Imago

Book 3 of the Lilith's Brood series

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This book follows another of Lilith’s children as it goes through metamorphosis.

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Humanity has been back on Earth for hundreds of years making many thousands of blended children with the aliens, called "constructs". For fifty years, there has been a colony of humans mating without alien interference on Mars.

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In this book, genetic mutations of a kind the aliens never expected begin happening.

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Then I put my head against Nikanj, let my head tentacles link with its own. I spoke to it silently. “I’m not learning. I don’t know what to do.”

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“Wait.”

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“I don’t want to keep being dangerous, hurting Aaor, being afraid of myself.”

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“Give yourself time. You’re a new kind of being. There’s never been anyone like you before. But there’s no flaw in you. You just need time to find out more about yourself.”

The aliens, whose entire existence is built on genetic manipulation and perfection, are shocked when one of the constructs becomes the neutral third-gender. It is unexpected and dangerous because of the powers these neutral beings have.

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The Oankali are worried that Human tendencies will upset the methods, conditioning, and operation of these beings who are instrumental to the smooth continuation of many species.

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But that’s not all. Other genetic surprises are happening in a remote, mountain village populated by Spanish-speaking resisters.

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A few generations back, they spontaneously became fertile. Their children have all manner of cancerous growths and fundamental, life-inhibiting problems, but they are having children on Earth!

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When the human-born construct and people of this village cross paths, it benefits both of them very much. And because of this interaction, the paired sibling of the main character ALSO metamorphosizes into a third-gender being.

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By the end of the book, the aliens realize they will not be able to simply isolate these unprecedented beings because they understand that they are no longer rare. Fear passes through the Oankali.

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The first two books of this series are told in third-person perspective, but this one is told in the first-person perspective. I think Ms Butler did that because in this book we get much more information about how the third-gender thinks and feels.

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I held the female close to me and sank as many head and body tentacles into her as I could, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that I was somehow not close enough to her, not linked deeply enough into her nervous system, that there was something missing. Of course there was—and there would be until my second metamorphosis. I understood the feeling, but I couldn’t make it go away. I had to be especially careful not to hold her too tightly, not to interfere with her breathing.

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The beauty of her flesh was my reward. A foreign Human as incredibly complex as any Human, as full of the Human Conflict—dangerous and frightening and intriguing—as any Human. She was like the fire—desirable and dangerous, beautiful and lethal. Humans never understood why Oankali found them so interesting.

In this one, we get a greater understanding of the level of manipulation these beings perpetrate to get what they want. They use pheromones, a special fluid that gets injected into the human, they tell partial truths, they bind a person to them chemically so the person cannot listen to what their minds are saying, they must listen to their body. It’s an entire web of manipulation that made me see the binding of the first humans to the Oankali in a different light: it wasn’t really a choice.

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This is an excellent, mentally-stimulating book, but less gripping than the first two.

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