Tag Archives: Octavia Butler

Books, Science Fiction

Blobs, Orbs, and Starfish: Really Alien Aliens

6 Comments
Starfish - really alien aliens are known as "starfish aliens"

Book blogger Shruti Ramanujam recently published a  list of “oddly specific storylines” she loves in books, that made me laugh out loud. And it made me think about what storylines or tropes attract me in a book. 

One of those tropes, for me, is “really alien aliens.” I find them fascinating, and I’m always checking my inner alien-o-meter: Are they convincing? What is their alien-ness telling me? I love that sense of looking out through unfamiliar eyes, and feeling the expansion that comes with considering other ways of being. 

I remember the first really alien aliens I encountered: the disembodied energy beings that appeared as strange spheres of blue fire in Ray Bradbury’s classic short story, “The Fire Balloons.” The priests who traveled to Mars to convert them are themselves converted by the sphere-beings to a more open view of religion, sin, and humanity. On TV, I accepted the humanoid aliens of Star Trek—Klingons, Ferengi, Cardassians. But my antennae always buzzed for aliens so strange they couldn’t be seen, like the beings trapped in the ship’s innards in “Emergence,” an episode of Star Trek TNG. They sent distress calls in the form of Holodeck characters, embodying metaphors for the help they needed. 

There are many, many such aliens in science fiction, going back to H.G. Wells’ leather-skinned blobs in War of the Worlds. As a trope, they’re recognized as Starfish Aliens—a term first used by H.P. Lovecraft (in At the Mountains of Madness, 1936). I’m less interested in them as dangerous space-opera foes or dread-inspiring monsters, and more interested in aliens that give us new ways to think about social structure, emotions, and the self. My interest goes even higher when these things are revealed from the aliens’ point of view. 

Two recent books delivered this for me: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and Ann Leckie’s Provenance, both refreshing takes on the space-opera sub-genre. If you haven’t read them: some spoilers ahead. Chambers’ small, angry planet is indeed occupied by fierce aliens whose way of thinking is hard to decode and puts the Galactic Commons at risk. On the spaceship traveling there, the human crew members work alongside a variety of aliens. 

One character, Sissix, is an Aandrisk, a reptilian species. Sissix is friendly and naturally demonstrative, and Aandrisk culture features a complex, inclusive family structure that evolves over an individual’s lifespan—a nice departure from that of the usual cold-hearted Reptilian alien. On a supply mission, Sissix encounters an Aandrisk shopkeeper in the marketplace who’s old and alone, bereft of any kind of family. Feeling sorry for the shopkeeper, pulls her aside and they have a snuggle/make-out session The scene is weird, funny, and affecting, and leaves us with a more nuanced sense of Aandrisk culture. 

In Ann Leckie’s Provenance, we hear about the Geck long before we meet one of them in the flesh. They’re water-dwellers and hate leaving their world, so they usually interact with other species remotely, through robot-like mechs. The single scene in which the main character, Ingray, meets the Geck ambassador floating in a pool is, for me, the strange heart of the book. The ambassador is a blob-creature whose skin telegraphs emotion by changing color. Her language is filled with poetic repetitions that suggest the lapping of waves: “I will tell you a thing. I will tell you. When humans first appeared, many things died. So much died…” 

The story she tells Ingray reveals much about patterns of affection among the Geck, and how those patterns have been forced to shift by the humans among them. For that one scene, we see the world through her eyes. Her motives become clear, and the plot turns inside out. 

This got me thinking about how hard it is to imaginatively get inside beings so different from us—especially when they have motives beyond simply wiping out humans. Is that why these very alien aliens make such brief appearances? I don’t know. One such very brief appearance has stuck with me. It’s from Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first book in her series Lilith’s Brood.

Lilith, a survivor of the near-destruction of Earth, has been taken aboard a ship belonging to the Oankali. She needs a lot of time to get used to the Oankalis’ appearance, although they’re humanoid in shape, since their faces and bodies are covered in wiggling sensory tentacles. At one point, her Oankali teacher offers Lilith a glancing vision of his species’ deep past, before many generations of biological mixing with beings from other planets:

“Six divisions ago, on a white-sun water world, we lived in great shallow oceans,” it said. “We were many-bodied and spoke with body lights and color patterns among ourself and among ourselves…” 

That’s all. But this short description—not even a scene—conveys a strange, Edenic world with haiku-like compactness, giving Lilith and the reader insights into the Oankali’s origins, how they understand themselves and each other. 

