Rescuing, Symbiosis, and Consent

Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first book in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, deals with humanity’s forced rescuing and hybridization by a symbiotic alien species, which is exactly what the humans of A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys managed to avoid. And I very much think those parallels are intentional.

Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler

The aliens of both books are trying to save humanity from itself. In Dawn they are being saved from a war that literally ends all war. While in A Half-Built Garden, the aliens want to save humanity from the consequences of climate change and environmental damage.

Both sets of species are ultimately looking for a form of Symbiosis. Both are shaky on the human concept of consent. But the Oankali of Dawn are further along that decision path. They’re already engaged in genetic manipulation and hybridization by the time the novel begins, though the full extent of that only becomes clear by the end of the book.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

In A Half-Built Garden, the Ringers are definitely willing to violate consent, largely because they struggle to think outside of the scripts they arrived with. But they aren’t already committed to that outcome. There is space for them to be convinced to respect humanity and our decisions.

I suspect strongly that Dawn with its theme of violated consent formed part of Ruthanna Emrys’s influences when creating her novel. But she’s chosen to zoom in on that moment of whether the aliens who believe they are rescuing us will respect our right to choose and made it the battleground of her book.

Octavia Butler focuses instead on how her protagonist Lilith will cope with and adapt to changes that are forced, coerced, and manipulated into her and humanity. She also lingers more on the body horror elements of both truly alien life and genetic manipulation.

~ by Edward on December 7, 2022.