Octavia E. Butler: "Dawn"

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was the first African American woman to gain recognition as a science fiction writer. Her novelette titled Bloodchild brought her critical recognition in 1985, when she received the most prestigious award for sf and fantasy - the Hugo Award. Claiming her space in the field so dominated by white men must have been quite an achievement for the colored woman, who was remembered by the icon of African American sf Samuel Delaney as incredibly shy, a student who spoke only when she had something to say, but someone who obviously had great talent.

The first part of Butler's Lilith's Brood trilogy, titled Dawn, takes its readers to a spaceship inhabited by a nomadic alien species called the Oankali, who rescue as many humans as they can from Earth, which is devastated by nuclear war. The Oankali have been working on making the planet habitable again, and the survivors, who have been kept in "suspended animation" (sleep), are awakened to get ready to go back to their world. However, before they do it, the Oankali will use them to interbreed with the human species, since lack of diversity threatens the aliens with extinction. So, as much as the Oankali hate humans for self-destructive violence and hierarchical relations, they decide to mix their genetic material with theirs. As a result, humans will have to share the earth with an alien species in the future - their own children. The first person to be awakened is Lilith, from whose point of view the story is narrated. Lilith has been selected to prepare the other survivors for their return to Earth by training them to survive in the wilderness first.

Having very little experience in reading sf or fantasy, I focus on those aspects of this intriguing and absorbing narrative which appeal to me as a woman reader who is interested in African American women's creative writing. First, by aligning Lilith with the alien species, which she gets to know quite well after spending some time with two representatives of the Oankali, the narrator presents a (very critical) assessment of the human species from an alien perspective: You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... that was like ignoring cancer. I think your people did not realize what a dangerous thing they were doing. The observation has led the Oankali to choose the woman to be a leader and teacher to the groups of survivors who are awakened later because she doesn't seem to possess this characteristic.

Although the depiction of males' aggression, their will to dominate and desire to introduce hierarchical relations in the group may sound too biased and unjust to some readers, this inter-species encounter allows the narrator to make another accurate observation (voiced by an Oankali) concerning human behavior: Different is threatening to most species. Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it's true for you. The awakened people react to the alien species with fear and aggression, which is illustrative of human behavior on Earth and which is criticised in the novel. In this way it becomes clear that the main theme of the narrative is very human: tolerance (or, rather, lack of it). In an interview, the writer herself stated the following: Back during the early 1960s there was a United Nations television commercial, the audio portion of which went something like this: "Ignorance, fear, disease, hunger, suspicion, hatred, war." That was it, although I would have added, "greed" and "vengeance" to the list. All or any of these can be the catalyst that turns hierarchical thinking into hierarchical behavior. Amid all this, does tolerance have a chance? Only if we want it to. Only when we want it to. Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

The first group fail to get to Earth because the Oankali have to put them back to sleep after they attack the aliens and direct acts of violence against each other. Already pregnant with a half-human-half-alien child, Lilith is left to continue her mission to train another group of newly awakened humans. Will she succeed? What will be the result of the interbreeding? This can only be learned from the next book of the trilogy: Adulthood Rights.