Lilith's Brood

A very well written book, and a good story, but I'm only giving it 2 stars because of how deeply uncomfortable it made me. The mating rituals and reproductive strategies of these aliens are basically rape, and the humans don't really have any choice.

Hoo boy. Humans, eh? Can't live with ‘em, can't get them to reproduce an alien hybrid race with you. We're “intelligent but hierarchical” but also racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, wasteful, violent, frightened, and destructive. After a nuclear war, the Oankali come along and offer us a better life, free from illness and pain and ageing. There's also free shelter and food without waste, a way to live with other creatures in a peaceful, mutually beneficial way. But we just can't get over how ugly the aliens are.

So they want us to give up our ability to breed as humans and make “construct” babies without touching our human mates. Is that so much to ask? Many of the humans in this book seem to think so, preferring sterility and struggle to the parental control of the Oankali.

Interesting as this all is, I found myself losing patience by the middle of the second book. The Oankali are benevolent, well-adjusted, maybe a little condescending. The human characters come off as a bunch of ineffectual children who don't know what's good for ‘em. Even Lilith seems to have simply accepted her fate. There really is no contest between the two groups.

I can appreciate and respect this series but find I'm not that into it. There's a lack of real tension despite the high stakes (the future of the human race!) and I can't work up much interest in the characters.

What a stunning trilogy!

The writing, the ideas, the political discourse, the social commentary, the post-colonialist themes... all weaved together in a terribly humanist web. The prime question at its beginning is what it means to have power (and to use it), and what it means to not have power- yet the more it progresses, the more it becomes this multiculturalist tale of nuance.

Throughout the entire thing, I was never able to decicively choose sides. I was rooting for the Oankali, but I was also rooting for the humans. Is the survival of our race worth “losing” our humanity?

For its supreme ability to make you feel empathic for two different opposing sides alone, I give this full marks. But considering everything else, including the exploration of the human nature and irrationality, and this makes for one of my favorite trilogies I've read in a long time.

I thought the first book was by far the strongest and most interesting, but the latter two books definitely do some interesting things that wasn't in the first.

Amazing.

So well written. So well thought out. Amazing book. Might change this to 5 stars after I sit with it for awhile.

I don't relate to the strong desire to pair off and reproduce, but it was a really interesting story.

I'd only be ok with this alien rescue mission if I wasn't a woman. Pumping out babies is not something I would ever want and living in the woods with the constant threat of rape doesn't exactly sound enjoyable either....

I'd prefer to just to die before they started salvaging the earth tbh.

After humanity's near self-destruction on earth, an alien race swoops in to save the survivors. The Oankali are a species that is driven by life and procreation and the sharing and mixing of genetic material. They absorb other species by merging with them. Lilith is our protagonist in the first of the three novels in the series. By choosing life she reluctantly becomes the guide for other humans in uniting with the Oankali in their form of partnership, to gain the right to return to life on Earth. Part scifi-story, part mind-opener about different forms of sexuality and family, the series is super thought-provoking, as you're going from Lilith's mind to the mind of her human-Oankali construct child in the 2nd part. You see/feel both sides of the story, and mostly lose track of the terror of it, as you're lulled into the storytelling the same way the Ooloi slowly seduce and bind humans with their pheromones. What is the importance of consent, when our bodies are simply driven by chemicals and can be persuaded to enjoy/become everything? And when you zoom out, is humanity's hierarchical nature truly what drives it to self-destruction, have we never been meant to stick around for longer anyways?

This series was something of a disappointment. I had expected better from Octavia Butler. The first book starts out with only remnants of humanity, kept captive by aliens. While this sounds like a great place to start a story about the strengths of humanity recovering from a terrible setback, that's not the story we're told. Instead, the aliens completely dominate the remaining humans, strip them of their humanity, and turn them into sterile, drug dependent, genetic experiment monsters. Mankind is dead - we're just waiting for the creatures that used to be human beings, to die off - because no new human beings can be born after the aliens sterilize the survivors. She tries to end the trilogy with hope, by restoring fertility to a few humans on Mars. However, none of them are truly human anymore since all of them have been genetically altered, and injected with alien cells.

In my opinion, the story relied too heavily on the unbelievable alien powers of control by pheromones. How are we supposed to believe that simply breathing in the presence of these aliens, removes free will and logical thinking? She tries to tell us that the biological urges and bonding of mates overpowers all logical thought and physically injures them on separation, including death when their mates die.

Clearly, Octavia had an agenda to writing this story. Masculine characteristics are constantly denigrated - there are no strong male role models. Independent thought is depicted as a horrible thing. Everyone must obey the consensus decision.