Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Octavia - Cathy Peppers (essay date March 1995)

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Cathy Peppers (essay date March 1995)

SOURCE: "Dìalogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler's Xenogenesis," in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, Part 1, March, 1995, pp. 47-62.

[In the following essay, Peppers studies how Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy uses our three common stories of origin—Biblical, sociobiological, and paleoanthropological—to make us look at human identity in new ways.]

Octavia E. Butler's post-apocalyptic trilogy Xenogenesis is about a new beginning for the remnants of humanity, those few humans who are still alive after a nuclear apocalypse to be "rescued" by the alien Oankali. In order to continue to survive, the humans are offered the "choice" of reproduction only if they engage in a species-order version of miscegenation with the Oankali. As the title of the trilogy suggests, Xenogenesis is an origin story, a story about the origins of human identity, but it is a story with a difference. Xenogenesis...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Ruth Salvaggio (essay date Summer 1984)
   2. Octavia Butler with Frances M. Beal (interview date March/April 1986)
   3. Sandra Y. Govan (essay date Spring-Summer 1986)
   4. Adele S. Newson (review date Summer 1989)
   5. Frances Bonner (essay date Spring 1990)
   6. Hoda M. Zaki (essay date July 1990)
   7. Octavia Butler with Randall Kenan (interview date Spring 1991)
   8. Orson Scott Card (review date January 1992)
   9. Michelle Erica Green (essay date 1994)
   10. Rebecca O. Johnson (review date February 1994)
   11. Elyce Rae Helford (essay date Summer 1994)
   12. Hoda Zaki (review date July 1994)
   13. Cathy Peppers (essay date March 1995)
   14. Jim Miller (review date February/March 1996)
   15. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (review date 31 March 1996)
   16. Octavia Butler with Stephen W. Potts (interview date November 1996)
   17. Madelyn Jablon (essay date 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Octavia Butler