IN THE PREVIOUS three chapters, we’ve zeroed in on strategies that have helped three different life-forms—humans, cyanobacteria, and gray whales—survive in extremely adverse conditions. We learned how an ancient tribe of humans, today called Jews, lived by scattering and founding new communities in the face of war and oppression. We explored how cyanobacteria’s ability to generate its own form of sustainable energy has made it perhaps the most adaptable life-form on Earth. And we followed a group of gray whales on their difficult migration down the eastern Pacific coast, a journey each whale has memorized in order to survive, and even to bounce back from extinction once humans agreed to stop hunting them. By passing along stories about these survivors, we learn what it would take for humans to survive, too. But some stories about survival are more helpful than others.
In part two, we explored the role symbolic communication played in human evolution. Storytelling could be called the cultural backbone of human survival. There’s a reason that conquering armies often burn the books and libraries of their enemies. Extinguishing a people’s stories is a way of erasing their future. But when we remember those stories, they can steer us in a direction that leads away from death. In fact, stories about how humans might live in the future—sometimes known as science fiction—may be among the most important survival tools we have. We can use these stories as a highly symbolic version of the migration maps that gray whales pass on to the next generation. Futuristic stories offer possible pathways our species can take if we want our progeny to thrive for at least another million years.
One of the twentieth century’s greatest science-fiction writers, Octavia Butler, told Essence magazine, “To try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.” Butler grew up during the height of the space race in the 1950s, surrounded by hopeful stories about how humans would colonize the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But her life as the intensely shy daughter of a maid wasn’t exactly Forbidden Planet material. Butler’s mother was a widow who had no home of her own—instead, she and Butler lived in the home of her employers, a white family where Butler recalled visitors making casually racist remarks as if she and her mother weren’t in the room. As an adult, Butler always expressed great admiration for her mother’s tireless efforts to survive, to keep going, despite the many barriers in her way.
Perhaps for this reason, Butler’s great gift as a writer was her ability to tell moving, realistic stories about how people would survive in futures far more harrowing and strange than anything that ever appeared on the Enterprise’s sensors in Star Trek. Still, she often joked that bad science fiction inspired the themes in her writing as much as growing up black in a white-dominated world. She penned her first short story after watching Devil Girl from Mars on TV late one night, and realizing that she could do better.
The literary world would never put Butler’s work in a class with Devil Girl. Not only did she win many SF literary awards before her death, in 2006, including the Hugo and the Nebula, but she was the first SF author ever to win the MacArthur “genius grant” usually bestowed on fine artists and distinguished scientists. Ultimately, what makes Butler’s work mesmerizing is her incredible ability to help readers see the world from a perspective radically different from their own. In an essay for O, The Oprah Magazine, Butler recalled a formative experience. She visited a zoo with her elementary school class, and watched in horror as the other kids threw peanuts at a caged chimp, taunting him. As the animal wailed in frustration (and possibly madness), the young Butler realized she had more sympathy for this ape at that moment than she did for her fellow humans. She’d caught her first glimpse of humanity as it might look through alien eyes, and the experience left its mark on her imagination forever. “At age 7, I learned to hate solid, physical cages—cages with real bars like the ones that made the chimp’s world tiny, vulnerable and barren,” she wrote. “Later I learned to hate the metaphorical cages that people try to use to avoid getting to know one another—cages of race, gender or class.”
Many of Butler’s novels can be understood as thought experiments in which she offers solutions to the problem posed by that group of children tormenting the chimp. At the heart of this problem are those metaphorical cages. Such cages can be more pernicious than steel bars, because they prevent humans from seeing what we have in common as members of a species in danger of going extinct. How can humans survive in the long term when we seem to be so good at building cages? What would it take to alter the course of humanity?
These are the same questions that I’m asking in this book. We can only meet the challenges of surviving whatever the natural world throws at us by working together as a species in small and large ways. Before we understand the nuts and bolts of survival strategies, however, it’s important to take a short philosophical break and think about why we’re doing this in the first place. Why do we want to survive? What is it that makes life worth saving? How do we hope to improve humanity over the next million years, and what would that look like?
Using a few of Butler’s science-fiction novels, we can think about some possible answers to these questions.
Most of us want humanity to survive for a simple reason: We hope there’s a chance for our families and civilizations to endure and improve over the long term. The problem is that we have a hard time imagining what that would look like. We envision a far-future world full of people who look just like us, zinging around the galaxy in ships that are basically advanced versions of rockets. And yet, if history is any guide, the humans of tomorrow will be nothing like us—their bodies will have been transformed by evolution, and their civilizations by the kinds of culture-changing events that have already marked human history. In her trilogy of novels called Lilith’s Brood, Butler dramatizes why some people choose death over survival. They are not prepared to deal with the radical changes required to bounce back from extinction. Still, Butler’s story offers us hope for humanity’s survival, and a new way of thinking about how we’ll do it.
