• Genre: Fantasy Sci Fi
• Age group: Adult
• Pub. date: May 1987
• Format: Audiobook
• Pages: 248
• Goodreads link

Lilith Iyapo has just lost her husband and son when atomic fire consumes Earth—the last stage of the planet’s final war. Hundreds of years later Lilith awakes, deep in the hold of a massive alien spacecraft piloted by the Oankali—who arrived just in time to save humanity from extinction. They have kept Lilith and other survivors asleep for centuries, as they learned whatever they could about Earth. Now it is time for Lilith to lead them back to her home world, but life among the Oankali on the newly resettled planet will be nothing like it was before.

The Oankali survive by genetically merging with primitive civilizations—whether their new hosts like it or not. For the first time since the nuclear holocaust, Earth will be inhabited. Grass will grow, animals will run, and people will learn to survive the planet’s untamed wilderness. But their children will not be human. Not exactly.

Dawn by Octavia Butler was a read for our Classics? bookclub on r/fantasy and I’m using it for one of the Blackathon prompts. I loved it. I’d been putting Dawn off for a while because I’d heard it could be disturbing and weird, and it was, but not too much and in interesting ways. It’s definitely the sort of sci-fi I associate with Classics, thoughtful, exploring ideas in-depth, looking to the future while also turning a mirror on humanity.

It was gripping from the start because there’s such a narrow focus, Lilith wakes up alone in a strange room and all her interactions are with a disembodied voice. It’s very easy to be there with her. As her world grows and she meets the aliens I still always found it easy to keep up and the way she was processing everything made perfect sense to me. Though she was keeping her cool a lot better than I would’ve and taking things rather well, all things considered.

The aliens were truly alien, in their appearance, their ways, their society, their technology and ship. And yet, their practices, namely paternalism, disregard for consent and saviourism, were familiar. I thought reflecting on certain colonial practices through a friendly, seemingly well-meaning, alien race worked great. Cause most of the aliens are really nice people, they’re just uncompromising in their goals. They always think they what’s best for humans, and disregard Liltih’s, even when the measures and restrictions they place clearly hurt people. They present the illusion of choice when really it always comes down to do what the aliens want now or suffer and do it later. It was really interesting how Lilith tried to balance forming bonds and friendships with her captor and her resistance to their plan for the human race.

There was a lot of exploration of sexuality and gender, that I think I might have found more striking if I’d read this a while ago, but now I just sorta took it in stride. I thought it was well explored and unique, the way the Oankali mate, but not shocking, just pretty cool. I liked how Lilith wouldn’t stand for anyone misgendering the Oankali, and how she drove home that accepting their gender was part of understanding them, and that was a lot more modernly done than I generally expect from books that are older than me.

I think something Butler did very well was getting everyone’s point across. Everyone was kinda sympathetic if you looked at things from their point of view, even the more antagonistic characters were that way due to their fear and lack of control. I liked the way doubt ate at people and affected their decision-making. And how fragile trust was.

I strongly recommend this book, it’s not quite like any other I’ve read and for me it just had the perfect balance of weird and familiar, human and alien.

r/fantasy bingo: Book Club

For more sci-fi about colonizing aliens check out The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull and The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow.