Dawn by Octavia E. Butler: A review

 

I don't dream about the books that I am reading - at least not dreams that I remember upon waking. But in the middle of reading this book, I found myself dreaming vividly about it one night. I was there on the great ship of the Oankali orbiting Earth somewhere beyond our moon. I was standing with one of the tentacled aliens who was showing me the view from space and I could see the "blue marble" of Earth far, far away, looking about the size of a marble. It was such an amazing feeling that when I woke up it seemed to me for a moment that it had really happened. That is the power of Octavia Butler's prose. 

She tells us of a time when Earth has been made uninhabitable for humans by a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. (The book was written in the 1980s.) Humans who survived the catastrophe were rescued (captured?) by the Oankali, an extraterrestrial race with multiple tentacles extending from their bodies. The tentacles are described in one place as looking like Medusa's "hair." They are about as alien-looking as one can imagine. The humans were put into suspended animation and were studied by their rescuers/captors. From time to time they were awakened individually and then suspended again if they became uncooperative or obstreperous or had served their purpose. 

Lilith Iyapo has been awakened and suspended more than once, but now it is 250 years after the war that ravaged Earth and the planet is once again habitable. The Oankali plan is to send humans back to Earth to start over again and Lilith has a large part to play in their plans. 

The Oankali's benevolent plans to reseed Earth with humans is not without a price. They are genetic traders and their ultimate goal is to meld their race with humanity, creating a hybrid human/Oankali race that will forever change what it means to be human. The plan is to have "improved" humans who will not again destroy themselves.

The Oankali exist in three sexes - male, female, and Ooloi. The Ooloi have the capacity to engage in three-way mating with a human male and female, using their ability to control the human nervous system to create pleasure. The Ooloi feels every sensation that its human partners feel. If it causes pain, it feels that, too, and so it is careful not to cause pain. The Ooloi sees nothing wrong with this; it is simply a part of its nature, but as I thought about it later, I could see that it has some disturbing implications from a human standpoint. The humans are essentially captives and do not have much choice in the matter. Is this not rape, even if the person's body responds and even if the person is not hurt if that person objects? Indeed at one point, Nikanj, the Ooloi paired with Lilith, says to the unhappy male partner in their threesome, "Your words say no but your body did not."  Ewww! Humans have no choice about accepting these three-way liaisons if they want to go back to their home planet. They are in effect forced marriages.

But I digress.

After Lilith is awakened and finally becomes resigned to acceding to the Oankali plan for her, other humans are awakened. Males and females begin to pair up and group dynamics begin to assert themselves, not always in a positive way. Lilith becomes a kind of teacher and group leader who is expected to prepare the group for their return to Earth. Some males in the group resent the fact that their leader is a woman and sexism rears its ugly head.

Butler was actually brilliant at presenting this picture of the workings of the human group in all its prejudices, selfishness, and pettiness, even in a biological space ship far from Earth and even in the presence of an alien culture that is about as different from human culture as could be imagined. (For one difference, there's the lack of violence and of jealousy.) Human foibles and weaknesses assert themselves in spite of everything.  Butler presents us with very hard questions about human nature and its perfectability - or lack thereof. In the end, are the humans victims of Stockholm syndrome where they simply accept the role their captors assign to them and do what they need to do in order to survive? She makes clear that the aliens' intent, from their perspective, is entirely benign. But when does that intent become paternalistic and how much psychological and physiological manipulation is reasonable?

The narrative is never accusatory. Butler writes in a very straightforward manner, without flourishes, almost as a scientific treatise. She is careful not to present opinions, only the facts, and she lets us draw our own conclusions. No purple prose here. That careful telling, I think, is what gives the book such power. It is at once both beautiful and deeply disturbing and gives us much to think about. 

This is the first book in a trilogy and as such, it sets the stage for what is to come. It gives us all the background we need to continue the journey. And continue the journey I will. I look forward to reading more of the amazing world that Butler imagined for us.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler: A review

A recent Google doodle commemorating the birthday of Octavia Butler served to remind me that I had intended to read the second of her "Earthseed" books. I read the first one, Parable of the Sower, earlier this year and was fascinated by her apocalyptic vision of America in the 2020s. That book was published in 1993, but it seemed utterly prescient in some of its visions of how a combination of global warming, political demagoguery, a suspicion of science and education, and an all-consuming selfishness on the part of the rich and powerful were all coming together to tear apart the fabric of society. In 1993, one would probably have thought that could never happen here, but Butler could foresee such a catastrophic outcome and today it does not seem so far-fetched.

Parable of the Talents was published in 1998 and carries the story forward from 2032 until 2090. Suffice to say that in the short term at least things do not get better. In fact, they get very much worse.

