"Other Oankali had gathered to watch the bubbling ground. The orange mass had grown to be about three feet across and almost perfectly circular. It had touched one of the fleshy, tentacled pseudoplants and the pseudoplant darkened and lashed about as though in agony. Seeing its violent twisting Lilith forgot that it was not an individual organism. She focused on the fact that it was alive and she had probably caused it pain. She had not merely caused an interesting effect, she had caused harm...
She made herself speak in slow, careful Oankali. 'I can't change this,' she said, wanting to say that she couldn't repair the damage. ' Will you help?'
An ooloi stepped up, touched the orange mud with one of its sensory arms, held the arm still in the mud for several seconds. The bubbling slowed, then stopped. By the time the ooloi withdrew, the bright orange coloring was also beginning to fade to normal." - p. 76
Considered a classic in the Science Fiction genre, Octavia E. Butler's Dawn (published in 1987) the first in the Lilith's Brood trilogy, holds all the fundamental elements a book of its kind is expected to: confrontation with the Other, the immersion of the self within a place "foreign" to them, a new understanding of the world that has lost its past semblance of the believable, and the experiential lived reality under the dominance of oppression - the threat and actuality of one's life being ripped away, violently, by unfathomable, usually technological and/or futuristic, forces.
Particularly fascinating are Dawn's conceptions of these elements as they emerge in the actual environment, landscape, and ecology. Lilith, the main character, wakes up in a blank, white room that she later finds out, through dialogue with the Oankali (an alien race in control over the last of humanity), is permeable, mutable, and penetrable, as opposed to the sturdy, solid, and stable structures of old. Lilith is told she is on a ship that carries data and other information gathered from the Oankali's research: their stringent observation of human and earthly social activity spilling over into biology, scrutinizing genetic codes, auto-immune behaviors, digestive systems... the list goes on. While the ship has a habitat that looks almost exactly identical to life on Earth, all on - and of - the ship is pseudo - none of it from the same organic matter from which humans were originally conceived.
"'It's all right,' Lilith said. 'We can go outside if you like.'
Its tentacles smoothed flat against its body briefly, then it took her hand and would have opened the wall and led her out but she stopped it.
'Can you show me how to make it open?' she asked.
The child hesitated, then took one of her hands and brushed it over the forest of its long head tentacles, leaving the hand slightly wet. Then it touched her fingers to the wall, and the wall began to open.
More programmed reaction to chemical stimuli. No special areas to press, no special series of pressures. Just a chemical the Oankali manufactured within their bodies." - p. 62
Butler's Dawn captures the essence of post-humanism/post-humanist theory, a foundational approach to the world that decentralizes humanity as the sole driver of knowledge and understanding and instead balances the human alongside and within its environment and any other life that inhabits it (see The Anthropocene as we know it: posthumanism, science education and scientific literacy as a path of sustainability). In Dawn, the Oankali aliens are just as important as humanity in creating a pathway to the future that liberates the constraints of a past that doesn't yet understand or foresee what the species is capable of. Part of this is the change in how humans interact with their habitat: the ability to transcend the limits of inertia as well as recognize the outside realm as a presence that is as alive as their own bodies. In a sense, Butler is rewriting, reshaping, and envisioning another way to comprehend the nature of humanity, one that takes more into account than the straightforward idea of the survival of the fittest.
The premise and plot structure of Dawn make the story one of the most lauded science fiction novels of our time because of how Lilith's story re-conceptualizes humanity's place in the world and for its hearkening back to humanity's grievous errors (i.e. slavery). For those reasons I would recommend the book for all fans of SF. On a more personal level, I found Butler's writing less lyrical than I would have enjoyed. Then again, not all reading is meant for pleasure, including that of fiction.
"'The Oankali modified me,' Lilith told her, 'so that I can control the walls and the suspended animation plants... We are on a ship. Act as though you believe that even if you don't. There is no place to run on a ship. Even if you could get out of this room, there would be nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere to be free. On the other hand, if we endure our time here, we'll get our world back...'" p. 155
Comentários