2015 read #59: Imago by Octavia E. Butler.

Imago by Octavia E. Butler
264 pages
Published 1989
Read from October 3 to October 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Some general spoilers for the entire Xenogenesis Trilogy ahead.

One thing I particularly admire throughout this series is Butler's choice of viewpoint characters. Dawn followed a human woman awakening after nuclear apocalypse to find herself aboard a vast alien vessel, chosen to be the "Judas goat" aiding the aliens in their assimilation of humanity. Adulthood Rites was the maturation and coming-of-age of the first Oankali-human hybrid male, born as an experiment to see if such a configuration could be psychologically stable, used during his childhood as another scapegoat of sorts, his Oankali progenitors manipulating him into a choice they were biologically incapable of making for the remnant of "resister" humanity. Imago is the story of the first Oankali-human hybrid ooloi, a third biological sex with the capacity to absorb, manipulate, and recombine genetic information -- an experiment neither hybrids nor Oankali believe is safe. The progression from book to book is inevitable in retrospect, but Butler's handling of the different facets of her social/biological thought experiment is assured.

For much of its length I felt that Imago was a step above the two preceding volumes, Butler totally confident within her story universe and her narration. If I'm being honest, I found my interest flagging at times when I read both Dawn and Rites; Imago, by contrast, was zippy and riveting almost to the very end. The ending, alas, felt a bit rickety and incomplete, every plot obstacle and conflict resolved by, essentially, having the hybrid ooloi narrator smell really, really good. Perhaps it's an especially olfactory twist on the standard sci-fi messiah figure storyline, or perhaps Jodahs (again with the Judas imagery?) is merely the physical embodiment of "Life finds a way."

Having read all of Butler's novels (with the exception of Survivor, which I doubt I'll ever have the opportunity to read unless one day $90 means a lot less to me than it does now), it's interesting to be able to connect them thematically. For the most part, the Xenogensis Trilogy avoids Butler's seeming fixation on young women characters getting romantically involved with substantially older men (though there were hints of that in Dawn). But more seriously, Xenogenesis joins the Patternist series as well as (to a slightly lesser extent) the Parable books and even (arguably) Fledgling in exploring Butler's enduring interest in humanity evolving beyond and above its current sorry state. The amplification of social bonds (including but not limited to the expansion or redefinition of the family group) is her general means of accomplishing this evolution -- via alien biology and five-way sex in Xenogenesis, via underage sex and vampire saliva in Fledgling, via psychic powers and immortality genes in the Patternist books, via a new religion of cooperation and hard work in Parable. This focus on social factors makes the anthropologist in me nod in agreement, even if much of the time Butler seems to take a fatalist view that stronger social bonds and higher social understanding are impossible with humanity's biology. The Parable books, the one series that posits pure social evolution without recourse to fantastic biochemistry, happen to be some of the most depressing fiction I've ever read.

Kindred is the outlier, in the sense that broader questions of human evolution aren't considered, but even then, familial links once again dominate Butler's thinking.

One could comment as well upon other themes, such as survivorship and Butler's strongly anti-hierarchical bent, but at that point I'd just be quoting her Wikipedia page, so I won't strain my limited critical faculties further.

I still have one or two short story collections to read, but for now, a moment of silence for a marvelous mind and body of work ended much too soon. (I'm not good at this maudlin stuff.)