Lilith finds an ally and mate in Joseph, but he shares Lilith’s complicated reaction to the Oankali. Lilith is all too aware that her position will be seen by other humans as that of collaborator and traitor, and so it turns out as she wakens more and more of the humans from stasis. Lilith is selected by the Oankali both to bear the first offspring of the union of the two species and to “train” other humans to accept the new conditions of their life under alien rule. In Dawn Butler chooses Lilith as her protagonist to tell the story of how the Oankali-human interaction unfolds. They map out an empty future for the humans who resist having anything to do with the Oankali, who want to preserve their humanness at all costs. There are many echoes of European enslavement of African peoples, especially in the Oankali perception of themselves as helping humans, even while they are subjecting them involuntarily to genetic experimentation.
They call this a “trade” and describe themselves as a trading people. Their aim is not just to learn but to cure the diseases, especially cancer, and use the new knowledge to extend human life, making them suitable mates for the Oankali and a future blended offspring. Each time it has drastically changed its appearance to make its members suitable for symbiotic relationships with others.Īrriving after the war on Earth, the Oankali rescue a few hundred humans from the nuclear devastation, put them into stasis and examine at the molecular level the conditions that caused their illnesses.
The Oankali are an alien race that has traveled across the galaxy for thousands of years, adapting itself to one species after another. Her ability to capture the sensuality of human-Oankali mating far transcends most writing about sexuality but here with full recognition of issues of race, oppression and identity explored in detail.īutler depicts a ruined earth, destroyed by a nuclear war between Russia and the United States that left tiny pockets of surviving humans, mostly in the southern hemisphere. Octavia Butler wrote in her notebooks of how important it was to make people feel deeply through each of her novels, and the Xenogenesis trilogy is a powerful example of how well she succeeded.
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