Aliens are Just Guys

This week I read Octavia Butler’s Dawn. This was an incredibly compelling read which displayed a very unique alien species and culture.

            The whole time I was reading, I kept expecting there to be some sort of extra catch from the Oankali for saving the human’s lives. Although it was revealed about halfway through the book that the Oankali planned to mate with the humans and merge DNA with them, thus mutually evolving their species, I still thought that there must be some other, more sinister reason for saving the humans. I am used to seeing aliens as the enemies in popular media, and the usual trope for this is that aliens arrive with what seems to be good intentions, but later reveal much more sinister and self-serving reasons for “helping” humanity. I will always remember the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” as a prime example of this trope. At any rate, I had many prior assumptions coming into this reading, most of which turned out to be completely wrong.

            The Oankali were neither “good guys” nor “bad guys,” they were simply… “guys.” Just like the human species, the Oankali species has its own set of customs, morals, wants and needs. Just because they don’t align exactly with those of humans doesn’t make them wrong or bad. I learned this alongside the protagonist Lilith as I progressed gradually throughout the storyline, and by the end of the novel I, like Lilith, made peace with the fact that the Oankali weren’t as bad as I thought they would be. Yes, they were self-serving, but they also tried to genuinely help humans, and befriend them. This duality made them all the more humanlike and relatable.