In 2032, a Christian populist demagogue named Andrew Steele Jarret is elected president. His movement is called Christian America and their goal is nothing less than to stamp out vestiges of any other religious belief in the country. To do this, they are willing to kill, burn people alive as witches, rape, enslave, separate children from their parents and send them to be raised by "good" Christians, destroy or confiscate property, to do whatever it takes. The end justifies the means.

Early in the book, I was gobsmacked to read this description of Jarret and his actions:

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, "simpler" time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stopping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country…
…

Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of "heathen houses of devil-worship," he has a simple answer: "Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.” (My emphasis.)

I had to pause for a bit after reading that. 

While this movement is taking hold in the country, Lauren Olamina is busy establishing her community called Acorn and further solidifying and sharing her philosophy called Earthseed; a philosophy that proclaims that God is change and that the Destiny of humanity is out among the stars, colonizing other planets, seeding humanity and Earth's plants and creatures throughout the universe. Lauren marries and in time has a baby, a daughter that she named Larkin. Her idyllic world comes crashing down when Acorn comes to the attention of the Christian America Crusaders. They are attacked, several (including Lauren's husband) are killed and the rest of the adults are enslaved. Three individuals, whose fate we never learn, escape the attack and all of the children are sent away to be adopted and raised by Christians.

I won't spoil the plot except to say that eventually Lauren does escape and is able to continue sharing and spreading her philosophy but her desperate search for her lost child is unsuccessful. 

Lauren's book which expounds her Earthseed philosophy is called Books of the Living and it contains this passage:

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” 

Beware cowards, opportunists, thieves, liars, and tyrants; wise advice. We should heed it.  

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler: A review

Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, but Octavia Butler was eerily - scarily - prescient in the mid 2020s world that she imagined. Who could have dreamed twenty-five years ago that this broken and divided country would elect a president who promised to "Make America Great Again" by eliminating the space program and getting rid of all environmental, health, and labor protection laws and opening up the nation to be carved up by large corporations and the greedy wealthy? Well, Octavia Butler did. If she were alive today, I wonder what she would think, seeing her vision come true.

This book was planned as the first in a trilogy (the "Earthseed" trilogy), but after completing the first two books in the series, Butler reportedly suffered from severe writer's block in relation to the third book and was never able to complete it. Nevertheless, we have the first two, and, judging by this initial entry, that was a remarkable achievement.

Once I started reading this book, every time I had to put it down because duty called me elsewhere I couldn't wait to get back to it. When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about what I had read. I even laid awake at night thinking about it. Perhaps that tells you everything you need to know about what an impact the book made on me.

If the book were first published today, it would be categorized as YA lit, because the protagonist is a teenage girl, but at the time that it was published, the term YA had not yet been thought up by some media-savvy publicist. So, it was just considered as dystopian literature.

It is the mid-2020s and 18-year-old Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a walled middle-class community in a Los Angeles suburb. It is a California that is barely recognizable. Society is disintegrating under the pressure of global warming, wealth disparity, and economic stagnation. All communities have fortified walls to keep the predatory gangs out. Police and firefighters will only come when called if the caller will pay them, and when they come, they are just as likely to arrest the person seeking help or to pillage the home as they are to actually take action to assist.

Many people are leaving, trying to make their way north to Oregon, Washington, or Canada in search of a better and more secure life, but the borders between states and between the countries are guarded and patrolled to ensure that the unwanted immigrants do not make it through.

In the midst of this anarchy, Lauren's community is attacked and overrun, most of the people, including what remains of her family, killed, and the houses burned. Lauren had prepared for such an eventuality by putting together an emergency pack to get her on her way. (She had planned to leave anyway and go north with the other emigrants.) Now she is forced to start her trek before she had planned and she heads north with a couple of companions.

Lauren is a special person. First of all, she has a disability called hyper-empathy which means that she feels the pain that she witnesses inflicted upon others. In the violent world in which she lives, this is a serious disability indeed. If she is put in the position of having to fight for her life, how will she manage if any pain that she inflicts on her opponent is felt equally by herself?

Also, Lauren is a visionary. She has an idea for a new religion/philosophy of life and she hopes to found a community based on her ideas. She calls her vision Earthseed and she writes verses expounding upon it. It is a philosophy of self-sufficiency in which god is understood as change, but a change that can be molded and shaped by the individual.

We follow the teenage Lauren as she continues north, more people join her group, and she starts teaching them her Earthseed verses and attempting to mold them into a community.

This was a powerful and affecting read, one that I am sure I will still be considering for a long time to come.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars