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 …
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.
Exciting read, one of the books I couldn't put down. It's a very interesting analysis of humans and how they live together, and thoughts about if a kind of "benevolent dictator" would make it better or worse. I feel like the book doesn't come to a conclusion on its own, but let's readers think about it and opens some really interesting questions I hadn't really thought about before.
The characters and development are great, and the story is well written and very entertaining besides making me think.
I couldn't stop myself from reading it.
Once start, mate, this book wasn't leaving my hands.
How long has it been since my last Butler book?
Omg, she's such a good writer. The way she hooks you up is magic.
If only her and Le Guin were a bit more queer and less binary in their writings, but, well...
The Oankali have strange and disturbing ideas about consent, which makes this an uncomfortable book to read. (This is, like, intentional, though.)
There's a disregard for singular 'they' as a genderless pronoun, instead 'it' is used to refer to the Ooloi; this doesn't feel as bad as it might because it's apparently the pronoun that the Ooloi chose to use for themselves in English
The biggest problem I have with it technically is that not all that much happens for much of the book? At least the first half is spent with Lilith just learning things about the Oankali. Which is interesting, but pretty slow
I'm not sure I've read other books with aliens that seemed as believable. This book definitely had moments of discomfort. As a reader, you're meant to feel both xenophobia and xenophilia, hope and despair, often about the same subjects sometimes and sometimes in the same in the same moment.
This book made me think about what it means to be human, what it means to be sentient, what respect means, and how right and wrong are malleable. Nothing is black and white in this book.
I think this book could stand on its own, but it's definitely part of a series and I plan to read the other books in this series eventually.
Fascinating read (and a breezy one, too!); I really liked the premise and the worldbuilding in this, just incredibly imaginative and overflowing with opportunities for ethical and social dilemmas. I read in other reviews people call the main character annoying or obstinate, but I found myself understanding her positions more often than not. I'll have to read the rest of the trilogy, as the book is a major tease and doesn't even begin to resolve the plot by the end.
This is a magnificent post-apocalyptic novel. I think the late Octavia Butler may be one of the best authors in the genre. This series holds great promise.
"Dawn" in particular deals with an enormous number of issues associated with man's inhumanity to man, loss, uncertainty, fear, trust, and love. Stunning... a "Must Read".
I read this in a day and haven't stopped thinking about in the couple of weeks since. It's an incredibly uncomfortable read. At the end I was angry with Butler for writing such a grotesque scenario, but on reflection that reaction amounts to shooting the messenger. It's an absolutely brutal exploration of what complete loss of autonomy does to people
I read this in a day and haven't stopped thinking about in the couple of weeks since. It's an incredibly uncomfortable read. At the end I was angry with Butler for writing such a grotesque scenario, but on reflection that reaction amounts to shooting the messenger. It's an absolutely brutal exploration of what complete loss of autonomy does to people
I really wanted to give this 5 stars just for the sheer novelty of the work (and the fact I binge read it in one day, so you know it's decent) but couldn't quite because I think there were a few flaws in the handling of the human and aliens. There was not enough variety in personality: it just did not make sense to me, in this world where you can find tentacle porn fetish folk (in fairness maybe the author didn't know those people existed?), that every single human would flinch from the aliens on sight, or that they would have to be so damn coercive and have to force /all/ the humans to have no options but to breed with them in order to crossbreed! Similarly, you'd think a sapient species would have at least one or two conscientious objectors or weirdos instead of all of them universally …
I really wanted to give this 5 stars just for the sheer novelty of the work (and the fact I binge read it in one day, so you know it's decent) but couldn't quite because I think there were a few flaws in the handling of the human and aliens. There was not enough variety in personality: it just did not make sense to me, in this world where you can find tentacle porn fetish folk (in fairness maybe the author didn't know those people existed?), that every single human would flinch from the aliens on sight, or that they would have to be so damn coercive and have to force /all/ the humans to have no options but to breed with them in order to crossbreed! Similarly, you'd think a sapient species would have at least one or two conscientious objectors or weirdos instead of all of them universally agreeing with each other in a species that is /supposed/ to be anti-hierarchy. I get it, they're mucho into democracy, but democracy doesn't mean no disagreements. Or perhaps the one alien dude who volunteered to let Lilith kill herself was that one mutant, whatever. If 'bang every human you can' is really a universal drive in them as much as wanting to bang in general is in humans (although the actual metaphor is 'can you hold your breath forever?') it would have made sense to have a mutant, since ace people exist and the aliens explicitly said they saw value in genetic diversity so sometimes weird combos of genes could act unexpectedly (if cancer was so novel to them, they clearly didn't know everything there is to know about genes already too). Not all mammals have involuntary breathing and these guys go out of their way to mix with different species from different planets, I just don't buy not a single one of them would be a mutant who is hiding the fact they don't like what is effectively raping people and would want to work to free humans. If this is a colonialism metaphor, then it's one where for some reason there are zero abolitionists. The other thing I don't like is the total lack of any queerness in a work that has three genders, and all the men having a homophobic reaction to the third gender aliens. What the heck is up with that? Was she worried that homosexuality would somehow be less acceptable to an audience than tentacle p0rn threesomes? Well, maybe it would be, I don't speak bigot. I also felt frustrated there weren't any human genetic engineers, but some of this might be because I read humans as being closer to our current level of gene editing where a sufficiently determined knowledgeable person probably /could/ CRISPR a baby to remove foreign genes, whereas even a decade ago that wouldn't have been very plausible, so I may have simply misread the tech level of the people. The aliens said they removed human ruins but not all of them, so you'd just need one paranoid person who had a hidden stash of goodies somewhere the aliens didn't manage to find that included some CRISPR tech. If I were the aliens I'd probably be careful not to choose any humans with genetic engineering knowledge, or if I did, to make sure that human didn't end up in a group with one of those machine engineering fanatics, minerologists + doom prepper and SCA/historical-re-enactment type fans who might actually be able to re-build shit like very basic computers and metallurgy from scratch if they had to rebuild civilization. ...That would have made it a very different novel admittedly, and now I have an itch to maybe make a fanfic or something at some point, or expy of the aliens novel that just takes the premise and runs with it differently. I guess I just never take it very well when aliens or anyone else tells humans they are too stupid to comprehend or do something. You only need one genius to fuck that story up.
