Reading Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis after Seattle

Quite simply, Seattle imposes its own critical demands.

Amy Schrager Lang and Cecelia Tichi, What Democracy Looks Like: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World

Akin’s Question

In Adulthood Rites, the second volume of Octavia Butler’s science fiction trilogy, Xenogenesis, the protagonist, Akin, asks an interpretive question that mirrors one often asked by critics. As a hybrid creature composed of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial genetic material, Akin struggles with questions of personal and collective identity. Turning to Dichaan, his alien father, he searches for a metaphor or analogy through which to understand the aliens’ relationship to human beings: “What are we that we can do this to whole peoples?” (199).¹ The project to which Akin refers is the experiment in hybridity, the mixing of alien and human DNA to produce a new species, of which Akin is the first male member. Butler’s tentacled aliens, the Oankali, are natural genetic engineers, driven to exchange their DNA across the galaxies, transforming themselves and those they encounter in the process. They discover humanity after the cold war has heated to the boiling point in an apocalyptic nuclear war. Xenogenesis, as the trilogy’s title suggests, traces the production of the new species, a blend of the remnant human population and the Oankali, creatures who have come either to rescue human beings from self-destruction or to enslave them into a new captive-breeding program, or both, depending on one’s point of view.

Do the new hybrid beings like Akin sound the death knell of humanity, or do they merely represent humanity’s next evolutionary phase? Does the Oankali arrival amount to a biocolonization or biosymbiosis? Butler’s alien characters offer multiple, contradictory answers. Some Oankali, borrowing from terran biology, narrate the relationship in molecular terms, viewing their role as akin to that of mitochondria or helpful bacteria that cohabit the human body: just as mitochondria were once hostile invaders and are now an integral part of the human cell, so too the Oankali will become an indispensable and symbiotic component of human biology. But this seemingly benign reading of the relationship is contradicted by others, such as Dichaan, who counters, “we aren’t like mitochondria or helpful bacteria, and they know it” (Adulthood 183). Akin himself later offers “predators” as a possible reading, but this too is rejected. Indeed, by the end of the trilogy, in Imago, the question stands, leaving critics to do the work of decoding, beginning with the global question of what Butler might most profitably be read to be representing.²

Akin’s question seems, then, to signal an interpretive stance, for whether one reads the Oankali as predators or mitochondria, the question “What are we...?” turns from the particularities of the texts themselves—plot, character, theme—to the outside world to which the texts might refer as if in allegorical code. Akin’s name suggests this mode of analysis insofar as characters—and critics—seem inevitably to search for that to which the Oankali are “akin.” One might say that if Xenogenesis thematizes the “code” of genetics, it is also itself a kind of code, even if what it encodes is open to interpretation. But to highlight this doubling of biological and allegorical codes is to encounter a basic contradiction, for Akin’s invitation to interpretive multiplicity is simultaneously undercut by the dominant mode of reading practiced on the level of plot. Indeed, the central irony of Akin’s question is that it is one that the Oankali themselves would be incapable of asking, as it requires an approach to language to which they are constitutionally opposed. As Lilith, the human protagonist of Dawn, the first book in the trilogy, explains to her fellow captives, “we’re in the hands of people who manipulate DNA as naturally as we manipulate pencils and paintbrushes.. . . It’s like a language that they have a special gift for” (167–69). And if Lilith frames this practice with a simile, the Oankali take it quite literally. They read life—their own as well as that of all other species...