The Jewels of Aptor is Samuel Delany’s first book, written when he was just 19 and published a year later. His wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker (with whom he went on to edit the speculative fiction anthology/journal Quark) was an assistant editor at Ace Books at the time, and so nepotism greased the machine to give the world this weird, highfalutin’ fantasy novel about the dark gods of the future and the post-nuclear mutants who believe in them.

I’m tempted to draw parallels between this book and Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster, which I reviewed a few weeks ago: they’re both early novels from iconic black science fiction writers who made careers on unflinchingly drawing out the sexual, racial, and gendered subtexts of the genre. They both employ a narrative conceit that I call “Mythological Futurism,” that is, they set their action in such a distant post-apocalyptic world that the technology of our time has been reduced to a set of symbolic associations, fables, and ruins. They both erase the world, tabula rasa, and give it back to the reader in knowing glimpses: fragments of once-great cities peeking out from overgrown jungles, piecemeal stories about a mute people who once built machines and traveled to the stars. The difference, however, is that Delany’s novel predates Butler’s by a decade–enough of a gap that it could well have been an influence–and is much more ambitious.

Science fiction appears to welcome young genius. Maybe it’s the imaginative streak of youth, or its proximity to the leading edge of the future: Bradbury was published at eighteen, as were Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl. John Brunner published his first novel, Galactic Storm, when he was seventeen, and Theodore Sturgeon sold his first story when he was twenty. Of course, none of those guys are as good as Delany, whose command of language in The Jewels of Aptor is rare at any age.

The novel is intensely lyrical, complicated, and peppered with poems and songs whose strangeness suits the fact that they’re supposed to be ritual fragments from an alien civilization. It’s heavily mythic, a kind of post-apocalyptic hero’s trial where the journey’s purpose weaves and folds into itself like one of Mandelbrot’s fractal coastlines: you must seek a goddess on a damned island populated by shape-shifting creatures. No, wait, the goddess is manifold. She is and isn’t her own mother. Thieves and poets run wild. What are the jewels, technology or magic?

This, it turns out, is the central theme of the novel: the distinctions (and diffusions) between magic and technology. In this novel, isolated cults employ the scientific tools of the nuclear age (or, rather, what’s left of it) in a highly ritualized manner. Casualties of the bomb, generations down the line, barely resemble humanity but rather a hierarchy of mutants and flying creatures straight out of Dante. Words banal to our ears float through their minds like mystical incantations: radio, electricity, diode. A television, without context, in the hands of such a believer, takes on oracular form. Where religion is a culture performed publicly, technology, in this novel, is a kind of cargo cult secreted in the jungle, bearing occult knowledge.

In principle, religion satisfies its own metaphysical ends, but magic is a functional art, one which shoots for tangible results. In this respect, magic already resembles technology and science–it doesn’t take much to imagine their conflation somewhere down the timeline–and Delany plays knowingly with these nebulous distinctions. The end result of the hero’s journey to procure a handful of magical jewels is that they could be used to build an engine. When they are lost, it’s discovered that they were just shorthands; machines can (and will) be built without them. It’s the knowledge that was sacred.

I have an arcane personal system for reading. It’s basically a hierarchy of dog-earing: big folds at the top corners of the page when I put a book down, and precise little tucks on the bottom corners when a passage strikes my interest. Later, when I have a pen, I trace back through the dog-eared pages and underline specific lines–although I don’t often remember what moved me at first reading. A casual observer can tell immediately which books did it for me: they are peppered at the edges with accordion folds, and shed tiny triangles of old paper when handled. I read Patternmaster, Octavia Butler’s first published novel, in an afternoon and it contains precisely one dog-ear: a poor rating.

The essential premise is that eons from now, the human race has split into three distinct evolutionary categories: Patternists, mutes, and Clayarks. Patternists are psychic knights who are all tenuously linked to one another through the “Pattern,” a sparkling web of power and consciousness. They control the world; to them, the non-psychic are little more than animals. Clayarks, on the other hand, are a proud tribal race of creatures who look like lions and lack the ability to read and control minds. These two groups are sworn enemies, so mortally separate that they scarcely ever come within a mile of each other without flinging arrows, psychic and material.

Patternists and Clayaks stared at each other across a gulf of disease and physical difference and comfortably told themselves the same lie about each other: “Not people.”

Mutes, humans like you and me, aren’t even part of the equation. There are rumors that the mute race once built a mechanized society, traveled to the stars, and that this somehow led to the present situation, but they’re dispelled as myths. Patternmaster is a future epic that, without its glimmer of temporal premise, would be a fantasy novel. There are Lords, horse-riding and fiefdoms. It only hints at the themes which later developed over the course of Butler’s significant oeuvre: gender issues, empathy, class struggle, and racial anxiety.

What I’d like to discuss here is not the plot of Patternmaster, nor the merits of Butler’s later career, but a trope within science fiction that this book perfectly expresses. Imagine a future so distant that our present has become mythological, and all the things we associate with science fiction–viz. technology, space travel, modernity–have become inward experiences. Instead of zap guns, we have telepathic warfare. Instead of travel to the stars, we have a starlike map of consciousness. It’s a distinctly unfuturistic future, one where society functions like juiced-up medieval history, and monarchy and the mind are the only forms of power.