The premise of this book really pulled me in and Butler's compelling writing kept me reading. The world is so different. It presents really compelling questions as to what humanity is and how we could be seen to an entirely alien culture.
After a nuclear war and the nuclear winter that followed, the remaining humans on planet Earth were rescued by an alien race called the Oankali. The humans were put in suspended animation while the Oankali studied them to learn their biology and then started to repair the Earth so humans could live on it again. Now it is 250 years later and a woman named Lilith is awakened. The Oankali hope that she will be able to “parent” the first small band of colonists that they want to return to Earth.
When I was participating in Diversiverse I heard about Octavia Butler. She comes up in discussions that start with “Any people of color writing science fiction besides Octavia Butler?” I felt remiss in never having read her books. Dawn was written in 1977 and is the first in a trilogy.
I don’t read a lot of hard science fiction …
After a nuclear war and the nuclear winter that followed, the remaining humans on planet Earth were rescued by an alien race called the Oankali. The humans were put in suspended animation while the Oankali studied them to learn their biology and then started to repair the Earth so humans could live on it again. Now it is 250 years later and a woman named Lilith is awakened. The Oankali hope that she will be able to “parent” the first small band of colonists that they want to return to Earth.
When I was participating in Diversiverse I heard about Octavia Butler. She comes up in discussions that start with “Any people of color writing science fiction besides Octavia Butler?” I felt remiss in never having read her books. Dawn was written in 1977 and is the first in a trilogy.
I don’t read a lot of hard science fiction but this book pulled me in immediately. The writing is very accessible. I read this all in the course of about 24 hours.
My one word description of this book is … infuriating. I often say that I hate humans but this book really made me hate humans. The only idea in Lilith’s head is to get back to Earth and then escape the Oankali. What exactly have they done that is so bad? Let’s see, they pulled her off Earth before she starved to death. They healed her cancer while she slept. They enhanced her intelligence and gave her increased strength and healing ability. They fixed her planet for her. Would a thank you be out of line?
She’s all bent out of shape because the Oankali want a trade. They are a species that reproduces asexually so in order to increase their genetic diversity they want to mix some human DNA in with their own. I’d be like, “Sure, whatever you want. Here’s a cheek swab. By the way, thanks for fixing my entire freakin’ planet.”
Lilith and the humans that she is eventually charged with waking and teaching about what has happened to them act like it is the End of the World – oh, wait, they already had that. What is so precious and special about a species that wipes out their entire world? They would already be extinct without the Oankali so having human DNA live on in a hybrid form should be seen as an unexpected bonus.
But, no. The humans go all Lord of the Flies because they are idiots. They are put in a training room on the vast Oankali ship that replicates the section of the Amazon that they will be colonized. As soon as they are there they start thinking that they have been released on Earth even though they’ve been told repeatedly they are still on the ship. They start yelling, “No, we’re not! We’re running away!” I kept hoping the Oankali would see that they were dealing with a bunch of morons and shoot them all and check their storage units for some smarter ones.
Lord, this book was pushing all my buttons. The Oankali ship is alive. It can make all kinds of plant material so they eat a diet consisting of any fruit or vegetable ever known. So what is one of the first fights that happens when the group of humans is woken up? “We’re humans. We need meat. Give us meat!!!!!!” They are told that the Oankali won’t kill for them when they can eat as well as they want from the plants. Good. But, as soon as they are released in the training room they start hunting and fishing and ignore all the plant life around them.
I was seriously hoping that when the humans were released into the Amazon that they would immediately all be eaten by anacondas because anacondas need meat but apparently that isn’t what happens.
I’m giving this book 4 stars because any book that has this many issues that stick in my brain and make me angry every time I think of them has done a good job. I’m not sure if I want to read the rest of the series because it appears to involve more humans being horrible but I am intrigued.
Wow. I usually hate hard sci-fi. But this was captivating -- Butler taps into ideas about what makes us humans, at a core, biological level. As a parent, the concept of what we desire for our offspring - the desire for sameness in our offspring competing with a desire for the greatness beyond what one could desire for oneself was very compelling.
