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 means "the production of offspring different from either of...