The implication, presumably, is that our current epoch is a folly, an outlier, and that once we shake our obsession with gadgetry, we’ll understand the full force of the focused human mind, and replace theories and ideas with myths and stories. It relegates the entire span of the industrialized world into a chronological blip, rendered irrelevant by time. This genre deserves a name, and I propose Mythological Futurism.

Mythological Futurism has a strong lineage. We see elements of it in the entheogenic space travel and interstellar feudalism of Dune; all over the work of Samuel Delany, particularly in the Einstein Intersection, which takes place in a future so remote that the Beatles are half-remembered as gods; and in the broad chronological strokes of Olaf Stapledon, of course. Clifford Simak’s A Choice of Gods goes there beautifully, too, as does much of the canon of Jack Vance (undoubtedly there are scores more, and I look to my readers to fill me in). These are post-historical narratives, stories that have mutated far beyond us and somehow returned full-circle to the slow dreamtime of early human history.

At its worst, placing a narrative in such a remote future can turn science fiction into fantasy, absolving the writer of the responsibility of operating within real-world, or extrapolated real-world, physics. At its best, it zooms the human struggle out to a poetic and universal whole. I can’t say exactly where Patternmaster falls on that spectrum; in a sense it’s too grounded to be fantasy, but it’s also too concise to thrill as an ambitious work of science fiction (only one dog-ear, after all). That said, the difference between science fiction and fantasy, in this case, is essentially semantic; here is a world where technologies are so advanced as to be invisible, and its effects could be classified as magical if Butler chose to describe them as such.

Perhaps the distinction, then, lies in the gradients of myth. If, in the culture of its telling, a myth is regarded as a true account of the remote past, then a writer who scries forward through the same ahistorical fog–who tucks technology back into a magical space, building fables for remote aeons–is building a kind of sacred narrative for the future.

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

People throw around words like “dystopia” and “post-apocalyptic” a lot when they talk about modern science fiction novels. I wonder, have those people read Parable of the Sower? Dystopia. Dissed Topia. Apocalytpic and Apocryphal-ictic.

Parable of the Sower takes place in a dramatically fucked-up Southern California in 2024. The state’s traditional problems — water shortages, racial tension, economic disparity, botched government, fuel costs, gang violence — are all extrapolated to the nth degree. L.A. is an “oozing sore” of inconceivably terrible violence, cannibalism, contemporary slavery, drug addiction, and perpetual rape. There’s a new drug called “pyro” that turns people into addicts who set fire to entire neighborhoods (and people) just to watch them burn. The freeways are flooded with people fleeing North on foot. Private armies of security guards protect the estates, enclaves, and businesses of the super-rich, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves, or else form decrepit, self-sustaining micro-communities shut off from the outside world.

There’s a Hanns Eisler quote about Los Angeles that I’ve always really liked, which I found in Mike Davis‘ City of Quartz: “If one stopped the flow of water here for three days the jackals would reappear and the sand of the desert.” Octavia Butler‘s Los Angeles is one where all the artificial resources that sustain the city have been exhausted; the jackals have indeed reappeared. It’s a wholly dystopic interpretation of modernity (what if everything got worse?), but at the same time it’s so nightmarishly plausible that it shocks with familiarity, not estrangement.

In this situation, the ordinary concerns of science fiction — which is to say, questions of Utopia — are made urgent. There is no room or time for fantasy, nor are issues of causality relevant. In fact, Parable of the Sower never discusses the reasons why the world went this direction: only a faint hope that things might one day return to the “good old days,” before kids had to learn to use firearms as soon as they can walk. The novel isn’t about causality, it’s about change; Change as a force which molds and shapes our lives impartially, a God that we have the power to shape back.

The main character, Lauren Olamina, suffers from a hyperempathy disorder in which she feels the physical pain of others. No small issue in her barbarous world; she is practically incapacitated by violence, and yet she is often forced to inflict it on the maniacs which brutalize her neighborhood and eventually destroy it. Lauren, however, is concerned with more than just survival: she attempts Utopianism, even after the end of Utopia. Her empathy problem is the root of her worldview, and she tries to start a new agrarian community of fellow disenfranchised people somewhere in Northern California, which would seem cliché if it weren’t for the fact that it takes place a post-cliché universe entirely. Utopianism after Utopia. Will it work? We never find out; although the tone is hopeful, Parable of the Sower promises nothing. Despite essentially being a novel about having hope on a shoestring, it does not inspire confidence, only the dread of fulfilled prophecy.

The only inspiring thing in the pile of festering murk of Butler’s 2024 Los Angeles is Lauren Olamina’s valiant mutiny against entropy, which I suppose isn’t heroism — just what you do. Olamina refuses to accept what has been laid out for her (fear, death) and instead attempts to shape Change rather than be overrun by it.

It is, definitely, weirdly affecting. I’m in Los Angeles right now; I had this nightmare last night that I had to cover the windows of my survivalist bunker with black garbage bags so that maniacs from “outside” wouldn’t be able to see in and ravage my precious stores of food and water. This morning, during a conversation this morning about the state’s current political and financial situation (miserable), I bleakly contributed only that when it came to Los Angeles and that sharp precicipe before apocalypse, it has all already been written.

NEXT BOOK: ROBERT A HEINLEIN’S THE PUPPET MASTERS