Lilith's Brood (School & Library Binding)

Annalee Newitz once wrote an essay in which she said the half-believed the alien abduction myth: extraterrestrials coming to Earth, abducting people, screwing around with their bodies and spouting morally superior gibberish at them. After all, human history shows that is what people do when they encounter technologically more primitive societies.

After the near-extinction of humanity, the alien gene-trading Oankali arrive and resurrect groups of humanity for interbreeding. Humans are culturally, physically and sexually assimilated into the Oankali biology and civilization, in scenes that will make you squirm if you have personal boundary issues. Humans have the status of house pets or retarded people in Oankali society, and it's clear the aliens consider the preservation of human culture irrelevant.

"Lilith's Brood" is an allegory for colonialism and slavery, but it is also much more. It also touches important questions: Is humanity inherently flawed and self-destructive? How much are we driven by biology and instinct? Is it possible to fix human nature, and would we want to be fixed? What can you do when you don't own your own life? What would a sentient being without the human contradiction, intelligence vs. hierarchy, be like?

The Oankali are perhaps the most fascinating aliens I've ever read. Three-gendered and covered with sensory tentacles, they are apparently incapable of cruelty or deceit, yet utterly ruthless in remaking humanity into what they think it should be. Two of the three books are written from the perspective of non-human beings, and Butler's descriptions of the physicality, their vastly expanded mental, physical and sensory abilities, are beautifully realized. Although not a Campbell-style writer, Butler surpasses his challenge: "Give me something that is as smart as a man, but is not a man."

Butler's story is fascinating, but frustrating for what it skips over. It's implied that the Oankali have no art, music or written language, and are indifferent to the preservation of human culture. This makes sense for them, but wouldn't the human survivors, resister or otherwise, care about keeping their culture alive? Also, is homosexuality something that the Oankali edited out of humanity? Mating and family units are the glue of Oankali society, but how do people whose erotic drives are not directed the opposite sex fit in?

I expect Butler avoided these issues because she wasn't interested in them. The ideas and questions she does cover are beautifully done. This is a deep, thought-provoking story of humanity meeting aliens.

Butler has a pretty bleak view of human nature (though she implies that the Oankali are just as driven by their own biology), and her stories reflect this. The story concludes with the implied end of the human race as we know it, hopelessly out-maneuvered and out-classed by beings more powerful than us. Reading this book is a mind-expanding exercise in seeing that this might not be extinction, but transformation.

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