Quickly, I found myself back in the world of Dawn:- the devastated Earth, the gene-trading Oankali who have captured the survivors, the experiments on the survivors. Imago advances a few years and deals with the growing pains of Jodahs, the first human-Oankali hybrid, who metamorphoses into their third gender.
Jodahs, in search of love (and it requires two lovers to be satisfied) goes journeying, semi-pupates, gets into fights with suspicious chauvinist humans but ends back with its family. For all the adventures, Imago does not read like an adventure story - despite the outline you could never mistake this for H G Wells rewriting Tom Jones.
Many of the characters are mundane (though Wells could use ordinary people); there is "incident a-plenty" but it is not dealt with dramatically; there are large areas of xeno-biology and -psychology but they do not yield a sense of wonder. Jodahs is a thaumaturge among Latin Catholic peons but there is little spark of contact between the alien and fearful conservatives.
The real theme of Imago (and the whole trilogy) is colonialism/vampirism. Unfortunately the viewpoint is that a self-justified colonialist. Jodahs tells a resistor "This is our world. You people can go to Mars". And, humans are told that without genetic manipulation they are doomed to repeat their catastrophic warfare.
Wells was thinking of the extermination of the Tasmanian aborigines when he wrote The War Of The Worlds. There is no better justification for removing someone's possessions from them than telling them that they are undeserving. Xenogenesis is a work of extreme misanthropy, justifying a race which might be technically more advanced but is morally no better. After all, not every U-boat captain felt obliged to shoot the survivors who clung to the torpedoed wreckage.
CARMEN DOG by Carol Emshwiller (Women's Press)
In Carmen Dog the world has gone way beyond earlier fantasies - females everywhere are metamorphosing - human women are degenerating into bison, giraffes, snapping turtles, while animals are moving upwards. Pooch the heroine begins sleeping on the doormat of her master but ends as a grande dame on the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera. In between she goes through a series of escapes from mad doctors, government prisons, and sex maniacs but comes out unharmed. Men cannot understand what is happening, they don't trust the new women who were formerly domestic pets and they reject their former wives. They turn to bizarre experiments to try to reproduce but women eventually free themselves and come to terms with the new world.
If Carmen Dog is a distant relative of David Garnett's Lady Into Fox then Octavia Butler's Kindred is an even more remote descendent of Jane Eyre. From the first short section I expected a didactic novel but found that Kindred, set mostly in the antebellum South, belongs to that line of Jane's descendents known as bodice rippers.
Dana, 26, black and living in L.A. trying to write but getting by on unskilled jobs from an agency known as the slave market, suddenly finds herself back in 1819 saving a (white) boy from drowning. She returns to the present when she feels fear, increasingly damaged each time she goes. Throughout the boy's life (and years of Rufus' life are only minutes of hers) Dana goes back involuntarily when he is physical trouble. And those troubles, in shades of Roots, revolve around abusing Dana's ancestors. She is finally freed from the problem by a denouement which will be familiar to anyone who has read Charles Porteous' True Grit.
This book looked as if it would extend Yoko Ono's famous line - "Woman is the nigger of the world" but did not. It is much more an entertainment than it would care to admit. And its melodramatic structure of only pulling Dana back at times of physical trouble also helps it avoid any psychological depth in dealing with day to day pressures in the slave world.
This lightness is also a criticsm of Carol Emshwiller. Both authors played with their material instead of examining the subordination of women in a world of domination (Orwell, after all, found animals a good enough vehicle for his Marxist examination of power). I have emphasised the literary references because they indicate the failure of these books beside comparable ones. The only domination they have shown us is how much power an author has over a fictional world.