Description: MP3-CD IN EXCELLENT CONDITION. 10 HOURS 13 MINUTES UNABRIDGED COPY. BOOK 2 OF 3 IN THE XENOGENESIS TRIOLOGY. READ BY ALDRICH BARRETT. SYNOSIS: Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response by Joan Slonczewski, presented at SFRA, Cleveland, June 30, 2000 Octavia E. Butler’s novels share with readers her extraordinary vision of what it means to be "other," based on intelligent biological speculation. Her Xenogenesis trilogy, now retitled Lilith’s Brood for reissue by Warner, creates a stunningly vision of abduction and seduction by an alien species. This vision is presented in terms remarkably consistent with modern molecular biology, even predicting developments that have occurred since the novels were written. As the trilogy’s first book, Dawn, opens, the human race has nearly destroyed itself by nuclear war--"humanicide," as Butler calls it--a fate that seemed all too plausible in the eighties, when the book was written, and that remains a distinct possibility if the effects of humanity on our environment are not reversed. The few humans who survive the war are rescued and captured by the Oankali, a nomadic alien species that travels through the universe seeking partner species with whom to "trade" their own genes. The story is told from the viewpoint of Lilith Iyapo, a human woman whom the Oankali adopt into their family and try to enlist in recruiting other humans. Lilith is torn between accepting the medical enhancements and the sexual advances of her captors while trying to help other humans escape. Unlike the vast majority of alien abduction tales, Dawn actually presents a biologically plausible explanation for why the Oankali need to interbreed with humans--despite their own abhorrence for the human race, which to them appears monstrous for its combination of high intelligence and self-destructive violence, the "human contradiction." The Oankali have evolved specialized organs and subcellular structures which manipulate their own genes to maximize fitness in their environment, a self-sustaining starship which is itself a living organism. Paradoxically, because the Oankali are such successful genetic engineers, they tend to engineer themselves into an evolutionary dead end; losing all genetic diversity, they lose the ability to adapt to change. The only way they can recover genetic diversity is to interbreed with an entirely new species, which contributes new genetic strengths--and weaknesses. Butle's story evokes the experience of an African woman swept into slavery in the eighteenth century. Lilith’s "Awakening" among the Oankali evokes the dehumanization of slave conditions--she is naked, has to beg for clothing, and is denied reading materials and other access to her own culture and history. The theme of slavery appears frequently in Butler’s books, most notably Kindred, in which a Black woman travels back through time to rescue a white man who becomes her ancestor. The heroine of Kindred struggles with the fact that she owes her own existence as an individual to the oppressive cultural system in which Black women could bear children only by submitting to the advances of their white masters. In a remarkable update, today's descendents of master and slave can use DNA analysis to go back and confront their Jeffersonian ancestors. In Dawn, Lilith faces the choice of "trading" with the Oankali to produce half-human children, or having no family at all. Like the slaves who bore their masters’ children, Lilith obtains privileges of enhanced health and security for herself and her future children, who will be genetically half Oankali. The Oankali lecture her about the superiority of their egalitarian, nonviolent lifestyle, as opposed to the hierarchical, violent tendencies of humans--just as Americans told their African slaves they were fortunate to be rescued from barbarism by their "democratic" masters. Like the slaves and their descendents, Lilith and her children feel enormous ambivalence about her choice. In Adulthood Rites, Part 2 of the trilogy, Lilith’s half-Oankali son chooses for a while to live apart with the human "resisters," those who choose sterility rather than join the Oankali. He at last convinces the Oankali to provide a new home for the resisters, where they can breed again and regenerate the human species. The home provided is the planet Mars; reshaped for habitability, to be sure, but all of humanity is outcast from their own homeland, like Native Americans forced onto a reservation. Lilith’s son risks his life to allow humans to choose humanity; yet he himself returns to his own hybrid heritage among the Oankali. Throughout Butler’s work, people of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds struggle to make such choices. Lilith’s ambivalence about the Oankali, and about her own genetic heritage, echoes Butler’s own experience in the community of writers. For many years, Butler was one of only a few Black female writers of science fiction. Her gifts were embraced and appreciated by many fellow writers, and found success with supportive publishers. Yet for publication, she had to accept cover illustrations depicting her Black characters as Caucasian. Butler’s success required denial of her own racial identity, just as some of the early women writers of science fiction had to deny their gender by writing under male pseudonyms. Thus, she shared Lilith’s dilemma by accepting literary success at the cost of part of her own identity. In the Xenogenesis books, the transformation of humanity is accomplished by alien biotechnology, performed by genetic engineers called ooloi, who participate in the mating of human and Oankali. Until recently, genetic crossing of unrelated animals was considered untenable from the standpoint of biology. Yet in the past decade, biologists have discovered profound sources of genetic commonality between organisms as distant as humans and fruit flies. Reproductive technology has led to chimeric combinations such as sheep and goat; and an early human embryo has been generated from the egg of a cow. Researchers of the Primate Genome Project seriously propose to introduce the chimpanzee’s "superior" disease resistance genes into human chromosomes. Thus, a science fiction writer can now propose alien interbreeding based on reasonable biological speculation; but few writers in fact develop the biological basis as soundly as Butler does.
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