Finally finished Octavia Butler’s Lillith’s Brood trilogy 🤔
Totally not my kind of SF and I didn’t expect to enjoy it, but I did. The themes of race/gender/power/genetics etc seem fresh and interestingly treated. In part I guess because this predates the intense politicization.
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Themes like gender dysphoria pop in interesting ways that would be impossible today. 1987-89 when first published, all this stuff was still subconscious enough in the zeitgeist that it was possible to treat them with a certain imaginative freedom that would be hard today.
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As with Ursula Le Guin’s books I guess my one mild disappointment is that the tech premises (in this case genetic engineering) are not developed enough for my tastes. They are sketched in very roughly and the focus is almost entirely on the social “soft SF” side.
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The ooloi (third neuter gender of the Oankali) are both the complex identity exploration characters for the book’s social themes (deployed to explore gender/sexual identity, power, control, co-dependency, desire…) and the main technical design fiction, like a genetic warp drive
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But the latter aspect is only weakly developed, though there are tantalizing glimpses of how they can manipulate living matter and entire planetary ecosystems and breed spaceships etc.
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The weakest part for me was the vague premise of a “human paradox” of a species being both intelligent and hierarchical, which is framed as rare and anomalous in the Oankali’s long history of galactic genetic tourism of the galaxy. Feels like a lazy political slogan.
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Strongest part was the radical conceptualization of galactic spacefaring as an insectoid life cycle process. In this world, space is not a life-hostile void. It’s more like a garden of plants (= planets) with the Oankali as a sort of taxa of directed evolving insects.
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This would make a great prestige TV show, but would be hard to do well, and demanding to watch if done right. The book tries and mostly succeeds in creating a visceral sense of life processes. I suspect this trilogy is probably both terrifying and liberating to LGBTQ teenagers.
