 649

Butler, Octavia E. Imago. Lilith's Brood.  Warner Books, New York.  1989.

Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status

I recently finished the second book in Butler's Lilith's Brood/Xenogenisis trilogy.  Unlike in Dawn, Adulthood Rites is told from the point of view of Lilith's male construct son Akin.

Quick background! In the first book, Lilith and other humans are saved from an Earth that has been destroyed due to nuclear war by a group of aliens called Oankali.  The aliens saved them because they want to "trade" with them, meaning essentially creating a new species that is neither Oankali nor human and that will have the best features of each.  Free will and control are examined in the first book, as most of the saved humans aren't too keen on this trade.  Now back on a newly constructed Earth jungle some humans, including Lilith, have agreed to the trade and those that haven't are sterilized.

Like in Dawn, Adulthood Rites continues to examine the morality of the Oankali's decision to end the human race.  They make the argument that human's hierarchical tendencies coupled with their intelligence means the eventual destruction of humans at their own hands is inevitable again.  Humans cannot help but want to dominate each other, the land, other animals and the Oankali believe that giving them back Earth and allowing them to continue on is cruel.  It's like allowing animals to live together, even when you know that they will, in the end, hurt each other.  And so they give the humans long life and allow them to live on Earth but they cannot reproduce without the Oankali.  Butler makes a convincing argument for the aliens to not allow humans to destroy each other again; they are acting in the people's best interest.  But of course no one wants to become obsolete, which is exactly what the Oankali are doing to the human race.

Akin is a human construct: born to a human woman (Lilith) but has characteristics of both human and Oankali. The humans who have refused to live with the Oankali are desperate for children and these "resister" groups kidnap Akin and bring him back to their village Phoenix.  Akin looks mostly human but at a few months old is able to speak and comprehend complex ideas and has the cold logic displayed by the full Oankali.  He sees firsthand the destruction and violence the human resisters are capable of but he also comes to understand their frustration and anger at not being able to have their own children.  Life becomes pointless and even though they know Akin won't be able to give them what they want he represents a ray of hope.

The story tackles the human condition and the seeming inevitability of human violence and domination.  It never suggests that humans are able of overcoming these characteristics; even the humans seem to believe in this yet they want the chance to prove the Oankali wrong.  It also examines the Oankali acting in the people's best interest, yet they remove their choices.  Lilith talks about how the Oankali treat people the way humans treated animals.  The decisions made are for their own good, even if the people don't like it as they don't.

As I said in my review of Dawn, I'm not a huge sci fi fan and it's not really the aliens and the sci fi part that interests me with this trilogy.  I've found, even though this story is told through Akin's eyes, that I still sympathize with the human characters.  I understand why the Oankali behave as they do but I can feel the human's anger.

One more book in the trilogy (obviously) and then I'll be moving away from sci fi for awhile but for now I am enjoying this.  I feel like this review was difficult to write, which sometimes happens if I didn't really care about the book but honestly, I had trouble putting this down.  It slowed for me in the end but I went through this much quicker than I expected.  I hope Imago holds my interest in the same way.

Title quote form page 329.

Butler, Octavia E. Adulthood Rites. Lilith's Brood.  Warner Books, New York.  1989.

A cancer growing in someone's body will go on growing in spite of denial.

I'm currently re-reading Dawn, the first part of the Lilith's Brood trilogy by Octavia E. Butler.  I originally had to read Dawn for a college class: Gender, Sex and the Rhetoric of Science.  It was a great class but it involved a lot of strange books to read and this is up there.  I think the quote on the back of the book sums this up nicely, at least the first book:

Lilith's Brood is a profoundly evocative, sensual - and disturbing - epic of human transformation.

"Evocative", "sensual", and "disturbing" are 3 very good words to describe this book. It's not a traditional sci fi book, according to my very limited understanding of sci fi.  OK, I guess according to my limited stereotype of sci fi.  There are aliens involved and, again this is based on my sci fi generalizations, while they are main characters, they are consistently a source of disgust for the main character Lilith.  There is none of the sense of camaraderie between Lilith and the Oankali that you might fight in something like Star Wars. Everything is so literally alien that Lilith can never completely trust Jdahya (if you know the pronunciation for that, please feel free to add it in the comments. In my head I pretty much just call him "Jad"), any of the other aliens she lives with or the living ship they're on.

The books is written in the third person limited and I keep finding myself repeatedly surprised to find that the story isn't in the first person.  Not that I think stylistically it would be better in the first person, but rather I'll read something that says "she said" and I'll have to go back and re-read before I remember that Lilith, the main character is the "she" and there is no I.  I'd say this is just the case with the style, but I never noticed it with other works, such as Harry Potter (the Wikipedia entry may have pointed out that's written in the same  narrative mode).  You end up empathizing with Lilith so completely probably because Butler has made the aliens so incredibly, well, alien. This style connects you to Lilith without actually letting you as close to her as a first person narrative would do.

I've obviously mentioned a number of times already that aliens play a big part of this book, but I want to again stress this doesn't feel like a typical sci fi book.  There isn't really (so far or in what I remember) much action.  Thus far the book is really an examination of free will or rather the removal of it.  The Oankali want Lilith to learn about them and they want to learn about her but they do keep her ignorant of their actions.  They keep her a prisoner, though a prisoner in nice conditions.  The book opens while Lilith is in isolation and Bulter is such a talented author that within a few pages you really feel Lilith's pain and fear.

The book is split into 4 parts: Womb, Family, Nursery and The Training Floor.  The first two sections deal with Lilith learning about and coming to terms with the Oankali and the second two sections deal with Lilith teaching other humans about the aliens and how to survive in the jungle.  I found I was more interested in the first two sections and wished these parts were longer.  There's more action in the latter sections but I liked the tension and learning about the aliens and the ship with Lilith.  Because I related to her in the first sections I found myself frustrated with the other Awakened humans when they wouldn't just play nice.  Obviously this would have made a much less interesting book but I felt Lilith's frustration and hopelessness. 

When I began reading the book I had only planned on reading Dawn.  The book went by so quickly and I'm not ready to be done so I'm going to continue on Lilith's journal and start reading Adulthood Rites the next part of the trilogy.  I've read the first few pages before, right after I finished Dawn the last time, but books for class got in the way of me finishing it.  At least I'm hoping that's why I never finished it and not because it was so bad I blocked it from memory.  I suppose I'll find out soon.

Title quote from page 39

Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. Lilith's Brood.  Warner Books, New York.  1989.