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The Ethical Implications of Biological Engineering in Octavia E Butler's INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND HUMANITIES Full Length Article The Ethical Implications of Biological Engineering in Octavia E Butler’s Novels M. Prakash a * a Ph.D Scholar (part-time) & Asst. Prof. of English, Sri Vidya Mandir Arts & Science College, Uthangarai Tamil Nadu, India *Corresponding Author Abstract: The present study is based on the analysis of The Ethical Implications of Email: [email protected] Biological Engineering in Octavia E Butler’s Novels. The paper begins with a brief (M. Prakash) introduction of the writer Octavia Butler and a short summary of the novels chosen for Received : 19-7-2017 study of this paper. As the title suggests the study of the paper is carried out on the Reviewed: 25-7-2017 Revised : 26-7-2017 issues of Patternist Serious Octavia E Butler’s Novels. Starting in 1974, Butler worked Accepted : 05-8-2017 on a series of novels that would later be collected as the Patternist series, which depicts the transformation of humanity into three genetic groups: the dominant Paternity, humans who have been bred with heightened telepathic powers and are bound to the DOI: Pattern master via a psionic chain; their enemies the Clayarks, disease-mutated animal- https://doi.org/10.26524/ijs like superhuman; and the Mutes, ordinary humans bonded to the Patternists. th17112 Keywords: Genetic, Patternists, Telepathic, Psionic The Ethical Implications of Biological her. Feeling threatened by her shape-shifting ability, Engineering in Octavia E Butler’s Novels he wonders whether he holds enough control over her. Anyanwu witnesses Doro’s barbaric ways and Wild Seed is the story of two immortal plain disregard for his people, which frightens her. Africans named Doro and Anyanwu. Doro is a spirit When they arrive at the seed village, Doro tells who can take over other people’s bodies, killing Anyanwu that she is to marry Isaac, bear his anyone and anything in his path, while Anyanwu is children and the children of whomever else Doro a woman with healing powers who can transform chooses. Anyanwu eventually agrees once Isaac herself into any human or animal. When they meet, convinces her that she could be the only one to get Doro senses Anyanwu’s abilities and wants to add through to Doro. her to one of his seed villages in the New World, where he breeds super humans. Doro convinces Fifty years later, Doro returns to the seed Anyanwu to travel with him to America by telling village. His relationship with Anyanwu has her he will give her children she’ll never have to deteriorated, and one of the only things keeping watch die. Although Doro plans to impregnate her him from killing her is her successful marriage to himself, he also wants to share her with his son Isaac. He has come home because he senses that Isaac. Isaac has very strong telekinetic powers and Anyanwu’s daughter, Nweke, is fully coming into is one of Doro’s most successful seeds. By her powers. During her transition, Nweke attacks partnering Anyanwu and Isaac together, Anyanwu. Trying to protect Anyanwu, Isaac accidentally kills Nweke and suffers a heart attack. Doro hopes to obtain children with very Anyanwu realizes she is too weak to heal Isaac and special abilities. Doro discovers that when Anyanwu he dies. Afraid that Doro will kill her now that Isaac transforms into an animal, he cannot sense or kill Vol. 4 Iss. 1 Year. 2018 Int. Jour. Sci. Tech. Huma , 80-84| 80 is not there to protect her, Anyanwu transforms halts her acquiring of telepaths. This creates a into an animal and runs away [1]. conflict, as Mary will destroy herself and as a result all Patternists if she discontinues the expansion of After a century, Doro finally tracks Anyanwu her Patternist community. With support from her down to a Louisiana plantation. To his surprise, people, Mary gains the strength to fight and Anyanwu has created her own colony, which in ultimately kill Doro. There are many Patternist many ways is more successful than Doro's. She casualties in the fight; however, Mary is ultimately protects her people until Doro's arrival, at which able to continue to grow and protect the Patternist point he forces his breeding program on her society she has created [4]. community. One man he brings to mate with one of Anyanwu’s daughters ruins the harmony of the The novel is set in a near-future dystopia in colony, resulting in several deaths. Anyanwu which most people must live in gated communities becomes tired of Doro's control, since his or in armed nomadic groups called "car families." immortality makes him the only permanent thing in The novel traces the experiences of Blake Maslin, a her life. She decides to commit