Xenogenesis trilogy (Butler)

[cahn]

Via ase. Okay, Dawn (and the two sequels) blew me away. Just. This is some extraordinary SF -- humans (or what's left of them) are conquered by an alien race. Only it's not that simple. The humans might think it is. The aliens are really alien and don't look at it that way (and indeed are both much more ruthless than most humans, and much more compassionate than most humans, at the same time) -- they look at it as a sort of symbiosis. The humans, once they start understanding the aliens, can sort of see it the aliens' way, but humans deeply think of things in the form of dominator and dominated, and in that respect the humans are definitely the latter. Um. This synopsis is a mess. I cannot possibly describe what's going on and do it justice.

Butler always catches me a little off guard; this is true of both her short stories and her novels. I suppose it's partly because she makes no secret of her perspective as a black female and that it is going to differ from, say, my perspective; but some of it is, I think, her own style as well. For Parable of the Sower and the Pattern novels, I'm not sure I was working so much with that strangeness as against it (though I do very much like the Pattern novels). With the Xenogenesis books she leverages that strangeness to aid her in describing the very strange alien society, and it really, really works for me.

Comments

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I liked the first two Pattern novels, but not so much Clay's Ark and Patternmaster. I do like the Xenogenesis books,

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

I hated Clay's Ark (I guess I like my books to end happily!) and I actually liked Patternmaster, though that may have to do a lot with reading it first very young (I had no idea who Butler was, and did not even associate it with the other stuff I read by her until much much later). I do think it's cool as a look at "whoa, they had all these grand plans for the Pattern... and this is what it became."

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Whereas I read all four in an omnibus, and so I was really feeling the missing middle part of the story -- how did the Pattern turn into this? And both Clay's Ark and Patternmaster pretty much failed on the "I want at least one character i want to sit down and have a chat with over coffee/tea/cocoa/etc."

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can see how that might happen, reading them all at once.

And both Clay's Ark and Patternmaster pretty much failed on the "I want at least one character i want to sit down and have a chat with over coffee/tea/cocoa/etc."

...That's part of what I mean about Butler being strange, actually. I find very few of her characters to be people I would be comfortable spending time with, though many of them are rather fascinating.

[ase.livejournal.com]

Joan Slonczewski wrote an essay (http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/books/butler1.html) about the biology and race messages in the Dawn trilogy about a decade ago. I just recently ran across it, but I think the comparison of the Oankali to modern Western society is interesting.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

...Yeah. I haven't had a chance to read through this closely, but yeah, I was definitely getting the race message vibe from those books in a big way. In the best way, actually; it made me think about race/colonization without rolling my eyes at the parallels, because the message is never superior to the dictates of the story. (Ahem, LeGuin!)