XENOGENESIS TRIOLOGY BY OCTAVIA BUTLER (MP3-CD AUDIOBOOK) BOOK
1-3. PLUS THE KINDRED AUDIO BOOK.
2 MP3-CD IN EXCELLENT CONDITION. 24 HOURS 19 MINUTES UNABRIDGED COPY. ALL 3 BOOKS OF THE XENOGENESIS TRIOLOGY. READ BY ALDRICH BARRETT.
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SYNOSIS: Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy:
A Biologist’s Response
by Joan Slonczewski,
presented at SFRA, Cleveland, June 30, 2000
Octavia E. Butler’s novels share
with readers her extraordinary vision of what it means to be "other,"
based on intelligent biological speculation. Her Xenogenesis trilogy,
now retitled Lilith’s Brood for reissue by Warner, creates
a stunningly vision of abduction and seduction by an alien species. This vision
is presented in terms remarkably consistent with modern molecular biology, even
predicting developments that have occurred since the novels were written.
As the trilogy’s first
book, Dawn, opens, the human race has nearly destroyed itself
by nuclear war--"humanicide," as Butler calls it--a fate that seemed
all too plausible in the eighties, when the book was written, and that remains
a distinct possibility if the effects of humanity on our environment are not
reversed. The few humans who survive the war are rescued and captured by the
Oankali, a nomadic alien species that travels through the universe seeking
partner species with whom to "trade" their own genes. The story is
told from the viewpoint of Lilith Iyapo, a human woman whom the Oankali adopt
into their family and try to enlist in recruiting other humans. Lilith is torn
between accepting the medical enhancements and the sexual advances of her
captors while trying to help other humans escape.
Unlike the vast majority of alien
abduction tales, Dawn actually presents a biologically
plausible explanation for why the Oankali need to interbreed with
humans--despite their own abhorrence for the human race, which to them appears
monstrous for its combination of high intelligence and self-destructive
violence, the "human contradiction." The Oankali have evolved
specialized organs and subcellular structures which manipulate their own genes
to maximize fitness in their environment, a self-sustaining starship which is
itself a living organism. Paradoxically, because the Oankali are such
successful genetic engineers, they tend to engineer themselves into an
evolutionary dead end; losing all genetic diversity, they lose the ability to
adapt to change. The only way they can recover genetic diversity is to
interbreed with an entirely new species, which contributes new genetic strengths--and
weaknesses.
Butle's story evokes the
experience of an African woman swept into slavery in the eighteenth century.
Lilith’s "Awakening" among the Oankali evokes the dehumanization of
slave conditions--she is naked, has to beg for clothing, and is denied reading
materials and other access to her own culture and history. The theme of slavery
appears frequently in Butler’s books, most notably Kindred, in
which a Black woman travels back through time to rescue a white man who becomes
her ancestor. The heroine of Kindred struggles with the fact
that she owes her own existence as an individual to the oppressive cultural
system in which Black women could bear children only by submitting to the
advances of their white masters. In a remarkable update, today's descendents of
master and slave can use DNA analysis to go back and confront their
Jeffersonian ancestors.
In Dawn, Lilith faces
the choice of "trading" with the Oankali to produce half-human
children, or having no family at all. Like the slaves who bore their masters’
children, Lilith obtains privileges of enhanced health and security for herself
and her future children, who will be genetically half Oankali. The Oankali
lecture her about the superiority of their egalitarian, nonviolent lifestyle,
as opposed to the hierarchical, violent tendencies of humans--just as Americans
told their African slaves they were fortunate to be rescued from barbarism by
their "democratic" masters.
Like the slaves and their
descendents, Lilith and her children feel enormous ambivalence about her
choice. In Adulthood Rites, Part 2 of the trilogy, Lilith’s
half-Oankali son chooses for a while to live apart with the human
"resisters," those who choose sterility rather than join the Oankali.
He at last convinces the Oankali to provide a new home for the resisters, where
they can breed again and regenerate the human species. The home provided is the
planet Mars; reshaped for habitability, to be sure, but all of humanity is
outcast from their own homeland, like Native Americans forced onto a
reservation. Lilith’s son risks his life to allow humans to choose humanity;
yet he himself returns to his own hybrid heritage among the Oankali. Throughout
Butler’s work, people of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds struggle to
make such choices.
Lilith’s ambivalence about the
Oankali, and about her own genetic heritage, echoes Butler’s own experience in
the community of writers. For many years, Butler was one of only a few Black
female writers of science fiction. Her gifts were embraced and appreciated by
many fellow writers, and found success with supportive publishers. Yet for
publication, she had to accept cover illustrations depicting her Black
characters as Caucasian. Butler’s success required denial of her own racial
identity, just as some of the early women writers of science fiction had to
deny their gender by writing under male pseudonyms. Thus, she shared Lilith’s
dilemma by accepting literary success at the cost of part of her own identity.
In the Xenogenesis books,
the transformation of humanity is accomplished by alien biotechnology,
performed by genetic engineers called ooloi, who participate in the
mating of human and Oankali. Until recently, genetic crossing of unrelated
animals was considered untenable from the standpoint of biology. Yet in the
past decade, biologists have discovered profound sources of genetic commonality
between organisms as distant as humans and fruit flies. Reproductive technology
has led to chimeric combinations such as sheep and goat; and an early human embryo
has been generated from the egg of a cow. Researchers of the Primate Genome
Project seriously propose to introduce the chimpanzee’s "superior"
disease resistance genes into human chromosomes. Thus, a science fiction writer
can now propose alien interbreeding based on reasonable biological speculation;
but few writers in fact develop the biological basis as soundly as Butler does.