Of all the texts we’ve read so far, this book reminds me most of Lilith’s Brood. The trials that Matt Alacron goes through are much like the ordeal that Akin has to go through. Both boys get kidnapped at a young age and are treated with much contempt. At first their captors don’t treat them too poorly, but then when their captors discover that they have inhuman qualities, their captors immediately hate them. In the Scorpion for example, when Matt cuts his hands and feet on the glass, the maids as well as the children feel sorry for him. The maids treat him with kindness as they take the glass out of skin. Yet when they find out that he is a clone they immediately throw him outside. Rosa, the maid in charge of watching Matt, doesn’t even want to take care of him. She ends up imprisoning him in a room and filling it with sawdust so she doesn’t have to deal with cleaning up his excrement.
Akin’s captors, in turn, begin to treat him more cruelly when they discover that he is a baby who can speak like an adult. Galt, his red headed captor, treated him kindly at first. Galt let the baby sleep next to him, fed him, and prevented him from being sick. He had children before the war, so he could connect with Akin. Yet when Akin began to speak, Galt immediately disliked him.
Akin and Matteo represent the familiar made strange, the uncanny. People are immediately scared of what they can’t understand. With limited understanding of Oankali and Clones, Akin and Matt are both universally hated. Yet they are hated all the more because they are so close to being human, without actually being human.
I would say that Rosa and Neci are strikingly similar to one another. They are both women who believe it is okay to cause a living, sentient creature a great amount of pain because that creature is different from them. Neci was willing to chop off the sensory, tentacle organs of two little girls. Rosa, in turn, was willing to imprison and threaten a little boy all because of a few markings on his feet. Yet in the end, Neci and Rosa were both hated by others for their actions; which says something good about humanity.
The novels The Scorpion and Lilith’s Brood also raise questions about what it means to be “post human.” The Oankali constructs and clones are both creatures who are considered unhuman. I choose to use the term “post human” because they represent an altered form of humanity, a new stage in the development of human life.
Yet, to some degree, the same can be said about humans today. WE are post human. Humans today consume psychologically prescribed pills that reformat/improve aspects of our personality, and accept this behavior as normal. Many humans engage in plastic surgery, and this is mostly accepted by the public. We are now even developing the technology that can select what genetic traits we want to have in our children. Are these children post human? When the time comes for the creation of clones, will clones be accepted as normal as plastic surgery, or will they be regarded with contempt as they are in The Scorpion?
