So I hated Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis/Lillith’s Brood

This was my first Octavia Butler exposure, and I'm posting this in the hope that someone has a dramatically different read on this series than I did, but the way I read it, found the series shockingly repugnant. So if you love this series, and think I've absolutely missed the core themes at play here, please let me know, because I would *love* a totally different perspective on this series.

First the good:

Butler has a real talent for dialogue. Her writing is dialogue heavy and I always enjoy this kind of storytelling, and her dialogue really hits for me. The characters feel alive and full of personality.

This book as some of my favorite aliens. I love creative aliens and Butler knocks it out of the park with the Oankali. They really feel alien, from their unique reproductive methods to their strange but robust systems of ethics. 9/10 aliens.

Now the bad:

The bad is literally all of the thematic content of the books.

When I finished part 1, I felt a little conflicted about it. The aliens are not… malicious, but they do completely strip humanity of autonomy, and many humans are understandably angry about this. The whole thing has a very "white-man's burden" sorta feel to it, the aliens see themselves as saving humanity from itself, and that the protestations of humanity are basically the irrational screams of violent apes being dragged out of the darkness by saviors they're too small minded to understand. What rubbed me the wrong way by the end of Dawn is that Butler doesn't seem to push back on this at all. She presents humans as the violent, irrational, cruel, monsters the Oankali see them as. I kept waiting for the "yes, humanity has these deeply embedded problems but there's something beautiful here that is worth preserving", but that never comes. There is nothing beautiful worth preserving, humans resisting the Oankali are primitive morons.

But hey I solder on into book 2, "Adulthood Rites", thinking maybe she'll push back on the Oankali's interpretation of humanity a little bit, and show that for all their brilliance, advanced technology, and wisdom, there's something about humanity that they can't see or understand that they're going to destroy forever. Instead we get a story about a young Oankali/Human hybrid who is permanently compromised after being kidnapped by a resistor village and raised among humans who becomes a sympathizer for some reason. He then pleads with the other Oankali to create a colony on Mars for purebred humans to have another go at not wiping themselves out. The other Oankali agree to this but tell our protagonist that this is cruelty, because it's inevitable that the Mars colony will wipe itself out again because of the fundamental nature of humanity. We're given absolutely no reason to believe they're not 100% correct in their assessment. I can't help think about the North American reservation system, where the natives are forced off their land to barren chunks of the continent, but Adulthood Rites absolutely sides with colonial forces here and basically says "wow shit's really going to suck for those who don't assimilate and have to go live Mars. They're going to fail because they're such savages, honestly would be kinder to just kill them."

Then we get to the last book, Imago, which I am *so desperate" to see some kind of shift in tone on, some kind of pushback on the Oankali. Instead we get a couple Oankali/human hybrids who are physically dependent on human mates for survival and use custom crafted pheromone to make humans fall in love with them and break down the resistance of the last stronghold of un-modified humans on earth so they can be create a new community for the next population of hybrids. This is treated as a good and optimistic thing.

So I went into this specifically because I was reading a lot of scifi written by white men, and Butler is one of the genre titans, so I thought "I really should read some Butler for a fresh perspective."

I was just shocked to find a trilogy of colonialism apologetics. I thought at first she was just failing to really sell the idea that humanity un-changed by aliens was worth perserving, like she thought that idea was just didn't need defending at all while also painting a picture of humanity so bleak and depraved that she seemed to be fighting against her own themes. As the series went on, I stopped thinking she did think that this was worth perserving, that actually she really did think that the only hope for societies would be to be forcibly dragged into enlightenment by more powerful and advanced outsiders.