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A review by number3nw
Survivor by Octavia E. Butler
adventurous
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Minor Spoilers Ahead
I finished reading Octavia Butler's book Survivor, which the author took out of print due to her not being satisfied with it, the book I finally used interlibrary loan to track down, an aging fragile copy I felt bad shoving into my backpack. Well, my feelings are like a lot of Butler fans reviewing Survivor: I can see why she didn't like it, but I still liked it. I liked the story and the prose. Thematically, it was classic Butler with her signature survival philosophy and critique of hierarchical violence and religious bigotry, while also giving us such hits as human/alien interbreeding and a profound love of life and the strange. The biggest miss, in my view, and maybe why she called her third novel her "Star Trek" novel, was making the aliens, the Kohn, essentially human. Different physically, but not much more than fuzzy humans, their hairy coats default color determined their rank in their bellicose culture, and on an Earth-like planet, their society was one that was formerly an empire but had devolved into warring clans. Contrast this with the Oankali in the Xenogenesis Trilogy, who are non-hierarchical and exist in a completely different way in the universe and it is easy to see why the latter is so much more compelling. Of the Kohn, I did enjoy that their fur glowed luminescent with different colors depending on their mood: white for pleasure, yellow for anger, gray for grief. So even with its shortcomings, I enjoyed reading it and, if I were the writer, I couldn't imagine abandoning it like she did, seeing as how it is a solid work of considerable depth. I know from reading her biographies that she struggled with her work and writer's block, and with wanting to be taken seriously as a writer at a time when genre fiction was considered little more than pulp. So I can't help but think that she was her own most discerning critic, and if the current Butler revival is any indication, her suppression of Survivor may have been the right move.
I finished reading Octavia Butler's book Survivor, which the author took out of print due to her not being satisfied with it, the book I finally used interlibrary loan to track down, an aging fragile copy I felt bad shoving into my backpack. Well, my feelings are like a lot of Butler fans reviewing Survivor: I can see why she didn't like it, but I still liked it. I liked the story and the prose. Thematically, it was classic Butler with her signature survival philosophy and critique of hierarchical violence and religious bigotry, while also giving us such hits as human/alien interbreeding and a profound love of life and the strange. The biggest miss, in my view, and maybe why she called her third novel her "Star Trek" novel, was making the aliens, the Kohn, essentially human. Different physically, but not much more than fuzzy humans, their hairy coats default color determined their rank in their bellicose culture, and on an Earth-like planet, their society was one that was formerly an empire but had devolved into warring clans. Contrast this with the Oankali in the Xenogenesis Trilogy, who are non-hierarchical and exist in a completely different way in the universe and it is easy to see why the latter is so much more compelling. Of the Kohn, I did enjoy that their fur glowed luminescent with different colors depending on their mood: white for pleasure, yellow for anger, gray for grief. So even with its shortcomings, I enjoyed reading it and, if I were the writer, I couldn't imagine abandoning it like she did, seeing as how it is a solid work of considerable depth. I know from reading her biographies that she struggled with her work and writer's block, and with wanting to be taken seriously as a writer at a time when genre fiction was considered little more than pulp. So I can't help but think that she was her own most discerning critic, and if the current Butler revival is any indication, her suppression of Survivor may have been the right move.