2024 Book #65

“Dawn” by Octavia E. Butler

Book #65: “Dawn” by Octavia E. Butler.

The bombs came raining down; the survivors were few, then fewer; humanity seemed to have painted itself into a corner. And then, the deux ex machina of all deus ex machinas: the survivors were vacuumed up by an alien race, the Oankali, curious about life in all its forms, and willing to take the reins in a process of returning Earth to some kind of navigable terrain, and returning the humans to a world where they would have a second chance, maybe even a better chance. On paper, a terrific bargain for the survivors of humanity’s death throes. And yet: what if they rejected the offer?

That’s a lot of the structure here, in the first of a trilogy by the great, late, Octavia E. Butler, who couldn’t write a small idea if she tried.

Lilith Iyapo is one of those Earthly survivors, awakened from decades of suspended animation and thrust into a series of personal trials, each of which is enough to almost shut her down completely. First is the fact that the Oankali are themselves so off-putting that the fight-or-flight instinct is almost impossible to turn off (it takes Lilith days to even willingly be in the same room as the first Oankali, much less allow it to touch her; the fact that the Oankali want much, much more from her, is going to take a lot longer, if ever, to accustom herself to).

Next is the bargain itself: the Oankali have wandered the stars for untold centuries, seeking with whom they can engage their “trade”: not just to learn from the genetic diversity of this vast, complex universe, but to cross-pollinate the species themselves, grafting elements of one on the other. The Oankali aren’t just mad scientists – they have skin in the game, as it were, altering themselves, too, in order to get closer to their new trading partners. In the case of humanity, the prevalence of cancer cells in some of the survivors offers a singular opportunity to the alien species: if manipulated skillfully, cancer isn’t just potentially deadly, it’s potentially powerful (I like to believe this “aha” moment came from Butler’s mind alone; in fact, I refuse to do even the cursory online research necessary to verify that hypothesis, because to find out otherwise would be disappointing indeed).

During Lilith’s tutelage, the Oankali give only as much as they think necessary to keep her going, attempting to learn from previously unsuccessful interactions with other humans whom they have restored from suspended animation (and the process thereof is a lot more visceral than the chilly cryofreezers of many other SF stories); that they keep making mistakes adds to Lilith’s frustration: how can a race of such advancement keep misinterpreting the human psychology so irrevocably? But finally, after starts and stops in her individual apprenticeship, Lilith is handed, very much against her better instincts, the leadership role in the next phase: unwrap a few dozen other suspended humans, set them in a verisimilitudinous Amazon-style environment (down to the very mosquitoes), and attempt to teach them what they will need to know in order to make it when it’s time for the real thing.

This sequence, the latter half of the book, is about team building and leadership development as much as anything, but in Butler’s telling, the deck is stacked against Lilith from the moment the first new human flutters back to consciousness: to a man/woman, none trust the Oankali’s motives (Lilith agrees: the best she’s hoping for, silently, is to train them up to the status of “learn, then run”), none trust Lilith, whom they consider the flunky for the aliens at best (or secretly one of them, at worst), none believe even the one key fact, that they are not currently even on Earth (the Oankali do an especially poor job on this particular point of contention, but I think we’re to believe that the obsessiveness among the restored humans on this point is merely a placeholder for their horror and distrust about anything in their new situation).

And then there’s the relationships that the Oankali themselves foster among the humans and themselves: not surprisingly, there is a lot of male-female pairing off, and the aliens like this idea, setting these pairings into motion behind the scenes (this is a very hetero book, probably a product of Butler’s context, writing as she did in the 80s; I’ve read enough of her oeuvre not to be surprised by this fact, but I bet if she’d lived deeper into the 21^st century, there would have been more interrogation of the gender binary; and there’s even a little bit here, as the Oankali have three genders: males, females, and the ooloi, gender-neutral family members who are critical to the story’s relationships as well as the science and anthropology of the Oankali). The Oankali have jiggered the situation so they are each present in the human couplings during the training weeks – bonding to the humans via chemical processes that the humans resent, but then the libido gets turned up to 10, then 100, then googolplex, and it’s difficult to say no to that kind of sweaty good lovin’, even with a tentacled creature right there in the mix. (Lilith knows more than the rest where this is ultimately supposed to go – one overarching name for the trilogy of which this is the first book is “Lilith’s Brood,” and it’s no coincidence that Butler chose for her protagonist a character named for the other First Woman, the road not taken in some versions of the Christian mythology, a character connected in the apocrypha with femininity, witchcraft, and intertwined more.)

The humans rebel; the Oankali are okay with that, up to a point, but there are limits: why can’t the humans just understand that they are trying to help? Why can’t Lilith make better use of the abilities the Oankali have given her (and the knowledge she’s been given during her private -off-camera – solo training) to forge them into a more unified force for moving forward as a race? Well, I was never much for Whiggish history, myself: things aren’t always inevitably moving forward to the next better thing.

And despite the discomfort that the reader feels, skillfully abetted by Butler as she ratchets the tension higher and higher – Lilith is between a rock and a hard place, but we trust her, and we trust Nikanj, the ooloi with whom she’s been bonded practically since Lilith rematerialized, so we feel their frustration as the social experiment falls apart, but also, the other humans aren’t responding in remarkably surprising ways, even though one might wish for a bit less Lord of the Flies – we know that somehow there is going to be a next stage, even though, at book’s end, that possibility is ambiguous indeed.

Butler was the damnedest combination of pessimist and optimist – in her books, humans do the worst things to each other imaginable, they act irrationally and against their best interests to a fault, but at the same time, Butler’s long arcs point toward the better angels of their nature, their curiosity and their maybe destiny for something greater, less plodding than their mundanities and pettinesses, that could lead to something amazing if only they (okay, we) stay the course. Or maybe not? We’ll never get the third volume in the Parable of the Talents trilogy to see how she planned to get humans off a climate-change-devastated planet and into the stars in that otherwise bleak tale, but we know that was her plan there, somehow. In this trilogy, I sense the push-pull will be an effort to remain something recognizably human, on the one hand, while the Oankali attempt to remake them as something different, maybe even better (one’s mileage may vary, I suspect), on the other. This trilogy, at least, came early enough in Butler’s career that I can follow that thread to whatever resolution she was able to offer; I trust her enough to see it through now that I’ve begun the journey, sometime down the road.