Jun 22 2015 44 mins 5
Extraordinary stories. ⁓The Voice before the Void Octavia E. Butler, Part 2: Notable Works compiled from Wikipedia Lilith’s Brood Lilith’s Brood is a series of three science fiction works by Octavia E. Butler. The three volumes (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago) were previously collected under the title of Xenogenesis; the collection was first published under the current title of Lilith’s Brood in 2000. Synopsis The first novel in the trilogy, Dawn, was published in 1987. The story begins after the United States and the Soviet Union obtained nuclear weapons and their actions resulted in a terrible nuclear war that left the earth uninhabitable. Humans are all but extinct. The few survivors are plucked from the surface of their dying world by an alien race, the oankali. The title character Lilith (a black human female) awakens from stasis centuries later on an oankali ship. She meets her saviors/captors and is repulsed by their alienness. The oankali don’t have eyes, or ears, or noses, but sensory tentacles over their entire bodies with which they can perceive the world much better than a human can. Stranger still, the oankali have three genders: male, female, and ooloi. All oankali have the ability to perceive biochemistry down to a genetic level, but the ooloi have the ability to directly manipulate genetic material. Ooloi can mutate and “evolve” any living thing they touch and build offspring gene by gene using the genetic material from their male and female mates. Despite their alienness, the ooloi are strangely alluring – sexually arousing even while being visually repulsive. The oankali have made earth habitable again and want Lilith’s help in training humans to survive on earth without human technology. In exchange, the oankali want to interbreed with the humans to create a new human-oankali hybrid race. This book focuses on the conflict between Lilith’s desire to stay human and her loyalty to her species, and her desire to survive at any cost. The second book, Adulthood Rites, published in 1988, takes place years after the events of Dawn. Humans and oankali live together on earth though everything is not peaceful. Some humans have accepted the bargain and live with the oankali and give birth to hybrid children called constructs. Others, however, have refused the bargain and live in separate, all-human villages. The ooloi have made all humans infertile so the only children born are the ones made with ooloi intervention. This creates a great deal of tension and strain as the humans see themselves being outbred by the oankali-human constructs. Desperate humans often steal human-looking construct children to raise as their own. The main character of the second book, Akin, is the first male construct born to a human mother. Akin has more human in him than any construct before him. This book focuses on Akin’s struggle with his human and his oankali natures. As a human, he understands the desire to fight for the survival of humanity as an independent race. As an oankali, he understands that the combination of the species is necessary and that humans would destroy themselves again if left alone. The final book of the trilogy, Imago, published in 1989, shows the reader what has been hinted at in the first two books: the full potential of the new human-oankali hybrid species. The story is told from the perspective of the shape-shifting healer Jodahs. Through Jodahs’ unique heritage, it has unlocked the latent genetic potential of humans and oankali. In order to survive its metamorphosis, Jodahs must find suitable human male and female mates, and it finds them in the most unexpected of places: a village of renegade humans. This book brings a sense of completeness to the story by allowing the reader to understand the oankali better by understanding Jodahs. Themes Throughout the Xenogenesis series, themes of sexuality,
