Adulthood Rites

Octavia Butler

Completed 1/23/2019, Reviewed 1/25/2019

4 stars

This is the second book in the Xenogenesis series.  It continues the questioning of colonialism, slavery, powerlessness of women, and what it means to be human.  It focuses much more on what the Oankali call the Human Contradiction:  that humans are intelligent yet still perpetuate a hierarchical structure that is the cause of strife, violence, and self-destruction.  It’s an excellent rumination on the topic through the eyes of a hybrid male, part Oankali, part human, who tries to support the human race even though he sees the examples of the contradiction all around him.  There were parts that dragged, but overall, I really enjoyed this book.

Akin (pronounced ah-KEEN) is the hybrid, or to use the terminology of the book, a construct.  He has five parents, a human mother (Lilith from the first book) and father, an Oankali mother and father, and an ooloi, the neuter gender of the Oankali.  He is the first male construct, and sort of an experiment to see if he will have the same Human Contradiction because of his humanness.  The humans who are cooperating with the Oankali are on Earth in the Amazonian rainforest in trade villages living with the aliens.  The humans who are not cooperating have run away and formed their own communities.  These resisters were made sterile by the Oankali to prevent them from creating a new self-destructive world.  They can only bear children if they agree to procreate with the Oankali.  Resentful, they resort to violence against the Oankali and the humans who live with them.  There are also raiders, resisters who raid the villages stealing goods and children and selling them to the humans who are sterile.  Akin is one such stolen baby.

The thing that makes Akin so desirable, besides being the first male construct, is that he looks fully human.  He has no tentacles except for an extremely long tongue with which he perceives the world around him.  He can also sting and kill with it.  He’s extremely intelligent, speaking in complete sentences before normal babies would be speaking gibberish.  After an initial search turns up negative, the Oankali let him stay with the resisters because he has the unique advantage to learn about them and empathize with them.  He is eventually rescued and pleads on behalf of the resisters to let them have their own homeland and their reproductivity back. 

As in the first book, the plot and world building is quite complex.  It amazes me that Butler had such a vivid imagination, especially for the aliens and their culture.  The point of view of the book is mostly Akin’s, so we get a much richer sense of the morality of the Oankali.  What we learn is that they are the ultimate example of empathy.  It is this empathy that has made them decide to prevent humans from reckless reproduction and self-destruction.  But as Akin comes to question, is it wrong to force change upon a people who are not willing to change, even if the outcome seems tragically inevitable. 

What also struck me in this book was the complexity of the relationships.  Butler spends a lot of time giving us intimate looks at Akin’s relationships with his construct siblings, his ooloi parent, as well as his other parents and his captors.  All of his relationships are broken to some extent.  But being the first of his kind, it all helps, or hinders, his ability to figure out who he is and what his purpose is. 

I give this book four stars out of five.  I had a tough time coming to this conclusion because the parts that dragged made me want to give it three stars.  But the book is so intelligently and beautifully written that I had to concede that it was an excellent read.