Dawn is the first book in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, recently reissued as the infinitely-less-cool-sounding “Lilith’s Brood” series. It tells the story of Lillith, a woman who wakes up after a nuclear winter on Earth in an sealed room. She’s held there for almost two years, under constant interrogation from a maddeningly patient, incorporate voice. One day she discovers a shadowy figure in her cell — her captor. He tells her that the people holding her hostage aren’t Soviets, the CIA, or any other terrestrial entity. They’re aliens. He tells her that he’s come to free her, but only when she’s able to look at him without terror. He raises the lights: tentacles for a face.

Thus begins Lillith’s real ordeal, the struggle to assimilate with a race of impossibly alien aliens on a ship orbiting her own destroyed planet. The aliens, called Oankali, offer her a deal: they’ve restored the Earth to health, and they intend to send the surviving humans they’ve gathered back down to begin the race anew. In exchange, they demand access to the genepool. The Oankali are genetic traders, creatures who’ve evolved specialized organs to manipulate their own genes, but who (paradoxically) must interbreed with other species in order to assure the survival of their kind. The aliens, Lillith discovers, want to have sex with her.

“Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more like you….We’re as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing. We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done, to the rebirth of your people and mine.”

One of the most compelling things about Dawn is the way that it expresses the fundamental dread that alienness inspires in its human protagonists. The Oankali are ugly — covered in thousands of wormlike tentacles that serve as sensory organs — but it’s not their ugliness that Lillith and the other humans find repulsive. It’s their shocking difference. Upon first meeting an Oankali, humans panic, lose consciousness, and self-mutilate. They literally cannot bring themselves to move any closer to the aliens, or even look directly at them. The first time Lillith encounters her captor, he forces his presence on her for five days before, exhausted and psychically broken, she is finally able to touch him.

This realistic horror of the other is the crux of the conflict that Lillith and her human counterparts face in Dawn. They are given the opportunity to resurrect the human race, but only if future generations of humans hold Oankali genes. Can the humans cope with the idea of their children being only half-human? Is that a fair trade? Is it even the perpetuation of the human race, if the future includes tentacles for arms and advanced powers of genetic manipulation?

Many critics have read Butler’s tales of racial anxiety as post-colonial allegories about powerlessness and domination in a racist society, which is a totally valid interpretation since a) Butler is one of only a few black female science fiction writers, and b) many of her novels deal explicitly with slavery. Despite the obvious parallels in Dawn — Oankali as plantation owners, forcing nonconsensual interbreeding, denying the humans access to books and writing implements, emphasizing their genetic superiority — I think it’s somewhat reductive to read “humans” as “slaves” in Butler’s work. The value of science fiction is often sold to the mainstream as being primarily allegorical; the aliens are Russians, the astronauts are colonialists, the new planet is the continent of America, intergalactic trade is really just slavery, “how clever, this will fool the censors!” But the power of this kind of tit-for-tat symbolism died with the pulps, and Butler didn’t write space westerns — she wrote highly complex, nuanced, sexually-charged feminist think pieces with no clear resolution and no obvious bad guys. The aliens here aren’t evil, they just have a different evolutionary imperative.

If anything, the Oankali practice a kind of inverse racism that is particularly foreign to humanity: while the narrative of racism in the West stems from an emphasis on racial, biological, and genetic “purity,” the Oankali impose mutations, symbiosis, and cosmic miscegenation. There is nothing isolationist about the alien mentality; the Oankali procreate with humans by literally placing themselves between a man and a woman, interpreting and modifying the biological exchange. They’re in the scrum, not peering down at it from a pedestal of their own design.

Butler speaks, rather, to the instability of identity in the face of genetic manipulation. It’s a weighty exploration of biological determinism; if our genes define us, then who are we? We contain billions of them; how many need to change before we are no longer human? Lillith undergoes subtle biological changes as the result of her cooperation with the Oankali: increased strength, a change in chemical signature that allows her to operate parts of the ship, a greater resistance to cancer. These all contribute to a perception of her as a Judas goat, someone who has betrayed her humanity. And yet her essential identity remains, even when the aliens give her an eidetic memory. Her transformations cut her off from her own kind, and while she grows close to her alien keepers, she can never be quite like them, either. Lillith’s position is deeply liminal: she is human, biologically, though less than before, and soon to parent a generation born of intergalactic parentage.