When Lilith’s Brood opens, a civilization of bizarre, tentacle-covered aliens called the Oankali have just kidnapped the tattered remnants of humanity after a nuclear apocalypse. Unlike humans, who evolved to use machine technology, the Oankali’s entire civilization is based on biology. They journey through the galaxy in living spaceships the size of planets, and every part of their environment—from their tree homes to their sluglike cars—is alive. They’re an ancient species who have dealt with many alien cultures, and they view humans as a fascinating anomaly: We’re intelligent creatures who live hierarchically. Apparently this is an incredibly rare combination in the universe, and they suspect it’s what led to our downfall. Luckily, as a representative of the Oankali explains to the protagonist, Lilith, they’ve preserved the few remaining humans in stasis pods while the Earth returns to a healthy state of nature.
Though seemingly benevolent, the Oankali do want something in return for rescuing the remaining humans. They awaken Lilith before all the other people to offer a bargain: They’ll grant humans a rich, disease-free life if they agree to have children with the Oankali. It turns out that the Oankali evolve as a species by merging their DNA with other species, creating an entirely new kind of life every few generations. As the Oankali’s reluctant ambassador, Lilith must explain the deal to her newly awakened fellows and get their consent. Some of the humans are more willing than others, but all of them are suspicious of Lilith’s position—they see her as compromised because the Oankali have already reengineered her to be stronger and more intelligent than an ordinary human. Her capabilities are just a taste of what her half-Oankali children will have. But are the Oankali making the humans better, or robbing them of their humanity? Are they asking the humans to join them as equals, or to become their breeding stock?
One group of humans rebels against the Oankali, refusing to join them and opting to face death rather than form families with creatures they see as hideous oppressors. Lilith, meanwhile, consents to the deal. She and her lover, Joseph, form a typical Oankali family, which consists of a male, a female, and a third sex known as the ooloi. The ooloi can combine genetic material in its body and create mixed-species offspring which would never be possible via the kind of sexual reproduction humans are used to. Though Lilith comes to love her ooloi Nikanj, and her hybrid children, she is plagued by doubts. Maybe the separatist humans are right to refuse the bargain. Maybe the Oankali have pushed her toward accepting them by controlling her neurochemistry, slowly robbing her of the desire to resist assimilation. There’s also the nagging question of whether she’s truly surviving at all, if her children will no longer be properly human.
As the series goes on, these questions become even more thorny. We discover that the Oankali plan for their hybrid children to travel the universe in a living ship whose body will grow by consuming the entire Earth. Though the Oankali have, after long argument, given the separatist humans a refuge on the rejuvenated planet, this is only temporary. The unassimilated humans will die as the ship comes to life.
In some ways, the Oankali are giving humans what we’ve always wanted: perfect health, long lives, plenty of food, and a perfectly peaceful existence. But their bargain begins to sound a lot like what Europeans offered natives when they arrived on American shores in the wake of the great pandemics that were decimating their populations. In exchange for a few valuable commodities like guns and wool, Europeans disrupted the natives’ cultures and completely transformed the lands where they lived. The longer the natives lived among Europeans, the less they seemed like Apache or Inca, and the more they seemed like hybrid peoples with one foot in their parents’ cultures and one foot in their colonizers’. Even though Lilith and her children will survive, humanity as we knew it will not.
The thread that runs through Lilith’s Brood is the idea that human survival involves radical transformation. At the same time, Butler offers us reassurance that though our bodies may change and our cultures fall under alien influence, we will retain our humanity. As Lilith’s children come of age, we begin to see the world from their perspectives as creatures who are part of a species that never existed before. Though they are half Oankali, they treasure their human sides, too. Indeed, the first human-Oankali hybrid ooloi winds up falling in love with a man and a woman from a separatist human community, and discovers in the process what makes humanity so valuable. Unlike other species the Oankali have assimilated, only the humans have put up organized resistance to assimilation. As a result, the Oankali realize that they have to change their way of life. They will no longer assimilate whole species, but instead leave part of each species behind to continue on its own path. You might say that humans inject pluralism into the Oankali culture. And the Oankali, for their part, give humans a peaceful future among the stars.
So how can such an outlandish story shed light on our future as a species?
