Octavia E. Butler – Dawn (1987)
I assumed I would like Dawn, the first of three books in the Xenogenesis Series, by Octavia E. Butler. I’m a slow reader, so reading time is too valuable to spend on books I don’t decidedly enjoy. It’s a bit of a close call, since I dedicated the time to finish the first book, but right now I don’t plan on reading the remaining two books of the series – and it pains me not to know how things will turn out.
For the past year or so I’ve limited my reading to recent fiction reviewed by the NY Times. In the interests of using my reading time wisely, I decided to let the NY Times cull out good book prospects. However, I miss my days of reading science fiction, so I called my well-read daughter and asked her for recommendations. She suggested Butler, especially this series.
The basic premise of the book is deliciously clever and lends itself to awesome possibilities – only a few humans survive a nuclear war, and they are transported without their consent to an orbiting ship by extraterrestrial beings whose mode of evolution is to “trade” favorable gene traits with other species. The Oankali are a long-lived extraterrestrial species who have found something in humans that is worthy of trade, so they propose to clean up the earth and send humans back to re-establish a human presence while in some undisclosed way merging the Oankali/human lines.
Our protagonist, Lilith, is the human the Oankali identify as the most appropriate remaining human to prime with extra genetic powers of recollection and strength for purposes of leading the first group of humans back to earth.
This is a sensational premise. It doesn’t require a lot of science, but it does lend itself to a wide-open imagination to the possibilities of human/alien interaction.
Lilith develops intense relationships with individual members of the Oankali, while becoming essentially a beloved member of one of the alien families. She is conflicted throughout the book, however, with ambivalence of whether she is being co-opted by the Oankali for a purpose that will forever undermine the human species, or whether the Oankali are creating a reasonable way forward for humans.
My dissatisfaction with the book is with the dialogue between human and alien, and the unpredictability of Lilith.
The dialogue is stilted. The characters speak in full sentences that seem to serve more as explanatory narrative than as the free-flowing fits and starts of real conversations. In our daily lives, people (and perhaps aliens who speak with people) speak ambiguously and in clipped phrases of conjunctions and equivocation. But in Dawn, people speak like a novelist’s narrative.
Lilith herself is all over the place. At one point she’s sleeping with an alien, while at another point she’s angrily rejecting the plans that she has been going along with for months. At times, it seems like Butler uses Lilith’s unexpected anger to create a dramatic tension to drive the book forward. However, this makes Lilith into a foil rather than a human we follow for her intelligence and personality. It would have better for our protagonist to either cannily create a plan to bust up the whole Oankali plan for humans, or to obtain better intelligence on her role, but instead Lilith seems to unpredictably react in a way that makes it harder for a reader to join her life. I’m just not sure I like or appreciate Lilith enough to spend three books with her.
Otavia E. Butler is an accomplished writer, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She knows her science fiction. In the end, Lilith was a dominant character in 99% of the scenes of the book, but with her stilted dialogue and inconsistent character, I just found it difficult to get close enough to become vested in her life.
Bob Fall 