Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. We’re still experimenting with the format, so just like last month, this month we’re just doing a review followed by your discussion in the comments!
Dawn (1987)
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Pages: 256 (Kindle)
Series: Xenogenesis Trilogy/Lilith’s Brood
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci Fi & Fantasy
Why I nominated this for book club: It was January, so I wanted whatever we read to be about beginnings, and what’s more of a beginning than first contact? But I specifically chose to nominate Dawn because — SHAMEFULLY — until I finished this book, I had never actually read anything by Octavia Butler. This will definitely not be my last book.
The Premise:
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, post-apocalyptic interplanetary epic, as well as a ray of hope for humanity.
This book club discussion does assume you have read and finished the book. If you want to avoid spoilers, please finish reading before continuing!
Discussion: I’m going to start this discussion at its basest level, and we’ll work our way up from there: if someone had told me that Octavia Butler wrote books about humans having sexual relations with aliens, it probably wouldn’t have taken me 30 years to read one of her books. That’s just the kind of prurient detail I look for in novels. Look, I play Mass Effect regularly and I’m not romancing the humans, you know what I’m saying?
And now that I’ve said it, let’s move on.
There is a lot of meat for discussion in this book, but what struck me most is wondering how the Oankali could have done things differently to avoid Joseph’s death. They kept claiming to understand humans better than humans understood humans, but despite Lilith’s multiple warnings about the problems she saw with locking humans up in a room together without any tangible proof of where they were and who their “jailers” were, they went ahead and did exactly that.
An increasing number of bored, caged humans could not help finding destructive things to do. (Location 2317, Kindle edition)
I wonder how much Lilith’s suggestions would have helped though? The human community was angry and violent, and this denotes a particularly grim view of what humans are like in captivity. And while the end of the book was the culmination of that anger and violence, it was prevalent throughout the novel, starting with Lilith’s first introduction to the Oankali and her physical revulsion to them.
So I guess my biggest question is, was the interaction of the group of humans inevitable, or could it have been different? I asked myself this the whole way through. Would a different group composition of people have changed things? Would having firm proof have truly mattered? What if the group had been majority women/majority men/majority of a certain ethnicity?
The alien culture was really interesting as well. The fact that they’re gene splicers, and that their trade for giving the humans back to the Earth is essentially to change the very makeup of what it means to be human. Their gender roles, the physical appearance, their lack of connection to their own homeworld, how their social structure works, all of these things are shown to be completely alien, and in some ways antithetical to humans. I’m interested to see, in the future installments of this trilogy, how these differences are resolved in Lilith’s children.
In conclusion: I really liked this book, even when it was difficult and uncomfortable, and I really want to know what comes next. Will definitely keep reading this trilogy, and Octavia Butler in general.