There was the control of Lilith’s fertility, being forced to breed, or even having children stole off you. In my paper, I basically wrote about how the novel is a world full of empowering everyone, but also taking a look at how women are seen and used in society.

I actually wrote a paper on the novel and I loved exploring and analysing Butler’s way of writing which was very blunt and actually made me a bit uncomfortable in places because of how well she portrayed humanity. The book explores so many different themes like gender, sexuality and human society and I think that Butler does an amazing job at conveying that humans are there own worst enemy. “Your people contain incredible potential, but they die without using much of it.” ― Octavia E. It’s the first book in a trilogy and I’m really interested in reading the other two books in the series. However, Octavia Butler’s take on aliens using the dying-out human race for their own agenda was really interesting. I was a bit apprehensive at first because the other books that I had to read for my course weren’t that interesting. This was another book that I had to read for my science fiction class at university. Grass will grow, animals will run, and people will learn to survive the planet’s untamed wilderness. For the first time since the nuclear holocaust, Earth will be inhabited. The Oankali survive by genetically merging with primitive civilizations-whether their new hosts like it or not. 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. They have kept Lilith and other survivors asleep for centuries, as they learned whatever they could about Earth. 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. Lilith Iyapo has just lost her husband and son when atomic fire consumes Earth-the last stage of the planet’s final war. But you know what? I actually really enjoyed this one. I’d never heard of it (even though I HAD heard of Butler’s Kindred), and I hadn’t exactly had the best encounters with the other science fiction books that I had had to read for my course.

And sure, analysing the heck out of them *sometimes* takes the fun out of reading them for pleasure, but hey, at the end of the day, you’ve read a book that is new to you and that’s good! With Dawn, it was like that. The one good thing about studying English at university, is that you have to read books that you never dreamt of reading, books that you didn’t even know existed.

Octavia butler dawn series