Octavia
Butler
Completed 1/20/2019,
Reviewed 1/21/2019
4 stars
Octavia
Butler was an amazing writer. In this
book, she created amazing, well-thought out aliens and writes riveting
dialogue. This is the first book of the
Xenogensis series. It is about consent
and resentment and what it means to be human.
The aliens do everything under the belief that they are doing it for the
good of humanity. But the humans view
them as jailors. It doesn’t help that
the aliens are hideous to look at. It
creates a conflict that makes the book an uncomfortable but profound read.
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The majority
of the book is Lilith Awakening and coming to grips with her captors. Through her, we learn about the aliens: who
they are, what they’ve done, and what they are trying to do. Most interestingly, they have three sexes: male,
female, and oolai. All three are needed
to procreate. An oolai is assigned to
Lilith to learn all it can from her, and vice versa. Lilith becomes part of the oolai’s
family. They are good to her but she
feels treated like a pet. All she wants
is to be free. And of course, she doesn’t
want the Oankali to create a race of hybrid babies which would wipe out the
remnants of the human race. Lilith is
great character. She’s very complicated,
as evidenced by her love-hate relationship with the Oankali, as well as her
interactions with the other humans she awakens to be part of the first team to
resettle the earth.
The last
part of the book is Lilith Awakening over forty other humans who have been
asleep, but they are people who the Oankali have Awakened once to study and see
if they could be the leaders of the resettlement team. This part deals with the conflicts between Lilith
and the humans, amongst each other, and between the humans and the
Oankali. What makes this book such
riveting reading is that nothing is easy.
The humans resent their captivity and plight. They devolve into everything that’s bad about
the human race.
Butler’s
writing really shines in this book. The
prose is not flowery and poetic. Most of
the writing is dialogue or Lilith thinking.
It’s basically told third person through her eyes. It’s gritty and realistic. And the plot, which I thought was pretty
complex, was easy to follow. I give this
book four stars out of five. It has a
terrific premise, excellent execution and Butler’s imagination is in full
force. I’m really looking forward to the
rest of the series.
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