The strength of Lilith’s Brood as a thought experiment lies in Butler’s suggestion that human survival means an endless and increasingly profound series of compromises. Importantly, the books do not have a tidy, happy ending—far from it. Though the humans survive, both as pure humans and as hybrid Oankali, they endure incredible losses that some might argue are worse than death. To put this in the kind of historical perspective that we began with, the long-term outcome of cultural meetings between Africans and Europeans could hardly be described as unambiguously good, even though slavery was eventually abolished. We cannot ever hope to reach a future where the scars of history completely vanish, nor can we expect that we won’t be wounded again in the future. The key is to understand those injuries in the context of a much longer story about the great transformation known as survival. Hopefully, the rewards of seeing our half-alien children building an improved world can offset the injuries that produced them. This is why we survive, Butler suggests. We want to witness the birth of something better.
In Lilith’s Brood, Butler resists offering a pat definition of what “something better” might be. Certainly it seems that the human-Oankali way of life will be healthier, more sustainable, and more peaceful than ours is today. The author also hints that it will involve preserving what’s best about humanity: our ability to change while remaining true to what came before us. Perhaps most important, “becoming better” doesn’t mean transcendence. Though her future humans are vastly more powerful than us, they don’t achieve a state of perfection. They are the hybrid result of compromise—better than we are, but still dealing with conflict and disappointment.
One of the great lessons about future survival that we can take away from Lilith’s Brood is that it will require us to change. And those changes may be a lot more difficult, and a lot weirder, than we expect.
It’s easy to say that we need to change to survive, but how do you get people to risk everything to do it? How do we unite people divided by those symbolic cages and work on a long-term goal together? That’s a question Butler tackles head-on in two of her most realistic novels, Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, both set in a near-future United States that has been torn apart by poverty, climate change, and political instability.
We begin with Los Angeles burning down. In Parable of the Sower, we find ourselves in one of the last remaining gated communities outside L.A., where gangs have breached the walls and are setting houses on fire. A teenager named Lauren Olamina heeds what her father taught her on the shooting range, grabs her gun and emergency backpack, and flees into the burning night to find a safe road up to Northern California. She’s heard things are better up there. Along the way, though, she and her traveling companions are kidnapped by a militia and tortured in reeducation camps. After months of beatings, they’re released when the U.S. government begins to take power back from the separatists and gang leaders who have claimed the land.
During her ordeal, Lauren solidifies a plan she’s had since childhood. She will create a new religion. It will be a system of beliefs that she hopes can bring people together in empathy, preventing anyone else from ever having to endure what she did. She uses the word “God” in her teachings, but not the way most Americans would. First of all, God isn’t a white guy with flowing hair, floating in the clouds. God is an abstraction, described only as “change.” Lauren invokes this God to aid people who are suffering, but she also claims her God is devoted to shepherding the children of Earth into space, where they will scatter joyfully to the stars. Looked at from one perspective, Butler is drawing from the Judeo-Christian God, whose idea of justice in the Bible helped African-Americans protest slavery and inequality in the United States. But looked at from another perspective, this abstract God of change reflects the idea of evolution in action. Either way, Lauren’s God is a powerful idea, one that her characters in postapocalyptic America use to survive an ordeal that nearly destroys humanity.
In Locus magazine, Butler explained:
I used to despise religion. I have not become religious, but I think I’ve become more understanding of religion.… Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn’t had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish. But they could go to church and have that exuberance together, and that was good, the community of it. When they were in pain, when they had to go to work even though they were in terrible pain, they had God to fall back on, and I think that’s what religion does for the majority of the people.
The Parable novels are, in essence, a story about reconciling religion with social change, God with science, and the past with the future. In these books, Butler makes explicit what is only hinted at in Lilith’s Brood: Humanity’s story must be one of constant change because that is one way to transmute pain into hope. Lauren’s goal for humanity, and, indeed, the goal of the book that you are reading, is to get us off this crowded planet and into space. There, we can continue to change and hopefully, through exploration, learn more about how to build a civilization that doesn’t lock its members into various cages that prevent us from seeing our common goals.
But, as Butler told a student attending one of her lectures, “There’s no single answer that will solve all our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” First, however, you must be brave enough to turn away from death, embrace change, and survive.
In the next two parts of this book, we’ll explore two ways humanity will need to transform in order to survive as a species, with our histories and traditions intact, but changed enough to make our future civilizations sustainable ones. We’ll begin by transforming the cities where so many of us live and work. And, ultimately, we’ll start building those cities beyond this dangerous, explosive planet we call Earth. We’ll scatter to the stars, changing ourselves in order to survive, but always remembering home.