In the
Xenogenesis series, Octavia E. Butler tells a story of confrontation and accommodation between cultures. One
of these cultures is made up of human beings; the other, of far more advanced extraterrestrials called Oankali. After a war devastated Earth and killed most of its inhabitants, the Oankali transported the survivors to their spaceship, where they observed the
humans for some two and a half centuries, finally concluding that human nature is so badly flawed that human beings will destroy any world they inhabit. Sensibly, the Oankali refuse to let human beings reproduce their own kind. They are willing, however, to absorb the human species by mating with human beings, removing human flaws through genetic alteration, and using human genes in the production of new life forms. This means that the human beings in these novels are faced with a difficult choice: either to breed with aliens or to become extinct.
The first human to be offered this choice is a young black Californian, Lilith Iyapo.
Dawn is her story. Even though it is a third-person narrative, the novel is dominated by Lilith’s consciousness; the plot is moved and governed by her changes in attitude. The four parts of the novel, "Womb," "Family," "Nursery," and "The Training Floor," describe the major stages in Lilith’s development.
After being reborn, or awakened from her drugged sleep, Lilith must learn to discard her human prejudices. Her first test is to learn to see beneath the reptilian exterior of her Oankali instructor Jdahya to his real wisdom and kindness. Then she can venture out to meet other members of his family, in particular his child Nikanj, who is an ooloi, a member of a third gender that heals illness and genetic defects as well as linking mates for sexual pleasure and generation. When Lilith helps Nikanj through its metamorphosis, she becomes even more closely bonded to it. Eventually, she becomes its mate.
The last two sections of the novel deal with Lilith’s attempt to select and train other humans, persuading them to follow her example and mate with the Oankali. The experiment is not successful. Lilith’s recruits attack her, wound Nikanj, and kill the gentle human Joseph Li-Chin Shing, whom both she and Nikanj love. Lilith manages to save Nikanj, but she is forced to realize that by expanding her own understanding she has alienated her own people.
The protagonist of
Adulthood Rites is Akin, the first son born to Lilith, the dead Joseph, Nikanj, and her two Oankali mates. Akin is the first male human-born construct. Again, Octavia Butler tells her story in the third person, but as in
Dawn, she concentrates on a single consciousness, in this case Akin’s.
Adulthood Rites is divided into four sections, each of which is named for the place where the action occurs. In the first, "Lo," set in Lilith’s colony on Earth, Akin is born and begins to gather knowledge. He meets the human Augustino Leal (Tino), a resister to the Oankali who changes his mind after meeting Lilith and Akin. Unfortunately, Akin is carried off by a raiding party, to be sold to childless humans.
In Phoenix, a settlement of resisters, Akin is bought by a kindly couple that cherishes and protects him. Akin becomes sympathetic to the humans and comes to believe that they should have their own colony and their own children.
After his family turns up to claim him, they send Akin to a third location, the homeship Chkahichdahk, so that he can learn about his Oankali heritage. There Akin persuades the Oankali to let humans settle on Mars, and when he goes back to Earth in "Home," he immediately takes his news to Phoenix, only to meet hostility from the hard-line resisters. At the end of the novel, Akin and his human friends escape from Phoenix and start off toward Lo, the embarkation point for the new colony on Mars.
Like
Adulthood Rites, Imago is a tale of conflict and adventure. The protagonist and first-person narrator, Jodahs,is another of Lilith’s children, an ooloi with Tino as the human father. While
Adulthood Rites was a story of childhood and youth,
Imago focuses on the passage into adulthood, which for Jodahs and its pair-sibling Aaor is destined to be particularly difficult.
When they realize that Jodahs is a human-born ooloi, Lilith and her family go into exile in the forest, where they can supervise Jodahs’ development. They also hope to encounter humans who will agree to mate with Jodahs and with the Oankali-born Aaor, who is also an ooloi. Jodahs finds its humans easily, and after it cures them of their genetic disorder, they become bonded. In order to find mates for Aaor, however, the family members must enter a settlement of hostile humans. What could have been a massacre is avoided: When Jodahs heals them, the humans are won over. At the end of the novel, Jodahs is asked by the Oankali to plant a new town in the mountains of Earth.