I should say, first of all, that I still haven't finished the book. Sakura-Con is always... interesting like that. I'm kinda embarrassed about it, since I took Lilith's Brood with me, but I actually needed to do something else before it. Apparently, you can't save school .pdf files to disk by right-clicking on the link and hitting “save as” – live and learn, I guess. Besides that, I found myself without quite enough time to finish the book (and I had to finish the other class thingy first today). Obviously I'll come back and rewrite this when I've finished it...
For my 498 class last quarter (wanted to get it out of the way before I really had to worry about getting into one) I had to do a report on Octavia Butler, and I don't really recall coming across any materials that described her as particularly religious. Which is both odd and expected, as the Parable books are about a new religion, and Lilith's Brood... pretty much isn't. That's the thing that struck me most about it – two things, actually. First, I never saw (have yet to see...?) a strong “religion” presence – organized religion, I mean. I don't mean like just a priest or a rabbi, just that when the people were first Awakened, none of them referred to a God of any sort, and it doesn't seem to be in the notes Lilith received. And the Oankali never asked about it, either. So either all the religious people died out (religious war? no, Butler was of a generation old enough to remember the Cold War and the Cuban Missile thingy and nukes were apparently involved and it was written before 11/89) or the idea of religion was not acceptable to the Oankali – probably the second, since it involves the whole hierarchy thing. The second, kinda tying into this, is the lack of Bibles anywhere – that none of them survived the war. Again, this could be part of the whole Oankali “conspiracy” but I don't quite see the point.
On that note, there is a scene on page 369 of my book (chapter 13 of Phoenix, in Adulthood Rites) that kinda raises a slightly different question: “Bibles – using the memories of every village they could reach, Phoenix researchers had put together the most complete Bible available.” Not so much a question, I suppose, as a problem. Either this means that enough people who survived HAD memorized the Bible – which the Oankali would have done something about, or reacted to – or they just went to Sunday School as kids or something, and the Bible they've managed to make is a piecemeal mess (and very much Christian – something that would just be painful to go into, for someone like me). Given the importance of it – it's conceivably as close to an Oankali memory as humans can come – I find it hard to believe that they would not say something about it.
Then there's the line “We'll be fully Human and free. That's enough.” on page 531 (a page or so before chapter 2 of Imago) that amuses me – I'll explain why in more detail a bit later. Regarding the hybrids (and the humans in the book are already “hybrids” if looked at from the point of view of someone before the war – culturally, in a way?), they'll be “Human” to any other race that happens to drop in for a visit a few generations down the line.
This came up later than I hoped, but oh well. Can't stop time, can't go back in time, can only go forward. I'll put some more stuff up in a while.
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