By studying our cancers

I zipped through Octavia Butler's trilogy of Lilith's Brood in the last couple weeks. The first book, Dawn, stands alone, but once I was in, I was in for the long haul. (The subsequent books in the series demand knowledge of the first, but could be read independently of each other.)

Mostly it's about the recolonization of Earth (some hundreds of years after a nuclear apocalypse), via a cross-breeding program devised by the Oankali. Lilith is awakened (having been rescued from the dying planet) and the program is "sold" to her. She then leads the first inhabitants reintroduced to a healed Earth.

The big question is: Is humanity being saved or exploited?

The second novel introduces a plan to colonize Mars with pure humans. The alien Oankali race is betting they'll destroy themselves within a couple generations.

What's compelling about this series is how well the alien species and its culture is imagined. The aliens are completely alien, but they are flesh and blood; their ways are weird, but so natural. And over time, they gradually become more human.

Of course one of the biggest attractions of the book is all the alien sex. Which sounds kind of awesome. The Oankali is a species with three sexes: male, female, and ooloi. They mate together "through" the ooloi; the ooloi establishes a neural link with all parties, and mixes all the genetic material. Now throw in a couple humans, a male and a female, to get the cross-breeding — a genetic trade — underway. Once mated, the parties develop a revulsion for mating with anyone else, to the point of not even being able to comfortably touch one another. They connect only through the ooloi. That neural link must be out of this world.

"This isn't just a drug."

"What then?"

"Direct stimulation of the brain and nervous system." She held up her hand to stop him from speaking. "There's no pain. They hate pain more than we do, because they're more sensitive to it. If they hurt us, they hurt themselves. And there are no armful side effects. Just the opposite. They automatically fix any problems they fin. They get real pleasure from healing or regenerating, and they share that pleasure with us. They weren't as good at repairs before they found us. Regeneration was limited to wound healing. Now they can grow you a new leg if you lose one. They can even regenerate brain and nervous tissue. They learned that from us, believe it or not. We had the ability, and they knew how to use it. They learned by studying our cancers, of all things. It was cancer that made Humanity such a valuable trade partner."

So the Oankali improve humans, using cancer as an agent for good.

I'm including here a picture of a blobfish because it looks just like I imagine one of the cross-breed subadult ooloi whose metamorphosis goes horribly wrong for a little while when it doesn't have recourse to the grounding influence of mates (but it ends up OK).

Indebted

I watched Payback yesterday, the documentary based on Margaret Atwood's book — Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth — that served as the 2008 Massey Lectures (a book I believe I have a copy of, but have not read).

It covers the notion of debt, but primarily non-monetary debt: paying one's dues, paying for one's crimes — a debt to society.

This film looks at some particular cases: a code of family honour and revenge in an Albanian village, one man's time in prison for breaking and entering and his guilt for the seemingly irreparabe damage he did to an old lady's sense of security, the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the working conditions of Mexican migrant tomato pickers in Florida. Conrad Black and Raj Patel have supporting roles.

The pacing's a bit slow (I've seen better documentaries lately, for example, Freakonomics), and it doesn't cover the material I'd expected to (I've read better treatments of the subject, like the anthropoligical persepective in David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I admit I haven't yet read the whole of).

The movie finally comes together for me when the concept of debt, or payback, is rephrased as making reparation — what sets the balance right again. Money, time, spiritual penance? And of course there will be differing views on whether a debt has been settled depending on whether you're talking to a labour lawyer, a victim of crime, a priest, etc.

What makes this movie interesting to me, though, is that I watched it against the backdrop of a weekend in which I was immersed in Lilith's Brood, a trilogy by Octavia Butler in which extraterrestrials salvage humans and other species after Earth's nuclear destruction. The Oankali restore the humans and the planet, and restore them to each other, kind of.

The book makes me think of debt insofar as it questions: what do we owe our planet, our species, other species; to what do we owe our humanity (and how much of that debt is cultural versus genetic); to what extent would we owe someone or something for saving our life (or saving our species) and at what price?

That's fairly superficial, but there's something else too. I get the feeling we wouldn't have a sense of debt if there weren't a sense of honour or pride which could be injured. And that sense can originate within an individual, a family, a community, a species — any debt we feel is based in the thing, the unit, the code to which we feel allegiance.

So suddenly, this little science fiction trilogy is about a lot more than repopulating the planet — it's become socioeconomic. The Oankali call themselves a species of traders — they trade in knowledge and genetic material. A communal species with high intelligence, they claim their primary sense of debt is to the preservation, or continuity, of life.

A mismatched pair of genetic characteristics

"You have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics. Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species. But the two together are lethal. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed you."

[...]

Jdahya made a rustling noise that could have been a sigh, but that did not seem to comer from his mouth or throat. "You are intelligent," he said. "That's the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we've found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics."

"What's the second characteristic?"

"You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as problem, but took pride in it or din not notice it at all..." The rattling sounded again.

— from Dawn, book one of Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler.

So far, so very readable. When humanity destroyed the Earth, extraterrestrials saved the survivors, Lilith among them, and salvaged what they could of the planet. Lilith has been preserved for a couple hundred years, and when she is awakened and introduced to an alien culture, naturally she has a lot of questions.

What do you think: Is having a hierarchical nature incompatible with intelligence?