Review by cynicalplankton - Lilith's Brood

cynicalplankton 's review for:

Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler

4.0

adventurous challenging mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

A complicated series with major themes of consent, love, fidelity, colonialism and more. As the humans and Oankali interact, the clash of cultures, sometimes presented as a biological drive or essentialism, are explored with nuance and frankness. As a fair warning, the ways Oankali especially talk about consent (your words say no but your body says yes) could be triggering for some. Additionally, the Oankali, and many humans’, understanding of disability and healing may also be triggering. The Oankali have a deeply felt need to “heal” the life forms they come in contact with and there is only an implied resistance to what that means for humans. While human resistance in the books does center on bodily autonomy and self-determination, there is not an explicit discussion of disability in a positive way. The role that cancer plays in the human-Oankali relationship is probably the only positive discussion of disability and it is the Oankali who see it as valuable.

They acknowledge the pain and death it causes and also see its rapid cell growth as a way to make life saving healing possible. Throughout the book they use what they’ve learned from cancer to heal bullet wounds, regrow lost limbs, and prevent cancer altogether.

While cancer is ultimately a commodity in their “trade” with humanity, the Oankali in a way recognize what disability can be besides what human societies have often seen as a burden.

Overall, it’s important to remember when these books were written and what the societal discussions around consent and disability were. I think this series offers a lot to think about in those discussions and I also would not rely on these books for resolutions to those discussions.

While I don’t think the books every explicitly use the term colonize when talking about what the Oankali are doing, it’s hard to not see the parallels.

They plan to take over and extract all they can from earth, they subjugate all the humans to what they believe is their superior and more logical will, and then place many humans in a kind of partial death if they violently resist this takeover.

The complicated relationships between humans and Oankali give an insight into colonial interpersonal dynamics, raising questions of coercion, betrayal, survival, and what life after contact can be. The fact that the human war that took place before the narrative of the books wiped out primarily North America and Europe puts the situation of the remaining humans and the parallel to our real world colonialism into an even starker light. Yet again the black and brown people of the world are dealing with first contact and having their wills suppressed because their captors believe that their (human) civilizations were doomed to fail, unable to progress the human species beyond their “biological contradictions”. The insights we get into both colonizer and colonized/resisting ways of thinking are illuminating.

I would recommend this book for people who want classic Afro-futurist sci-fi as long as they are prepared for some of the themes mentioned above.

Content Warnings