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language: English
country: USA
year: 1978
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Patternist, #3
dates read: 18.1.23-20.1.23
okay. well. I’ve finished Survivor. unfortunately I think it’s my favorite Butler novel that I’ve read so far. it’s still definitely got stuff that’s fucked up. the core sexual/romantic relationship is founded on coercion, and while it’s apparently grown to be founded on mutual respect that’s a…weird vibe. (but there isn’t a weird age gap, at least!)
Alanna, a “wild human” whose parents died in the chaos of a plague that killed at least half the population of Earth, was adopted by the leaders of a community of Christian missionaries (the “Missionaries”), who brought her with them as they fled Earth to find a new planet to live in. it turns out the planet is inhabited by an intelligent species, the Kohn, and the Missionaries find themselves caught up in the conflict between the apparently friendly Garkohn — who turn out to have been manipulating and ultimately enslaving the Missionaries for their own ends — and the apparently viallainous Tehkohn, whose leader Alanna ends up married to.
the narration moves through two time frames: first-person accounts from Alanna and her husband Diut of the development of their relationship after Alanna was captured by the Tehkohn, and a third-person narration of the culmination of the conflict between the Garkohn and the Tehkohn (with the Missionaries trapped in the middle) after Alanna is “rescued” in a Missionary/Garkohn raid. it’s part planetary romance, part captivity narrative, part (sharp) critique of Christianity, part weird reimagining of the colonization of the Americas without the devastating effects of European diseases, such that the Missionaries become pawns in the struggle between two significantly stronger indigenous communities. it does the classic thing where indigenous people are recast as literally nonhuman, which I think is probably more likely why Butler rejected it than the alienfucking aspect.
in a lot of ways this feels like it’s test-running concepts that Butler takes up again in later work, in particular humans’ inability to understand and accept the (literally alien) Other and an interest in assimilation into the Other by way of reproduction. it’s also got the classic Butler power dynamics: Kohn society is a phenotypically-based caste system that’s partly biologically determined (there’s a culturally-reinforced physiological imperative for lower-ranked Kohn to obey a Hao, a member of the highest caste). which is a weird vibe: the end of the novel kind of feels like it’s affirming that Christianity (intolerant) is bad and the Kohn caste system (more or less tolerant) is good.
don’t get me wrong, though: I enjoyed this more than either of the previous Patternist books (and I have, despite these ambivalences, fewer reservations about it than I do about Patternmaster, which was previously the book of hers that I most enjoyed). I just increasingly can’t shake the feeling that people read Butler’s work too reparatively.
moods: dark, hopeful, horny, tense