Who Goes There?

Some authors are reborn posthumoussly, in that their reputations get a shot of adrenaline following their deaths, but Octavia E. Butler’s story is a bit more complicated than that since she was already a respected writer—at least within the field. Butler was one of literally a handful of black American writers to be writing SF in the ’70s and ’80s, and as Butler hersself admitted the barrier to entry was so high for those of her race that the few black writers to “make it” in the field at the time sort of had to be very talented. Butler is most known for her novels, which she actually wrote more of than short stories (she also loved sequels, which is unfortunate since she didn’t live to write some of them), although this didn’t stop her from winning back-to-back Hugos for her short fiction. It was in the years following her death, though, that Butler has become reevaluated as one of the very best writers in modern SF, to the point where she recently got a Library of America volume. (Basically if you get an LOA volume you are, at the very least, canonical so far as stuffy academics are concerned.) In fairness, while it’s easy to see Butler’s recent ascension to mainstream literary godhood as (like with Ursula K. Le Guin, sad to say) a bit overblown, she was quite a good writer. Case in point, today’s story, which after the Ballard story I reviewed a few days ago stands in the running as one of the bleakest SF stories of all time. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” is brutal.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1987 issue of Omni. Honestly this is the worst way you can read this story, because Omni is physically quite hard to read. It was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Omni Visions One (ed. Ellen Datlow), The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (ed. Richard Glyn Jones and A. Susan Williams), Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (ed. Sheree Renée Thomas), and of course it’s in Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

This story is nominally SF, and I say that because it’s only SF on account of the disease at the heart of it being of Butler’s own creation. In the near-future, an experimental drug called Hedeonco, “the magic bullet, the cure for a large percentage of the world’s cancer and a number of serious viral diseases,” has a horrific side effect called Duryea-Gode disease, which is hereditary and degenerative. People with DGD rarely make it past the age of forty. Lynn, the protagonist, has DGD on account of having inherited it from both of her parents; and things only get worse when her father brutally kills her mother in a murder-suicide. People with DGD are defined by a physical and mental decline, but also the preculiar symptom of having a inclination for self-mutilation. In the afterword to this story (which you can find in Bloodchild and Other Stories, not the Omni printing), Butler says she was interested in the idea of a disease which makes you feel like a stranger in your own body, or a disease which makes you feel like your body is a prison. She lists a few real-life diseases as inspiration for DGD, including Huntington’s disease, although curiously she does not mention HIV or AIDS. Maybe it goes without saying, considering Butler would’ve written this story in the wake of the public announcement of HIV/AIDS, after the Reagan administration had deliberately kept it secret for four years. (Reminder that being pro-Reagan makes you at least passively supportive of homophobic policies.) AIDS and queerness don’t come up in Butler’s story, but it’s hard to not read into the subtext of how DGD people are treated, even being made to wear emblems that designate them as having DGD (for social but also medical reasons), like they’re lepers.

Lynn is of college age and knows she has maybe twenty more years before she probably kills herself in a gory fashion, which doesn’t mean she can’t contribute meaningfully to the world. After the deaths of her parents she gets sent to Dilg, an institute run by and for DGDs, a hospital and research institute rolled into one. There she meets Alan Chi, whom she takes a liking to, being someone who also inherited DGD from both his parents. “I thought Chi was a Chinese name, and I wondered. But he told me his father was Nigerian and that in Ibo the word meant a kind of guardian angel or personal God.” Symbolism much? Jokes aside, Lynn and Alan do find comfort in each other, having been excluded from normal society and being left with a disease that predestines them for short and very painful lives. The people at Dilg range from fully functioning researchers, or “elder” DGDs who have managed (so far) to retain their mental faculties, to patients who have quite literally gouged their own eyes out, as happens to be the case with Alan’s mother. One of the elders Lynn and Alan meet is Beatrice, a woman Lynn suspects is about sixty, which (we’re told) is very old indeed for someone with DGD, yet Beatrice seems like a normal person. There’s a reason for this, we’ll get to that in spoilers. It’s actually hard to sum up the plot since there isn’t much of one, despite this being a novelette; normally this would be a negative criticism, but while she doesn’t stuff her story with events, Butler more than makes up for it with character insight and a creepy fullness in how the world of the story is described. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” is about disease and mental illness, but it’s also about control. There’s a tug-of-war going on between DGDs and the outside world, but also within the community DGDs have made for themselves. This is a truly speculative narrative about a made-up but perfectly plausible disease and its consequences.

