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language: English
country: USA
year: 1988
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Xenogenesis, #2
dates read: 19.6.24-20.6.24
Adulthood Rites, the second of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, addressed most — though not quite all — of my reservations from Dawn. if Dawn was largely ambivalent about what the Oankali did — regarding it as an unpleasant necessity — Adulthood Rites is decidedly negative, acknowledging the Oankali’s denial of human agency and reproductive freedom as a kind of violence.
the novel follows Akin, the first male human-Oankali hybrid (or “construct”) to be born to a human mother (Lilith), from his birth to his young adulthood, as he explores the new Earth the Oankali have built: both his home village of Lo, where humans and Oankali live together in peace, and the various “resister” villages scattered through the region, where humans who have rejected the Oankali attempt to rebuild worlds they know, but without the ability to produce children. some of these resisters resort to stealing construct children from the mixed settlements.
Akin spends almost a year living amont resisters as a very young child, and this convinces him that the Oankali have made a mistake. they divided themselves into three groups: Dinso, who will live on Earth with humans and ultimately be replaced along with humans by their construct descendants; Toaht, who will live on another world-ship with humans and ultimately, with these humans, be replaced by their construct descendants; and Akjai, who will leave on a world-ship without having mixed with humans at all. Akin argues, forcefully, that humans, too, must have an Akjai group, who will remain unchanged and allowed to attempt to rebuild their species.
there are still a number of fundamental contradictions unaddressed by the end of the novel, but this is probably the best of Butler’s books that I’ve read so far other than Kindred, and some of the contradictions have at least been raised or posed, so I’m hopeful they may be addressed in Imago.
it also has the first arguable appearance of a kind of Oankali queerness, in a tense conversation where Akin — still technically a genderless Oankali child, but one who knows he will mature into a male — and his sibling Tiikuchahk grapple with the fact that they are meant to be a bonded pair (Akin male and Tiikuchahk female) who will form the basis of a tripartite Oankali relationship (with a third-gender ooloi). both of them, on one level, want this closeness, but both of them also reject it, and Tiikuchahk in particular is torn between its desire to be with Akin and its desire to mature into a male — but also possibly still to be with Akin. the novel unfortunately moves quickly past this moment of gender and sexual ambiguity, and there is still no mention of a serious possibility that anyone might be anything other than cisgender and heterosexual. all sex and all families in the mixed settlements appear to be heterosexual, organized around a new kind of nuclear family (two human parents and three Oankali parents). one is left to wonder whether the Oankali just conversion-therapied any queer people they rescued.
its other flaw is, typically for Butler, its commitment to genetic determinism — even Akin believes that the human contradiction of intelligence and hierarchy will ultimately lead any Akjai humans to self-destruct, such that their only hope is random mutations (which he thinks they should be allowed to hope for). its focus on species reproduction and heterosexuality is closely related to this, and there is, of course, also an explicit commitment to eugenics.
I think it’s very good in spite of these flaws, but they are flaws.
moods: hopeful, reflective, tense