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.They have rescued the remnants of humanity from the aftermath of nuclear conflict and have kept them unconscious on their orbiting spaceship for 250 years, until the Earth could be made habitable again.They intend to awaken this human population and release it back into the wild, as it were.In return they require only one thing from humanity: their genes.Butler’s aliens, the Oankali, are essentially traders in genetic material, continually augmenting their own bodies with genetic diversity from other species, a process they can control at a molecular level.These aliens, then, are the symbolic embodiment of diversity.Their strength lies in the technology they wield, which is always represented in a suitably Edenic, utopian manner as organic technology, and their position as the literal saviours of mankind reflects that diversity as a fundamental good.Although they are not cartoonishly ‘virtuous’ (they do not always tell humans the truth about their plans, and they do sometimes force themselves upon humans), their balance of rational and generally kindly demeanour tends to valorise their cosmos-view.Diversity and hybridity are the absolute raison-d’être of these aliens: ‘we do what you would call genetic engineering’, one of them tells Lilith.‘We do it naturally.We must do it.It renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species instead of specialising ourselves into extinction or stagnation’(p.39).As a result of this, Butler’s Oankali have a radically contrary approach to difference from that of most humans.In the second book of the trilogy Lilith says as much, talking to her son, a hybrid human–Oankali called Akin:‘Human beings fear difference,’ Lilith had told him once.‘Oankali crave difference.Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status.Oankali seek differencesf and race108and collect it.They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialisation … When you feel a conflict [within yourself], try to go the Oankali way.Embrace difference.’(Butler, Adulthood Rites (1997): 80)That last sentence might stand as the epigraph for the whole Xenogenesis trilogy.It is interesting to contrast the Oankali, a race of aliens who cruise the galaxy seeking out new life in order to assimilate its difference to themselves, and who are not prepared to leave any unaltered human beings behind on Earth, with a similarly conceived race of aliens from Star Trek, the Borg.The Borg are thoroughly evil, conceived only in terms of threat, the most extreme of Trek’s demonisations of the alien as other.Butler’s Oankali, on the other hand, constitute one of SF’s most convincing utopian experiments, a profound and moving exploration of the possibilities alterity could bring with it.This attempt at utopia is one strand of Butler’s trilogy, but perhaps the books are more focused on the extreme difficulty all the humans have in the face of such radical difference.In the first volume Lilith undergoes a slow and painful process of acclimatisation to the strangeness of the aliens.Their skin, which is covered in sensory tentacles and feelers of varying sizes (‘Medusa children.Snakes for hair.Nests of night crawlers for eyes and ears’), causes her the most problem ( Dawn, p.41).Even when she accepts the aliens and even takes an alien mate, the sheer weirdness of these phallic organs continues to bother her.That there is something sexual at the root of this unheimlich quality is made explicit both in their characterisation, and by the fact that Lilith and her human partner find a super-sexual bliss in conjunction with their mutual alien mate:She tore off her jacket and seized the ugly, ugly elephant’s trunk of an organ, letting it coil round her as she climbed onto the bed.She sand-wiched Nikanj’s [the alien’s] body between her own and Joseph’s.(Butler, Dawn (1997): 161)But it is the setting of a black woman at the core of this story that brings us back to issues of race.We discover that Lilith has been awakened by the Oankali for a particular reason: she is to ‘parent’ a group ofsf and race109newly awakened humans, to guide them into a position of acceptance of their new position.She doesn’t want this job, but that is the very reason why she has been given it by the aliens: ‘somebody who desperately doesn’t want the responsibility, who doesn’t want to lead, who is a woman’ ( Dawn, p.157).In other words, as Jenny Wolmark puts it, this is a novel about the ways a character’s ‘marginality, articulated in terms of both gender and race, [can] become her strength’ (Wolmark 1994: 32) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]