In suit, Dawn is a meditation on the self, a novel that ponders the porous boundaries between skin and world, human and alien, person and nonperson, natural and technological. What we think of as our personhood is actually an emergent system of genes, microbes, and electrical impulses — and it’s the product of cultural interpretation, an ideological system for enforcing meaning from meat. Identity is not biology. The Oankali know this, and they push Lillith to understand herself as more than the sum of her genes, as a mutable instance that is adaptable to an intergalactic, rather than terrestrial, context.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon review of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Illustration by the great Jim Burns.

Triad, 80s oeuvre of Sheila Finch, is unbelievably beautiful. It takes place on an extraordinarily sumptuous alien planet called Chameleon, or Omareemee,  which changes color every time it’s perceived; sometimes it’s described as being awash in bright reds and vermillion, all the plants glistening wet red in the tropical rainfall; other times it’s gray and lavender, the indigenous species’ fur coats undulating softly in gray-mauve-shades, gray grass, purple sky; wet, colored mist, perfumed, dripping with fruit.

There’s a lot going on, all of which deserves due diligence. The story is multi-tiered: it’s about language, reality, sexuality, feminism, colonialism, and machine ethics. An all-female crew from a post-male Earth travels to Chameleon for merchant purposes; the crew’s xenolinguist, Gia, is charged with learning the natives’ language and brokering some kind of trade deal with them. The methods used for this are fascinating — the linguist has a chip implanted in her brain, keeping her in constant contact with the crew computer system, HANA, that mechanically parses all the phonemes and breaks them down into semantic categories, then assigns Gia a battery of psychotropic drugs in order to properly break open her reality:

“Each species of intelligent life in the galaxy learned to limit its perceptions of thr world it inhabited in order to preserve itself from insanity, then petrified those few chosen sensations into language. Once a child was brought up in a language system, it was impossible for her to hold a concept that couldn’t be framed in that language. Therefore…the drugs [were] designed to break down her normally held world view, shatter her illusion of ‘reality,’ eliminate the mechanism by which her mind censored information it considered unimportant according to its preconceived categories of priority.”

Gia literally trips her way through Chameleon, the ground swelling up to meet her feet with each step, a sensuous communion with the natives, who she blurs into, lost in a sea of morphing color, every sound shooting through her brain. She struggles endlessly to comprehend the local language, which seems to operate in a different space-time continuum. They have no past tense, no future tense, no proper nouns, only variations of “we;” she comes to learn that the Omareemeeans exist in the pre-conscious Now, and comprehend themselves only as that which their planet uses to know itself. They have no concept of death, and murder each other thoughtlessly, lovingly, sensing everything as part of a complete and ever-changing whole.

It forms a lush and impossibly alluring worldview when juxtaposed with the crew of humans, who come from an Earth where machine intelligence has been dictating evolutionary development for generations — women self-impregnate and dominate culture, while men are mostly artists, prisoners, peripheral figures. A small men’s liberation movement is currently in bloom, but it is powerless against the steel will of the female hegemony, who hardly deign to touch the opposite sex.

As for the Omareemeeans, they’re groovy. Their language hangs lazily beyond of Gia’s grasp: each word has at least three meanings, only two of which Gia can identify at once, the third lingers unknown, a “carrier wave” pregnant with meaning. The fragments are like poems:

Much of Triad is concerned with Gia’s efforts to understand Omareemeean; it’s easily the most fascinating (and well-researched) aspect of the novel, even held up against the various mutinies and space politics that serve as a backdrop. The pragmatic crew-women, eager to make a trade agreement and colonize Omareemee, insist to Gia that the natives (they call them “Ents” for “entities”) aren’t sentient because they lack self-awareness; the tension is in identifying and defining self-awareness, and trying to understand just how much language molds reality.

