Name: Dawn
Rating: 4.296296296296297 (108 reviews)
ISBN: 9781491581841

Octavia E. Butler

Aldrich Barrett

Dawn

Lilith lyapo awoke from a centuries-long sleep to find herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. Creatures covered in writhing tentacles, the Oankali had saved every surviving human from a dying, ruined Earth. They healed the planet, cured cancer, increased strength, and were now ready to help Lilith lead her people back to Earth--but for a price.

M. Sosotris

This is high concept sci-fi in the mode of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. It’s mysterious, unsettling, awe-inspiring, and it asks difficult important questions about human nature. 

Butler’s prose is crisp and immediate, and her protagonist feels incredibly real. I also love her alien design. It’s strange and complex, and yet is so well described that I can picture them clearly in my mind.

I loved this book and desperately want to read the next book in the series.

An alien race calls on one woman to revive mankind after Earth’s apocalypse in this science fiction classic from the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower. 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. Featuring strong and compelling characters and exploring complex themes of gender and species, Octavia E. Butler presents a powerful, postapocalyptic interplanetary epic, as well as a ray of hope for humanity. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.

I normally don’t like science fiction but  Octavia E. Butler can make me enjoy any genre. The beginning was a bit slow as it set up the plot but later I couldn’t put it down. 

Butler captures humanness and renders characters like few others I’ve read. 

Kierce

I normally don’t like science fiction but  Octavia E. Butler can make me enjoy any genre. The beginning was a bit slow as it set up the plot but later I couldn’t put it down. 

Butler captures humanness and renders characters like few others I’ve read. 

Butler throws a lot at her readers and has a remarkable ability to capture and explore gray area. It's fascinating, horrific, and almost 

dense with ideas to unpack. There's not much room for the reader to breathe or process, for better or worse.

elizabeth

Butler throws a lot at her readers and has a remarkable ability to capture and explore gray area. It's fascinating, horrific, and almost too dense with ideas to unpack. There's not much room for the reader to breathe or process, for better or worse.

Meagan Fischer 

Louise 

** spoiler alert **
           *3.75⭐

I have mixed feelings for this novel.

The premise: an alien race has saved/rescued/captured the last remaining humans after nuclear war certainly intrigued me. 

I enjoyed the start of the novel as it wastes no time plunging you into the story. Lilith wakes up in a 'womb' and we figure out together what is going on. Butler is a fantastic writer, no doubt and the story had the ability to make you feel as uncomfortable/frustrated as our main character.
From part 2-3 the story got slow for me; the world building I overall didn't find that interesting. I also found it pretty heavy on the science & some parts I had to re-read to try and take the information in (that's a me problem).

I enjoyed how the novel highlighted social issues such as race, gender, sex, eating animals etc. Also the name Lilith possibly having biblical links.

However, I am still trying to wrap my head around the coercion of a human by an alien. I find it interesting but also repulsive. 
I can't deny the talent of the writing and I have not read anything like this before but I am in two minds if I will continue with the series.

Dweedle 

Absolutely loved this book. A deep exploration on what it means to be “human”, survival, exploitation, and much, much more. Butlers writing is often terse in the right way. This book contains a bizarre sexual encounter with an alien, that left me terrified and highly curious. The kind of book I’ve been thinking about since I put it down.

i think we need to make more contemporary sci-fi writers read books like this one. the intelligence with which butler inquires themes of what makes us human, authonomy, race is unmatched and invaluable.

elif sinem

the intelligence, nuance, themes and characterisation that this has WHEW.......

One woman is called upon to rebuild the future of humankind after a nuclear war, in this revelatory post-apocalyptic tale from the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower. When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali - a seemingly benevolent alien race -- intervened in the fate of the humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth -- but salvation comes at a price. Hopeful and thought-provoking, this post-apocalyptic narrative deftly explores gender and race through the eyes of characters struggling to adapt during a pivotal time of crisis and change.

Simon Crocker

Things have a tendency to escalate very quickly from the slower moments in this book haha. It's a very thought provoking book that asks many questions about sexuality, the constructs of society, and what exactly it means to be human. Curious to see where the rest of the series leads.

Judy Hudgins

It's not a 'beach read' for sure. Very unsettling to read and to go through the issues Lilith goes through.

Jessica Smith

Dawn is, in many parts, an uncomfortable book to read. Butler really does not want to give the reader any easy answers, but instead makes us grapple with some tough dilemmas. The prose is deceptively easy to read, because the real struggle is trying to work out who you're “barracking for”, or what you want to happen.

Dawn is set in the aftermath of an all-consuming war which has wiped out human life on Earth. Lilith, the protagonist, wakes up aboard a spaceship – not for the first time – on which she's been woken up and put to sleep, and woken up and put to sleep, over and over again and put through a range of weird experiences over these bouts of wakefulness. At last, her captors present themselves to her, and explain what's happening.

Her captors are aliens, a species known as the Oankali. They perpetuate their own species through genetic engineering, basically hybridising themselves with other species they encounter in the galaxy. Seeing that humanity was just about the wipe itself out anyway, they've rescued as many of the survivors as they could, and now plan to splice those humans' DNA with Oankali DNA and (eventually) set those humans free to repopulate the Earth. Through their tests, they've determined that Lilith has the ideal personality to learn all about the Oankali and their culture, teach other survivors about the mission, and ultimately lead a new human society on Earth.

There is a fundamental flaw in the Oankali's plans, of course, which is that Lilith and pretty much every other human in the book abhors the idea of having their DNA tampered with and producing not-fully-human offspring. Although the Oankali are kind and well-intentioned in many ways, they refuse point-blank to consider the humans' autonomy in this regard, no matter how many times Lilith tries to explain things to them.

But as I said before, Butler couldn't make things as binary as “Oankali evil meddlers, humans good freedom-seekers”. Many of the humans who appear in this book are actually not very nice – there are incidents of rape and murder – while most of the Oankali are very caring, if prone to patronising behaviour. Oankali society is communal and theoretically non-hierarchical; extended Oankali names convey how you're connected to the broader society. They're far more disgusted by violence than humans are, and eat exclusively vegetarian diets. They have the ability to heal humans' wounds through touch (and give them pleasurable sex-analogue experiences); it confounds them that most humans find this alarming and terrifying, when in their minds they're only trying to do good.

But the overarching point that Butler seems to be making is that even if Oankali society is “better” than humans', humans must be free to decide their own fate without outside interference – even if, as the Oankali point out, that decision was apparently to wipe out the entire species in nuclear war. That position seems a bit dubious, but on the other hand you can't deny that the forced impregnation, DNA tampering, etc. that the Oankali go ahead with is icky, too (and has a real-life parallel to chattel slavery, when slavers felt entitled to treat other people as livestock and “breed them” accordingly). Lilith tries to take a middle position, where she's on good terms with individual Oankali and helps them out wherever possible, while still planning to bail on them and vanish into the jungle as soon as they let her loose on Earth. Most of the other humans hate this strategy though for being, in their view, too soft.

This is a many-layered story; there is also commentary on gender, the difficulty of falling in love in an environment where you have little control over your life, and more. The dominant themes are shared in common with other Butler books that I've read, like Anyanwu's efforts to escape Doro's clutches in Wild Seed or Teray's conflict between being compromised but safe or free but endangered in Patternmaster. That said, the reason I've rated this book lower than those two is mainly that I was not so emotionally invested in it. Intellectually invested, sure, but the characterisation wasn't as gripping. Still, this might improve over the rest of the trilogy, and I'm still interested to see how things play out from here.

Dawn

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