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Are you human? Lilith's Brood
A year or so ago I heard or read a news story about the late science fiction author Octavia Butler. I had heard of her but never read any of her work, so I decided to find some. Conveniently, an independent bookstore had just opened in my neighborhood, and this was a good excuse to give it some business in hope that it stays afloat.
I've read three (or five) of her books so far: Kindred (in which the protagonist time-travels into the body of one of her slave ancestors in antebellum Mississippi), The Parable of the Sower (in which the protagonist, living in a falling-apart near-future society, becomes the leader of a religious/social community devoted to treating people decently, rebuilding society, and eventually emigrating to other planets and stars; I gather it's the first of a series but I haven't looked up the rest), and most recently Lilith's Brood, which is actually a trilogy bound together. So let's talk about the last one.
In Lilith's Brood, humanity encounters an alien, star-traveling species (the Oankali) who are born genetic engineers (as one human character says, "They manipulate genes as easily as we manipulate pens and pencils"), so their every offspring is the result of conscious genetic choice. And the Oankali's driving motivation is to seek out new interesting species and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new species, just as individual humans seek out other humans and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new individual. Every million years or so, they discover a new species and their own species Divides: part goes on as it was, while another part interbreeds with the newly-contacted species to form a new species with selected genetic characteristics of each.
Since humanity has just killed off most of itself and much of the Earth in a nuclear war, the Oankali pick up all the survivors, heal their injuries and radiation damage, and offer each survivor the choice between staying on the starship with them or returning to an Earth whose less-radiation-ravaged portions the Oankali have restored to livability.
But the human race has a deadly combination of intelligence and hierarchical thinking that inevitably leads to oppression, war, and misery, so they won't be allowed to breed as humans did before: it would be just too irresponsible, like a skilled carpenter seeing a crooked table or a warped door frame without fixing it. Each survivor is also offered the choice to interbreed with Oankali or to be sterile, living out an extended, healthy life but not producing any more of those intelligent-hierarchical-murderous humans. The "Resisters" who choose not to interbreed remain purely human, but in a dead end, unable to propagate their pure humanity. Some respond to this dead end with suicide; others kidnap the most human-looking hybrid babies from hybrid communities and try to raise them as humans, hoping to back-breed them with true humans to produce a sustainable population that's as human as possible. And they view the people who choose to interbreed as traitors to their race.
Which leads to the question at the top of this post: "Are you human?", which forms a sort of ostinato theme to the book. The first non-Resister, Lilith, is given some minor genetic enhancements and assigned the task of training other humans to get along with Oankali; her students suspect her of being not entirely human, and certainly not "loyal" to the human race. And various other characters have their humanity and/or their loyalties questioned. You can justify almost any treatment of a person that you've decided is non-human.
If there's a moral to the book, it might be "Life is messy. It doesn't fit into neat categories with clean boundaries."
What does "human" mean when most of the living humans have some Oankali genes, and others have had Oankali change the activation state of some of their in-born genes? (Or, in our own world, when most living humans have some Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes?)
What do "male" and "female" mean if, like the Oankali, you have three possible sexes, and you don't know which one you'll be until adolescence? (Or, in our own world, when nobody has all the characteristics we associate with "male" or "female", a small number of people have ambiguous genitalia, and rather more people have social identities that don't match what's between their legs?)
What does "individual" mean when a good deal of your body mass is mitochondria (which used to be independent organisms) or symbiotic bacteria (which still could be)?
Not to mention: what do "white", "black", and other race names mean when in fact almost every human has ancestors from a variety of ethnic groups, and every human descends from eastern Africa two million years ago?
I've read three (or five) of her books so far: Kindred (in which the protagonist time-travels into the body of one of her slave ancestors in antebellum Mississippi), The Parable of the Sower (in which the protagonist, living in a falling-apart near-future society, becomes the leader of a religious/social community devoted to treating people decently, rebuilding society, and eventually emigrating to other planets and stars; I gather it's the first of a series but I haven't looked up the rest), and most recently Lilith's Brood, which is actually a trilogy bound together. So let's talk about the last one.
In Lilith's Brood, humanity encounters an alien, star-traveling species (the Oankali) who are born genetic engineers (as one human character says, "They manipulate genes as easily as we manipulate pens and pencils"), so their every offspring is the result of conscious genetic choice. And the Oankali's driving motivation is to seek out new interesting species and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new species, just as individual humans seek out other humans and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new individual. Every million years or so, they discover a new species and their own species Divides: part goes on as it was, while another part interbreeds with the newly-contacted species to form a new species with selected genetic characteristics of each.
Since humanity has just killed off most of itself and much of the Earth in a nuclear war, the Oankali pick up all the survivors, heal their injuries and radiation damage, and offer each survivor the choice between staying on the starship with them or returning to an Earth whose less-radiation-ravaged portions the Oankali have restored to livability.
But the human race has a deadly combination of intelligence and hierarchical thinking that inevitably leads to oppression, war, and misery, so they won't be allowed to breed as humans did before: it would be just too irresponsible, like a skilled carpenter seeing a crooked table or a warped door frame without fixing it. Each survivor is also offered the choice to interbreed with Oankali or to be sterile, living out an extended, healthy life but not producing any more of those intelligent-hierarchical-murderous humans. The "Resisters" who choose not to interbreed remain purely human, but in a dead end, unable to propagate their pure humanity. Some respond to this dead end with suicide; others kidnap the most human-looking hybrid babies from hybrid communities and try to raise them as humans, hoping to back-breed them with true humans to produce a sustainable population that's as human as possible. And they view the people who choose to interbreed as traitors to their race.
Which leads to the question at the top of this post: "Are you human?", which forms a sort of ostinato theme to the book. The first non-Resister, Lilith, is given some minor genetic enhancements and assigned the task of training other humans to get along with Oankali; her students suspect her of being not entirely human, and certainly not "loyal" to the human race. And various other characters have their humanity and/or their loyalties questioned. You can justify almost any treatment of a person that you've decided is non-human.
If there's a moral to the book, it might be "Life is messy. It doesn't fit into neat categories with clean boundaries."
What does "human" mean when most of the living humans have some Oankali genes, and others have had Oankali change the activation state of some of their in-born genes? (Or, in our own world, when most living humans have some Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes?)
What do "male" and "female" mean if, like the Oankali, you have three possible sexes, and you don't know which one you'll be until adolescence? (Or, in our own world, when nobody has all the characteristics we associate with "male" or "female", a small number of people have ambiguous genitalia, and rather more people have social identities that don't match what's between their legs?)
What does "individual" mean when a good deal of your body mass is mitochondria (which used to be independent organisms) or symbiotic bacteria (which still could be)?
Not to mention: what do "white", "black", and other race names mean when in fact almost every human has ancestors from a variety of ethnic groups, and every human descends from eastern Africa two million years ago?