Science fiction, I do think more than other genre, can be defined by it capacity to ask questions and pose hypotheticals. If we’re to judge the quality of SF by the questions it asks then “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” would be an all-timer, because Butler asks some genuinely disturbing questions and refuses to give easy answers. I said this is a story about disease, mental illness, and control, but it’s also about free will. The term “free will” is kinda loaded, because we know our capacity for “free will” is constrained by several factors, not the least of them being our own physiology. Butler basically asks, “Is the body really a prison? Is our capacity to act and even think determined by what our bodies will allow us?” Will DGD prevent Lynn and Alan from leading happy and fulfilling lives? Probably. God knows Lynn saw some people very close to her, including her own parents, have their lives completely derailed by a disease which they really had no say in. Some of the brightest minds in human history were ruined by disease or mental illness. Butler herself suffered from depression and high blood pressure, the latter contributing to what was probably a stroke that killed her when she was only 58. Have I mentioned this is an extremely depressing story? It’s concerned with agency, control, mortality, and how people with certain ailments are excluded from larger society; again it’s hard to not think of how people with AIDS were treated like lepers, not to mention all the misinformation floating about, once the AIDS epidemic became public knowledge. People who are not perfectly able-bodied are deemed “less useful” in the capitalist meat-grinder, and in such a society DGDs really only have each other to turn to. Like recognizes like. It’s like how, in my case, I gravitate towards other people with mood disorders, namely depression, bipolar, and borderline personality disorder. We’re social animals, and if we’re excluded somehow from “the norm” then we look for communities.

Again Butler asks, “Are we slaves to our own bodies?” Mind you that this is not a transhumanist story, but it does seem to plant the seeds for what would later become transhumanist SF (not to mention genderqueer SF, which is certainly related if not the same thing). If the body is a prison then we have an obligation to break out of it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The reason why Beatrice has so far retained her appearance of normalcy and how she’s able to “control” other DGDs at Dilg has to do with pheromones. I mentioned that DGD is hereditary, but it also has to do with which parent passed down the disease and the sex of the offspring. Beatrice, like Lynn and Alan, is the offspring of two parents who also had DGD, but Lynn in particular shares Beatrice’s “gift” for controlling other DGDs. As Beatrice explains “the scent,” which she and Lynn have:

“Men who inherit the disease from their fathers have no trace of the scent. They also tend to have an easier time with the disease. But they’re useless to use as staff here. Men who inherit from their mothers have as much of the scent as men get. They can be useful here because the DGDs can at least be made to notice them. The same for women who inherit from their mothers but not their fathers. It’s only when two irresponsible DGDs get together and produce girl children like me or Lynn that you get someone who can really do some good in a place like this.”

So Lynn and Alan are in a bit of a catch-22: if they end up getting married and have kids, they’re incentivized to produce a girl, who would be able to contribute to Dilg and help with the little DGD community; but also it would be irresponsible to produce more DGDs since there’s no cure for the dissease and knowingly passing DGD on to one’s offspring is condemning them to a painful and probably short life. Dilg is meant to serve DGDs, but it’s also run by DGDs, which means the institute requires fresh supplies of capable DGDs to run it. Dilg would not exist without DGD, both because of the disease’s very existence, but also the people who live with it. Beatrice is an exceptionally well-trained DGD who uses her “scent” to work with less lucid DGDs, like Alan’s mother, but she’s also the exception that proves the rule. It’s unclear, at the end, if Lynn will follow in Beatrice’s footsteps or if she will try to live as close to a normal life as she can. This is a case where I think an open ending is ultimately for the best.

A Step Farther Out

Excellent. Of course Omni has this reputation for publishing very high-quality fiction, despite printing so little of it (it took me ten month to cover another story from Omni because frankly there are relatively few stories from its pages that I have no read before), and I think said reputation is more or less justified. This also marked Butler’s only appearance in Omni, and she really made the most of it. Check out “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” if you don’t mind a discomforting read.

See you next time.