There’s the usual colonialist conflicts, too, fear and misunderstanding of the other; the humans are trigger-happy to define the Ents as “sub-human,” but where does that distinction stand anymore in a Universe teeming with various forms of sentient life? What becomes the gold standard of consciousness or worth? It’s all relative, of course: even humans know they’re low on the evolutionary totem pole, as their own trade activities are monitored by yet another higher intelligence, which lurks unseen in the blackness of space.

Meanwhile the Omareemeeans change colors along with their planet, oblivious.

In the hotel room carpeting that is my life, The Female Man was a major event. It’s among the most important-feeling events of my career as a reader, but it’s also the kind of book that sounds crummy on paper.

But here goes.

The Female Man takes place in four worlds inhabited by four different women who share the same genotype and whose names all start with the letter J. There’s Jeannine Dadier, who lives in 1969 in an America that never recovered from the Great Depression; Joanna, who also lives in 1969, but in an America like ours; Janet Evason, an Amazonian beast who lives in an all-female world called Whileaway; and Alice Reasoner, or “Jael,” who’s a dystopian warlord from a future where women and men have been launching nukes at each other for decades.

When all these women get together throughout the course of the book, you come to realize that all their realities are “worlds of possibility” with no linear relationship to one another. So, although some of the book takes place in the future, no one woman’s world is supposed to be “our” past or “our” future. Rather, they’re each inter-dimensional travelers. Not to mention that they’re all manifestations of the same woman, spread out over time, situation, and possibility.

It’s complicated. Janet, faced with a world populated by men, balks. Jeannine becomes complicit in Jael’s war. Joanna, exasperated, calls herself a Female Man, ostensibly to separate herself from being identified as “just another” woman. Jael attempts to set up anti-man military bases over space and time. The women travel from place to place, to Janet’s world, Joanna’s, Jael’s.

There’s nothing straight about the book, in any sense of the word. Russ’ style is epically woozy, disjointed, and, for lack of a better word, “feminine,” unconcerned with structure or the rigidity of narrative. Unsurprisingly, too, the novel plays heavily with voice, with characters playing multiple roles, and speaking from diverse points of view. It’s usually impossible to identify who the speaking “I” is, which is maddening until you learn to realize that “I” is the key to power and all that fiddling with it is an attempt to speak to a universal (albeit feminine) point of view all while eradicating whatever prejudices are built into our language: “I, I, I. Repeat it like magic.” In a sense, the traditional authority of The Novel is futzed about, as very few concessions of logic and characterization are made to the reader: Russ even espouses, “to resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person.” In short, you are forced to loosen your grip, which in turn throws out all the usual assumptions about readers having a “right” or “getting to” know what’s happening and why.

This is actually, to me, the most subversive gesture of the novel, despite all the other, more vitriolic points about power and gender dialectics (athough some of that stuff can be fustian in a “hell yeah!”-empowering kind of way). Here’s a book that’s telling you all kinds of heavy shit, but it’s not condescending. It holds the insight firmly in its grip and it won’t just give it to you. It demands to be decoded. It demands consideration. It demands, most of all, to be read with both feet firmly planted on its own turf.

This is why it works so well as science fiction, which is a genre that demands a hearty suspension of disbelief from its readers. As readers of SF, we are ready to believe a great deal of improbable things, but we are rarely asked to indulge a writer’s style so profoundly. And yet, why not? Isn’t that why we’re here — to experience things which readers of traditional fiction scarcely know exists? Joanna Russ says “try harder.”

Samuel Delany noticed this, too. In a 1977 review of Russ’ work (which is cryptic but presumably positive, since he mentions The Female Man in Dhalgren), he asks “What does one do with an SF novel like The Female Man, which demands its politics be taken seriously, and presents those politics without naivete or bombast, but rather through a whole host of distancing devices that make it an “epic novel” in almost exactly the way Brecht used the term “epic theater”?

Which is to say: No Fourth Wall.

Which is to say: No Walls At All!

NEXT BOOK: SAMUEL DELANY’S DHALGREN