Lilith’s Brood, the trilogy of speculative fiction novels by Octavia Butler, held me in a tight grip. I would read hundreds of pages in a single night. I think I finished Imago in two days. It is one of the most enthralling books I ever read.
I think it is because this book is full of grief. This book grieves the human species, it grieves the Earth, it grieves love. The text is primarily concerned with Oankali’s slow cancellation of the future. A future without human children, a future without Earth, a future without the complex mess of conflicting emotions that is humanity. In a way, Butler clearly depicts humans as fickle, violent beings, but also beings capable of deep love for one another.
One of Butler’s main theses for the text is that of communication of emotions, or rather, the lack thereof in human culture. In the West at least, the cultural link between emotions and the spoken word is sparse, especially compared to the cultural link between “logic” and the spoken word. These bipartite semiotics of speech are interrogated in the trilogy. Rather than viewing speech, argument, and logic as the height of human reason, Butler shows the deep transfer and sharing of emotions is a far more effective communicator than speech.
Perhaps that is the most incredible gift the Oankali present to humanity: the ability to go beyond mere empathy by directly linking with one-another’s emotions. To be able to feel what others feel.