Le forum d'ActuSF.com

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) est généralement considérée comme une écrivaine de science-fiction. Afro-américaine. Enfant, l'écrivaine voyait sa mère, femme de ménage, se faire humilier et insulter. Des souvenirs qui l'ont marquée à jamais. « Je savais que quelque chose n'allait pas, c'était désagréable. Je me souviens lui avoir dit "Je ne ferai jamais ce que tu fais, ce que tu fais est terrible". Et ma mère a juste eu ce regard triste sur son visage et n'a rien dit. » Ces années lui ont inspirée Liens de sang, Kindred en anglais, publié en 1979, ou elle entreprend le récit d'une jeune femme qui voyage dans le temps et rencontre ses ancêtres esclaves.

Dawn is absolutely about a beginning, and how painful that can be. Butler makes hundreds of brave choices throughout the book that still stagger me, and defy traditional writing advice. That’s obvious from that first section alone, Womb, with its introduction to Lilith Iyapo, one of the few survivors of a terrible war on Earth, saved and also kidnapped and drugged by an alien race called the Oankali.

Butler’s “Bloodchild” protagonist, Gan, is born on a planet colonized by humans and home to a species of giant, sentient centipedes. When the humans first arrived neither race recognized the other as intelligent, but by the time the story begins a tense truce has been negotiated. Humans live on special preserves, and each family “voluntarily” commits one male child per generation to incubating the centipedes’ offspring. Usually the grubs which hatch from eggs laid in these men’s bodies are removed before they devour them from the inside out. Unfortunately, young Gan encounters a man whose centipede is absent, and who is therefore experiencing the horror of a hatching without her surgical intervention or the tailored pain relief drugs only she can provide.

Humans are the aliens in this scenario. And challenging the popular science fiction narrative which reenacts white imperialism by mapping the subjugation of non-European lands onto the conquest of extraterrestrial space, it is the foreign humans, rather than the natives, who are reduced to the status of a commodity.