Why I love science fiction, and Octavia Butler

We suspect that certain things might be true: the existence of aliens, rich people out to get us, the impending catastrophe of global warming, and etcetera. Science fiction authors write stories about these things. It’s interesting, that’s all. It’s more interesting if you’re fairly certain of some of your suspicions.

During the Nixon era I suspected that things were more screwed up at the higher governmental levels than even the wildest conspiracy theories could predict. There were hundreds if not thousands of stories about my suspicion in the paperback racks. They fed my hypothesis and kept me amused. Now, when our government appears to be so stupid, corrupt and incompetent that it’s beyond average belief, I’m comforted that it wasn’t all beyond my belief. I was prepared.

Another thing I always suspected was that we’re all more alike than different. Science fiction often posits that if we really knew this to be true we’d get along better. So in recent decades arrived the invention of empathic types of fantastical creatures to help writers explore these ideas. Along came a lot of them as SF matured into its humanistic phase, as many as there were malicious bug-eyed monsters scaring people in the thirties, forties and fifties. America came to know these sympathetic aliens as these authors were hired to write the occasional script for Star Trek, following on the heels of Rod Serling’s fiercely brilliant writing for The Twilight Zone. Both of these television programs broke ground in moral, spiritual and humanistic thought. They examined our fear of Differentness.

And recently I’ve been reading Lilith’s Brood, an omnibus of three books from the late eighties by Octavia E. Butler. An African American woman, Ms Butler was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant among other awards. I researched the author and discovered I was reading her book on the first anniversary of her tragic death from a fall in her home – just like Kurt Vonnegut. She was in her mid-fifties. In this particular work, she envisions an Earth wiped out by nuclear winter. The survivors, mostly from South America and Australia – the last areas to succumb to the freeze – are rescued by aliens who are driven above all by the urge to trade – to trade anything, particularly genetic material, which continually rescues them from stagnation and genetic overspecialization. In looking into human DNA they uncover what they believe is a fatal flaw, two qualities that combined would have doomed the human race eventually: humans are intelligent, and they are hierarchical. The need to dominate – or even to see dominance and submission as part of a natural order – is lethal when combined with intelligence. This, the aliens believe (and Ms Butler also, I presume) beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is also a suspicion that I’ve carried around without being able to name the particular qualities that clash. I had thought of dominance, but not as a subheading of hierarchy. A hierarchical directive seemed fundamental to me because we see it in animal and plant life. Therefore it’s natural. Isn’t it? But Butler’s fictional aliens are not driven by it; they never were. So I wonder if this duality is inherent in the macrocosm; does the architecture of dominance play out even in the stars?

Butler’s aliens, the Oankali, have the ability to link profoundly with each other. Nevermind how, they just do it. It’s a story, and most of it centers on the thorny problem of mating with humans, but they link and feel what each other is feeling. And one of her characters, part human and part Oankali, says this:

People who spend as much time as we do living inside one another’s skins are very slow to kill.

This is why I love science fiction.