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.
“God Is Change”
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 hu
manity.
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.
PART IV HOW TO BUILD A DEATH-PROOF CITY
14. THE MUTATING METROPOLIS
WE’VE SEEN HOW life-forms like cyano, birds, and mammals made it through mass extinctions, and we’ve explored the strategies humans used to deal with threats to our species. But we’ve also seen a lot of failure modes that consigned whole ecosystems and classes of people to death. How will we convert our guardedly hopeful stories of a human future into a real-life plan for survival that avoids some of the worst failure modes?
We’ll start by changing our cities, which are a powerful expression of human symbolic culture and a perfect example of why we have a lot to learn about adapting mass societies to our environments. Cities have always been central to human civilization, but now they’ve become almost indistinguishable from it. Certainly they’re the sources of our greatest economic, scientific, and artistic productivity. They’re also a good way to organize communities when you’re an invasive species with a population that just passed the 7 billion mark. It’s easier to provide standard levels of good hospital care, sanitation, housing, and education to 1.6 million people packed into the island of Manhattan, for example, than to the less than 1 million spread out over the state of Montana. But cities are also a problem. They’re death traps during pandemics and natural disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Though cities are efficient in their use of energy, they still use far too much of it—especially given that most of them run exclusively on fossil fuels that are not sustainable and harm the environment.
Still, cities have become the dominant form of human community today. In the past decade, the number of people on Earth living in cities surpassed those living outside of them. And those numbers are expected to rise—the United Nations’ Population Division estimates that 67 percent of humanity will live in urban areas by 2050. Certainly it would be better for people and the planet if we could dramatically decrease our population, as Alan Weisman argues in his book The World Without Us, but that idea simply isn’t pragmatic in the next few decades. It would require us to regulate the bodies of billions of women, leading into a morally gray area from which we might never return. For now, we must accept that our population is growing. And that means human survival in the near term depends on whether we can build cities that protect their masses of inhabitants while also preserving and sustaining the environment. In short, we need cities that don’t collapse at the first twitch of an earthquake, that aren’t hives of disease, and that offer sustainable energy and food sources to their citizens.
To get there, we must first understand how cities work and what makes them survive over the long term.
The City Is a Process
A city is more than its brick and mortar. It is the sum of its cultural history. That’s why the urban planning philosopher Jane Jacobs, in her groundbreaking 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, makes the case that what attracts people to cities is “sidewalk life.” By that, she means the everyday social world of the city, the comings and goings of neighbors, strangers, and events. The city, Jacobs believed, was profoundly social. People flocked to them for the excitement of new kinds of human interaction, not to admire great works of monumental architecture or simply to make money.
Jacobs’s interpretation is just one of many ways to express a certain ineffable aspect of city life. Some call it an emergent property, a system of organization that arises spontaneously out of chaotically interacting parts. Others call it a cultural legacy. And the fantasy author Fritz Leiber dubbed it “megapolisomancy.” The point is that cities draw their vitality from a mix of social, political, and cultural practices that are hard to quantify scientifically. But they are also undeniably products of technology and engineering. They are financial powerhouses too, fueling their inhabitants’ cultural and scientific undertakings in massive, elaborate marketplaces that link cities to each other across the world.
Successful cities are what physicists might call stochastic, meaning a structured, repetitive process that contains an element of randomness. Certain structures appear in cities again and again. Even the very earliest cities, located in what are today Turkey and Peru, contain monumental architecture in honor of religious and political leaders. They also contain private homes where people lived in family units, cooking, sleeping, and raising children together. And yet every city has its own character, its own random, emergent sensibility that’s a product of a particular group of people at a particular time in history. Some cities, like Istanbul and Paris, manage to nourish this stochastic process over centuries and even millennia. Others, like Detroit, flash brightly for a few decades and then crumble into ghost towns. To make our cities long-lived, shaping them into “battle suits for surviving the future” as the industrial designer Matt Jones calls them, we have to respect their stochastic natures. We must build cities with safe, sustainable structures, but always leave room for randomness and social change.
Anthropologist Monica L. Smith, who researches the development of cities in the ancient world, has noted with some frustration that there is really no good way to define what makes an area “urban.” Key components of urban life include a high population density, specialized forms of work, social stratification, and monument building. But listing the ingredients of a city doesn’t adequately address the problem of definition, because cities are what Smith calls “a process.” The brilliant urban planner Spiro Kostof suggested the same thing, writing that “a city, however perfect its initial shape, is never complete, never at rest.” In other words, a city is always shifting, perhaps possessing some aspects of urban life at one time and other aspects later on. Moreover, what felt urban 5,000 years ago probably wouldn’t feel urban today—and indeed, what feels urban in Canada might not feel urban in China. We may know a city when we see it, but the idea of a city is itself a moving target.
Cities were born in two very different regions of the world: along the coast of Peru in South America
, and in the area once known as Mesopotamia, where southern Turkey, Syria, and Iraq stand today. The Peruvian cities, clustered along mountain rivers speeding toward the sea, date back to 3200 BCE. They boasted large sunken plazas surrounded by platforms, winding stairs, and rooms that were probably living quarters. The largest of these cities is believed to be Caral, which dates back to 2800 BCE and may have housed up to 3,000 people who left behind art, carvings, and woven textiles. Most likely, Caral and its outlying cities lived on fishing and agriculture, trading goods and ideas back and forth.
Unlike the cities around Caral, which were elaborately planned around large, central public spaces, the even more ancient city Çatalhöyük, in southern Turkey, looks more like a honeycomb made out of mud. Anthropologists believe it was probably constructed in roughly 7500 BCE, and inhabited for hundreds of years after that. The people of Çatalhöyük built their simple one-room houses right next to each other, with no streets in between. Doors were built into the rooftops, and residents clambered across each other’s roofs and down ladders to reach their pantries and beds. When the mud walls of a Çatalhöyük house began to crumble, residents would just build a new structure on top of the old one. Many ancient cities are called “mounds” because over time, ancient city people literally created hills by building new homes upon the ruins of the old. Anthropologists today often find the remains of these cities by using satellite photos to look for suspiciously symmetrical mounds in regions of the world known for early urban development.
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