Have I left out your favorite book, scene, or pet peeve about really alien aliens? Any thoughts are welcome. 

Books, Science Fiction

The Broken Earth Trilogy

4 Comments

The Broken Earth: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky coversReading each volume of The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin left me electrified. The first two books, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate, won the past two annual Hugo awards for best novel—a rare occurrence. Her final book in the series, The Stone Sky, is up for the 2018 Hugo. Here’s why I think this science-fiction/epic fantasy trilogy is so important, and why I’m rooting for it to win. (It’s largely spoiler-free.)

The Broken Earth gives us a vastly-scaled vision of global environmental catastrophe.

With Essun, the main character, we enter a world that long ago suffered a planet-wide injury, which has locked the earth into unending cycles of convulsion. Periods of relative stillness are punctuated by Fifth Seasons, with earthquakes, eruptions, and toxic fallout that threaten humankind’s survival. The people of Essun’s time call their planet “Father Earth.” This name jolted me whenever I read it, challenging my ingrained understanding of our planet as Mother Earth, Gaia, the Greek Demeter, etc. But rather than seen as nurturing, this Father Earth is viewed as angry, unpredictable, and punishing, like an Old Testament Yahweh.

A genetically gifted group is the oppressed minority.

Essun is an orogene, possessing a genetic mutation that allows her to both amplify and calm a geological disturbance. Because untrained orogenes may trigger seismic events when they’re under stress, they are feared, shunned, despised and sometimes killed. Even when adopted and trained in the harsh sanctuary of the Fulcrum, their lives are hedged in by duty, even to the point of forced reproduction. Essun is also a woman of color, but in this world race and gender aren’t markers for oppression, functioning more like ethnicity in ours. Being an orogene is what defines her identity and her fate.

We feel the destructive effects of oppression burrowing deep into individuals.

In order to keep her safe, Essun traumatizes her daughter, Nassun, pushing her at an early age to learn to control her gift. Essun herself has been abused and ostracized as a child—and that’s only the beginning of her many psychic injuries. Even Schaffa, Essun’s morally ambiguous, Fulcrum-appointed guardian, is emotionally deformed and controlled by institutionalized pain.

Essun’s own suffering provides the raw, long-running engine that powers the book and animates the larger story. She’s a mother who has lost her children, to fear of orogenes and to the system that controls them. Over the course of the books, she creates and loses multiple family groups in the same way. Among her other hurts are the harms she is forced to inflict on others, given the narrow range of choices she has in an unjust world. The parallels to the experiences of the enslaved are immediate; the anguish of parents and children separated from each other, more relevant than ever.

Jemisin’s narrative structure is brilliant, gradually evolving to carry the expanding spheres of the story.

Essun’s story unfolds in second-person, at first by an anonymous narrator who addresses her as “you.” Later, we learn the identity of the narrator, a character in the story; and in the final book, we learn how that character’s history is central to understanding the sweeping, millennias-old forces that shaped Essun’s broken world. I was left in a state of stunned and grateful admiration at the scale of Jemisin’s writerly authority. By the end we’ve learned how the orogenes began, the meaning of the massive floating obelisks left over from a dead civilization, and the origin of the apocalyptically destructive Fifth Seasons.

With all its vast worldbuilding, the story grounds itself not only in individual lives, but in what have been traditionally women’s concerns…

…how we raise children, make and keep (or lose) homes, how we make communities with whatever is at hand—the humble, necessary building-blocks of culture. Among the six nominees for the Hugo awards this year, only The Stone Sky and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 take place on a home planet; the others are all set in space, either on ships, space stations, or faraway colonized planets.

The romance of space is fantastic and still worth writing about. But Jemisin takes the legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler and makes it her own. Like Le Guin, she assumes the continuing importance of women’s everyday lives and concerns in larger narratives. Like Butler, another African-American author, she insists on the need of children and other vulnerable people for community even in the most desperate circumstances. Jemisin adds a commanding voice to this growing continent in the science fiction/fantasy world. All this is why I want to see Jemisin win an unprecedented third consecutive Hugo for The Stone Sky, the shattering finale to a powerful and precedent-breaking series.