Reading response

Octavia Butler’s trilogy started with a bang, and ended with a whimper. The last part of imago seemed to me to be the most boring part of any of her books. It also had the most Deus ex machina. Of course the series is supposed to be SF, but most scenes were well explained. It was never satisfactorily resolved how all of a sudden there was a fertile colony of humans around. Somehow someone was raped and found to be fertile, but apparently she was the only one. And that these fertile resisters had a hidden location where both other resisters and the oankali could not find them rang false. The resisters had been searching pretty closely for other humans to raid, and they knew that people in hard to reach spots would be the most likely to be fertile, the resister raiders should have found the fertile village long ago. There is a better reason why the oankali didn’t know about the village, because they never actively searched out resister villages so long as they left others alone.

That leads me to my main point. Octavia Butler’s work seems to be filled with Deus ex machina. While those scenes in imago were the most obvious parts, looking back through the work, there are many scenes where something happens just so that it will work out later. Now of course, writers are allowed to do this to make their story turn out the way they want to, but there seemed to be too many coincidences which made the story slightly less believable. In imago, meeting humans only a few days out of Lo was one such scene. In Adulthood Rights, Akin being captured was another. In fact, all of Akin was a coincidence. Why were males so much harder to create than females never seemed accurately explained, and why Akin was the only one also seemed strange? It seemed as if Butler wanted a hero who was unique and powerful to maintain interest, and so a normal rank and file oankali would not do, only a one of a kind construct. Then, it turned out that he was to speak for the human race after being trained by an akjai ooloi. It didn’t seem like any other oankali received that privilege, but Akin did. In the first work, there were also scenes which didn’t ring true. Almost all violent reactions to Lillith seemed strange to me. These reactions appear constructed with second glances, because they don’t seem to have any thought process behind them. They were made to further the story rather than anything else.

Octavia Butler uses a lot of Deus Ex Machina to further the story, at least in my opinion. Used in small doses, this can be helpful, but in too many parts of her story, it makes it ring false.