This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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In order to keep relevant, the contemporary film adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy would update its nuclear holocaust to apocalyptic climate change. With a few exceptions, most of the end-of-times imagery can remain unchanged. Mass rioting and civil wars erupt over deadened landscapes and disintegrating cities. All seems lost. Then: an alien race, the Oankali, swoops in from space, scooping up the last surviving species, humankind in particular.
The Oankali also restore Earth to pristine, pre-Industrial health, yet Butler treats this like a neutral fact, important to the world building, (literally,) and not singled out for the miracle that it is. This would change in the modern movie remake. In the book, the humans seem barely appreciative, and quickly move onto other concerns. They take the healed planet for granted, but as victims of an atomic war, they were never responsible for its loss. Everyone blames the few military plutocrats who pushed the button. The Oankali try to prevent the redevelopment of technology, which irks a great many survivors. How could innocent people not wish to restore everything that was stolen from them—houses and streets and mines and guns and all?
In the hypothetical film update, the world is destroyed by the narrowness of the human race, albeit orchestrated by these same military plutocrats. No one prized the environment above all, and everyone lived unsustainably. The blame becomes collective. The equators flood, and food and water run out. The humans are widely aware of their hopelessness as they approach the end of the world. Then: almost divine intervention. Redemption. The audience watches the human survivors emotionally leveled, toppled by grace and humility, rapture and grief. Cue swelling strings, a long pan over waterfalls, or intact glaciers. Hands sifting the soil. They could easily reapply the John H Williams score from Jurassic park—the part when the jeeps pull up into a field of Brachiosauri.
In this version, it’s also easier to imagine humanity consenting to what the Oankali require in return—to interbreed with them completely, leaving no further generation of purely human beings.
Would humanity still value Earth, if humankind had to take the fall, and extinguish itself instead? The reverse narrative is far more dominant—humans racing out in spaceships for a replacement planet. Interestingly, the Oankali believe that letting the human species continue as is constitutes mass-suicide. ‘The Human Contradiction,’ the mixture of intelligence and hierarchical behavior, will always guide humankind to utter destruction of themselves and the Earth. The Oankali believe they are offering a way out—humans may not survive, but their genes can.
It is eventually revealed that the Oankali plan a parallel fate for Earth. They had to save the environment to have something to feed their animalesque spaceships. Once these ships reduce Earth to a desolate core, the half-Human, half-Oankali people will take off in search of more intelligent life to augment. Sadly, this development comes too soon in the books, nullifying what had been a beautiful, difficult paradox. Why not resist, if they’re destroying the Earth as well? So what if the solar system will be eaten by the sun, or a passing black hole, in the matter of aeons? Perhaps humans will outrun it. That’s what the Oankali are doing. The movie version breaks down in development hell.
This is fun to imagine. I think the big question is, how would a film version handle the sex vs. violence? Hollywood shoot em ups are supposed to have a lot of the second and little of the first; it’s hard to imagine a major summer release in which aliens take over the earth without a shot fired and then tentacle sex.
Either it would have to be an artsy Cronenberg type thing, or else it would be radically altered beyond recognition, seems like the two options.
You may be disappointed to hear that all but the very last drafts did tackle this. I didn’t like how I’d written it though, and scrapped it.
I think there’s enough violence to go around, at least in Dawn and Adulthood Rites. Maybe Xenogenesis is better suited for a television series though, where you have a number of smaller escalations, rather than a Lord of the Rings/Independence Day epic showdown. And according to HBO/Showtime/etc, tons of sex.
The sex issue, for me, is how would a human audience feel about our entire species being treated like a femme fatale– according to the Oankali, we’re dangerous, fascinating, irresistible, and ethically speaking, pretty much should die out as soon as they’ve had their fill. The male humans in the book worry about being feminized, for good reason, and I think audiences would object to every “male” character being played by an Oankali or hybrid.
By male character, I mean male personality.
I agree that this would be better suited for a television mini-series where they could allow the tensions to build and linger a bit longer on the moments of encounter, including the sex, since the book seems to be very much about relationships and negotiations of power. Wouldn’t it be fun, though, to imagine a pared down 60 mins. Star Trek version? With the bad stage Oankali costumes and phasers?
I think the major question (for me) though would be how quickly a major motion picture would try to erase the racial diversity the human cast. They’d keep Lauren Olamina as a black woman, maybe Halle Berry (or Kerry Washington?) so that readers wouldn’t get pissed off. But then they’d quickly move to make sure to fill in the rest with well-known white characters….
It will be interested to see what happens when the sci-fi mini-series Extant airs in two weeks – starring Halle Berry!
That’s true. And if the nature of the apocalypse was itself changed, it would actually be people of color who would be mostly imperiled. In the books, most of the survivors are South American, African or Southeast Asian, as these areas were not as hard-hit by the bombs. I’m sure studio execs would be happy to offer boatloads of white people instead, under the reasoning that equatorial peoples would be wiped out by rising oceans and mass starvation.