Dawn is an incredibly raw and heavy book. Not for the weak minded. An African American woman wakes up in a room, locked inside these alien walls. She has these captors who turn out to be aliens. The aliens are planning on having our female protagonist Lilith, lead a group of humans onto the Earth, after it was destroyed by nuclear war. They're going to go back to the planet and repopulate and live on the Earth if they can learn how. In the meantime, they have to get along and hopefully not kill each other. The fact that the aliens make Lilith in charge of the human enterprise makes her into some kind of quasi-Messiah figure, meanwhile, the other humans hate her for being more than human, after she'd been tampered with genetically by the aliens.
That plot seems so simple. Hardly. There's not really any action at all in the entire novel. Most of its psychological, scary stuff regarding sexuality, reproduction, DNA, cloning, rape, colonialism, psychology, rights to your body and others' bodies, and freedom. These ideas are also prescient in modern society, for women, and women of color especially. Think about slave times when the white slavemasters used to rape the slave women and there would be mixed kids running around the plantations. There's a lot of serious themes going on here. Themes that are overtly female, that even science fiction gods like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling can't write about well. This is where Octavia Butler shines. Because although the themes are gut-wrenching and uncomfortable as all hell, the writing is so inspired and good, that I have to recommend this book to anyone interested in science fiction. It's such a good read that I couldn't put it down. I finished the book in only two days, two hundred and fifty pages read very easily.
Butler's prose is quite unique. Although the writing isn't difficult, there's a sense of single-mindedness throughout the novel. Deliberate. It seems that she had a good editor, or edits well herself because no parts seemed to anything, nothing was too long, too short, everything seemed to have been given proper detail and time. Sometimes the sentences can get busy and colorful but again, nothing ever loses its place. Everything seems to fit. The beginning of this book reminded me of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, but only in the sense that both novels start with a woman in a cage, in a sense. However, in reality, Octavia Butler is a much more powerful, visceral writer than Atwood. And in fact, Dawn is a much better book than Handmaid's Tale.
This is a great book. So great that it demands your attention to read the next books in the trilogy: Adulthood Rites [1988] and Imago [1989]. Thankfully, I already have a copy of the omnibus Lilith's Brood, so I already have my copy ready when I am ready to read. Definitely check out Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. Every book in the trilogy was nominated for the Locust Award, but it was the short story "Bloodchild" that ended up winning the award.
Recommended to science fiction fans and feminists. It goes without saying that Octavia Butler should be read because she's a black female science fiction writer of the new wave of science fiction. As a black woman outside of the genre, she has important things to say about being black and female, that the other new wave science fiction writers can't get away with, no matter how hard they try. There's only one Octavia Butler.
Check out my review for Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, where a black woman goes through a portal to the antebellum south, reliving the slavery era, https://ofigueroamusic.blogspot.com/2018/01/kindred.html
Next on my list is H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. It's a short read, also on the Wikipedia timeline of science fiction page. Looking forward to it. At some point soon I'll continue Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy.
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