“We are as committed to the trade as you’re body is to breathing. We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done – to the rebirth of your people and mine.” (Butler, 41)
Butler’s Dawn plays with perceptions on human development and evolution towards becoming a new race, showing consequences to the mindset that promote ceaseless development at the risk of hurting existing life. The aliens in Dawn, the Oankali, resemble modern humanity in many ways in their treatment of other species and their need to change. This starts with the premise of the inferiority of humanity as a “fatally flawed” (36) race whose polar impulses, our intelligence versus our pride, will always tear us apart and keep us from becoming something existentially better. It is therefore suitable to use human bodies as guinea pigs for observational purposes: her body is worshipped as “a tool for reconstruction” (97) but can be healed or even genetically changed (like all other humans on the ship) without her consent. Furthermore, the Oankali view, not only the human body, but also the actual human race as malleable, and ultimately disposable. They prefer the term “trading” to “interbreeding” in describing their kind’s methods of expansion and evolution, despite the sexual nature of the act of creating a new mixed race. They believe that they are not simply creating a new species, but bettering the lives of both parties involved by helping each to evolve. The process “renews” (39) the Oankali as a species, saving them from extinction or stagnation, which humans seem to have fallen into. In fact, it is their destiny to continually evolve in this manner: in speaking of his planet, Nkanj says, “It was a womb. The time had come for us to be born.” (36) The Oankali ceaselessly move forward as a species; they do not exist as much as a race, as they do a continually expanding multi-race, absorbing others into their genes so easily and emotionlessly that you could argue they are killing these other races in the process. In doing so, they represent a scientific view of humanity as a species that needs to interbreed or find and take on the characteristics of a better species in order to evolve as humans. This view is not content with humanity’s cultures or thoughts; since humans are inferior to whatever we are destined to become next, it promotes the debasement of our current state in our attempt to find something to make us better.
Alien similarly compares humanity to a seemingly superior alien species. As deemed by the company hiring the crew of the Nostromo, human life on the ship comes second to the pursuit of a new alien species, a new race. We see the perspective behind this need for discovery of a greater being in Ashe’s admiration of the alien species: Ashe states, “I admire its purity…no conscience, remorse, or delusion of morality.” Ashe represents a cold and robotic human drive to discover, and eventually adapt from, a new improved race, despite the cost this discovery will have to our physical wellbeing and existence. Like in Dawn, the humans of Nostromo are degraded to vessels for the procreation of another, superior species – the company in charge of the ship is not directly responsible for this, but its willingness to sacrifice its human employees to the whims of science resembles the Oankali’s willingness to replace the human race with their own mixed breed. Within both, an overlying society imposes its will to branch out to another species, learn, and copy from it for the sake of science.
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