lilith's brood dawn adulthood rites and imago octavia e butler

That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic. This leadership is of course fraught with danger and violence as human reaction to the new situation is volatile and unpredictable. The rest of the novel then spends its time with Lilith as she trains and then leads this group. Lilith and the humans she is grouped with will simply be the transitory state. The reason? The alien civilization propagates through a shared interchange of genetic material with alien species and the humans that repopulate the Earth will be altered and their children will be the products of a new symbiotic genetic process and will be a whole new species.

Now it’s several hundred years later and the alien civilization has been working to rehabilitate Earth for humans they’ve saved to repopulate it. A frustrating wait as she gets used to her new situation reveals that she’s onboard a gigantic living spaceship inhabited by an alien species (kind of two really) and that the Earth as she knows it was rendered uninhabitable by nuclear war. In this novel, Lilith awakes in some kind of captivity. A novel about significant and existentially nightmarish changes to our genes, coupled with a total helplessness to do anything about it except acquiesce is something else. She’s so good at exploring issues related to gender, our bodies, consent, sexuality, and our brains and demonstrating horror and disgust without getting didactic about it.

Not by any means a definitive list, the hope is that it can help expand the conversation started by Nelson, Garétta, and the writers featured here.I hope no one ever comes for Octavia Butler. The below list contains, with these books in mind, a collection of novels that feature agender, bigender, or gender-fluid characters and narrators. At the end of April, too, American audiences were finally able to access Anne Garétta’s Sphinx - wonderfully translated from the French by Emma Ramadan - a novel that uses no gender markers to refer to its protagonists. The last month alone has seen the publication and widespread critical acclaim of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a moving, multi-genre consideration of gender fluidity (among other themes).

But in the current moment, at least one promising development is certain: literary writing that challenges or refuses stable gender binaries is of increasing critical and aesthetic prominence. Contemporary literature is an amorphous, expansive thing, and it isn’t always easy to pinpoint how or why it is changing or what it may become.

Lilith's brood dawn adulthood rites and imago octavia e butler