"Dawn" and "Adulthood Rites" (first 2 books in the Xenogenesis trilogy)
I'm way overdue for a book post, so here is a two-fer. Maybe I'll retroactively post some of the books I skipped over. The ones worth posting, that is. *g*
Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1) by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Best I can tell I first read this book in high school. The copyright on this edition was 1987, which would fit. It is one of those books that haunted me for years. I actually have a collection of "this seems close" books, most of which were geared towards younger readers. Okay, a collection of 2. Still....
* Sleepers, Wake by Paul Samuel Jacobs
* The Lotus Caves by John Christopher -- the author of the Tripod trilogy which I read (and did a diorama for) in middle school.
I looked up the description I used when looking for the book:
A book. I'm guessing I read this in the late 1970's early 1980's. Science Fiction. Might have been YA. The main character (human) was alone with a bunch of aliens. I think they were on a space ship. I think the aliens had the tentacle thing going. And there was some sort of plant life that they put people in - and they were in suspended animation.
Aside from the date guess and the YA guess, nailed it.
Lilith wakes up alone in a cell, no clothes, no idea where she is, no way out. This isn't the first time she has awakened this way. Only this time things are different, her captors show themselves for the first time, and they're not human.
Mankind managed to screw itself and majorly damage the Earth. The few survivors were scooped up by aliens calling themselves the Oankali. They are here to save us from ourselves, but in return they expect to tinker with our DNA and interbreed with us, so no one leaving the ship and trying to repopulate the Earth is quite human anymore.
I must say this story held up remarkably well. Only the brief mention of the US and USSR as superpowers before the war in any way dates the book.
Despite the level of detail in which the aliens and their ship are described, Lilith herself is remarkably uncommented on in terms of external physical characteristics. I say this because this book was included in a list of books with lead characters in SF books who were "something other than Caucasian". That may be true, but if you skimmed a single paragraph, you could have overlooked that fact. There is a everyman quality to Lilith. Who she was on earth is irrelevant. Life on the ship represents a clean slate and a blank page.
P.S. No wonder the "non-Caucasian narrator" discussion confused me. Look at the cover that was first used with the book.
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Previous LJ posts:
http://mlady-rebecca.livejournal.com/220525.html
http://mlady-rebecca.livejournal.com/222067.html
http://mlady-rebecca.livejournal.com/865071.html
Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis, #2) by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
While I read "Dawn" as a child, I'm unsure if I ever read the sequel "Adulthood Rites".
"Dawn" focused on Lilith, a rescued human from before the war. "Adulthood Rites" focuses on Akin, Lilith's first son, and the first boy born -- a hybrid, a construct, with a human appearance, but plenty of Oankali traits, including a tongue that acts as a sensory tentacle. The Oankali feared that the first male child would be the test as to whether the blending of Oankali and human genes is enough to overcome mankind's fatal flaw, the human contradiction that lead to war and the near destruction of the planet. That contradiction being intelligence bent by the need for a hierarchical structure.
Akin's intelligence and speech patterns outpace his physical maturity, rendering him a sponge for learning in the body of an infant. An infant that is human enough in appearance that the resistors -- the humans resisting living with and reproducing with the Oankali -- kidnap him.
The ideological condemnation of mankind -- the human contradiction -- that theme is more strongly felt in the sequel than it was in "Dawn". Despite having a narrator that is less human, the bulk of this book takes place on earth in both the mixed species trading villages and the all human resistor villages. So we go from a human perspective on the alien to an alien perspective on what it means to be human.
What were those story types we learned in school -- man vs man, man vs nature? Found them: man vs man, man vs society, man vs nature, and man vs self. They're all four here. After all, this is the fight to survive at its most elemental level. The base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_(narrative)
*snort* Complete aside, but the example they give for man vs self? "Requiem for a Dream". For man vs society? "Fahrenheit 451".
To continue the aside (of reading the article on conflict) ... they also list several less universally accepted forms of conflict, that don't apply here: man vs machine, man vs fate, man vs the supernatural, and man vs god. Geek that I am, I'm actually considering tagging my books that way.