suicide. Her decision physician living in Southern California, and his causes Doro to have a change of heart. In sixteen-year-old twin daughters, Rane and Keira. desperation, he agrees to compromise as long as Traveling across a Mojave desert, the three are she goes on living [2]. From that point on, Doro no kidnapped by Eli Doyle, the only survivor of Clay's longer kills as carelessly to remain immortal, and Ark, a spaceship that made an emergency crash does not choose his kills from the people that he landing in the desert on its return from the first should be protecting. He also stops using Anyanwu manned mission to another planet. Eli is infected to breed; from now on she helps him in his quest to with an alien microorganism that gives him try to find more promising seeds, but is more of an heightened sensory and physical powers, but also ally and partner than his slave. directs his actions toward its own survival and transmission. He has assembled a "family" on a This second novel in the series recounts the small isolated ranch, hoping to slow or stop the story of how the Patternist society originated. The microorganism's transmission, but the urge to novel is set in Los Angeles, California in the 1970s. reproduce is so strong that he seeks out other The leader of the telepathic humans that later humans to add to his family. Many infected young became known as the Patternists, was a man men or older women die of the disease, but infected originally from Africa named Doro. Doro is 4,000 women survive to give birth to sphinx-like years old and immortal. Since Doro does not have offspring—intelligent quadrupeds with physical immortality, he must move his essence to extraordinary speed. The mutants, eventually (in different bodies as time goes on for his continued novels set later in the series) called clayarks, see survival [3]. Doro tends to procreate with and breed uninfected humans as food but can also spread the people who are telepathically sensitive, in an effort microorganism through their bite. Blake, Rane, and to make a group of superhuman telepaths. The story Keira are infected and Eli expects them to join in the is focused on one of Doro's daughters, named Mary, reproductive project of the community. Blake and who is a young, poor mulatto woman. Doro's hope is his daughters flee, only to be captured by a "car that his daughter Mary will connect with other family" with much more violent tendencies. Blake telepaths and ultimately become an exceptional and Rane, drawn by the microorganism to seek out telepath who is able to link with other telepathic food and sex, are fatally injured by the "car family." people. Rane is decapitated, but Blake manages to escape In the midst of Mary's status change from a long enough to infect a long-haul truck driver, "latent" to an "active" telepath, she makes the first making inevitable the spread of the disease through ever Pattern as a result of her attaching mentally the rest of the country and eventually the world [5]. onto six other active telepathic people. Two years Keira, having been cured of leukemia by the later, after Mary has added 1,500 people to her microorganism, reluctantly agrees to participat and community of Patternists, Doro thinks she has returns with Eli to the ranch family, acquired too much power and demands that she Vol. 4 Iss. 1 Year. 2018 Int. Jour. Sci. Tech. Huma , 80-84| 81 Pregnant with her own mutant child. attack. After several years living as a feral child, Alanna was captured by a group of Missionaries, a Survivor follows the early contact between Christian religious sect dedicated to maintaining the Missionaries, a group of human colonists fleeing humanity as God's chosen form in the face of a plague on Earth, and the Kohn, intelligent natives Clayark and Patternist competition. Although some of the planet on which the Missionaries have of the Missionaries distrusted Alanna, either arrived. In particular, the novel focuses on Alanna, because of her wild upbringing or because of her the adopted daughter of the Missionaries' leader, as African American and Asian ancestry, she adapted she attempts to prevent the Missionaries' quickly, and became the foster daughter of the destruction or assimilation at the hands of a group's leader, Jules Verrick, and his wife Niela. dominant local culture. During the course of the Sometime later, the Missionaries receive an novel, Alana’s experiences assimilating and opportunity to flee Earth on a Patternist starship as negotiating with the Kohn draw upon her earlier, part of a program to seed humanity on other similar experience joining the Missionaries planets in order to preserve the species from the themselves, and Alana’s ability to interact with the Clayark plague.
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