Despite a couple of minor niggles with its portrayal of male sexuality, and overly grim group dynamics, Dawn was in general amazing; and at times both very beautiful and deeply disturbing book. Though its plot was necessarily almost all setup and exploration, if you like the idea of reading a book which really takes you into a very alien world where you’ll have your comfort zone severely stretched, Dawn is definitely worth your time.

Divided into four sections, “Womb,” “Family,” “Nursery,” “The Training Floor,” the narrative largely divides the story into chunks of time and stages in Lilith’s interaction with the Oankali. Transitions between the sections seem slightly awkward, sometimes with setting changes, sometimes with significant time breaks. The third person limited point of view brings the reader closer to Lilith’s experience without unnecessary breaks in point of view. Readers who are used to the popular first person perspective, or multi-person perspective may find it hard to emotionally relate to Lilith as she copes with her confinement and the proposed genetic destruction of the human race. Akin's proposal for a Mars colony in the previous book has been realized, providing an opportunity for humans who wish to live independently from the Oankali. Many humans have already migrated there, though the most hateful and barbaric of them still resist so that the Oankali render them unconscious and store them on the ship for genetic material.Just before dawn, the ghosts troop silently into the cell to witness the killing. Moments before the execution, Dawson suddenly smiles, saying he just realized that he doesn’t know why he’s dying. He wants to tell Elisha another story. However, Elisha tells him not to smile, raises his revolver, and fires. As Dawson dies, the name “Elisha” is on his lips. Elisha watches as the ghosts accompany Dawson’s spirit from the room, the little boy at Dawson’s side and Elisha’s mother sadly repeating, “Poor boy!”

Lilith lyapo awakes alone. She barely remembers the war, the conflict between the USA and USSR which resulted in the almost total destruction of humanity. Neither does she remember her capture by the Oankali, the alien race who arrived just in time to salvage the last of the human race and place them in suspended animation aboard their massive biological ship. 250 years have now passed, and the Earth is once again habitable. The Oankali will help humanity reclaim the Earth and start a new culture, but only at a price, a price which will change what it means to be human. I don’t think I was ever so aware of my body and my safety and my breathing space as I am now. One’s body is perceived as a temple; defile it and you’ll break that person for life.I was utterly compelled. When I got to the end, I was so hungry for the next book I was actually frustrated not to have it to hand. The last book I enjoyed nearly this much was The Lathe of Heaven so I guess I need to give in and accept that speculative fiction with feminist consciouness is my true love. Outterson, Sarah. " Diversity, Change, Violence: Octavia Butler's Pedagogical Philosophy." Utopian Studies 19. 3 2008, pp.433–456. Pulizia etnica: l’esodo dei palestinesi a seguito della fine del mandato britannico, 15 maggio 1948. Can I just say it? Most of the humans are assholes. There are about 40 of them, and Butler can't possibly characterize them all successfully in such a short time (and she does not). So the story goes from an intimate character-driven one between the fleshed-out Lilith and aliens Jdahya and Nikanj as she gets used to life with the Oankali, to a more action driven one with 40 extra assholes dumped into the mix. The humans are all cowardly, tribal, suspicious, dense, selfish, and violent. Ok, maybe not all. Joseph, Lilith's blander-than-bland love interest, is not like that, and Butler goes to great lengths to let the reader know how special he and Lilith are. But what do they get for their trouble? He dies. Killed by the most violent alpha-male of the group. And Nikanj the alien ends up keeping Lilith on the ship in the end, rather than on Earth with the humans she has trained, because it says the other humans would have definitely plotted to kill her. This fatalistic attitude about humans permeates the book and is unrelenting!

How the average Joe and human society may react to those new realities and how human mentalities could be more directly expressed by breeding in and out certain traits, body parts, etc. What the motivation of aliens might be, like for instance getting interesting new traits by dealing with all kinds of collected material from all around the universe. The dangers that come up with misusing that technology. Yescavage, Karen, David Lumb, and Jonathan Alexander. " Part Four of Imagining Alien Sex: Preparing for the Alien". Los Angeles Review of Books. January 5, 2014. What an unsettling little book! I stayed up late last night to finish it and I awoke this morning with it still on my mind (and I think I dreamed about it too). Octavia Butler is skilled at making me re-examine my beliefs about humanity. Elie Wiesel, a world famous, highly honored (and sometimes-criticized) Jewish writer and political activist, was born in Romania in 1928. The novella Dawn was his first work of fiction, published in 1960. Together with his famous memoir Night (1958, of the time he spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1944-5) and his next fictional work, Day (1961) it appears in The Night Trilogy. Wiesel died in 2016. There are a number of symbols seen in Dawn. One of the first symbols that readers see is night. The beggar describes to Elisha that night has a face, and explains that if you can see a face, you know that night has succeeded day. Due to Gad's explanation of night, the night or darkness represents purity of thought. Throughout the novella, Elisha continues to see different faces in his window during the night. The faces that Elisha initially saw were people from his past who have died, until the end when Elisha sees his own face. The eyes/faces that Elisha see represent death.When the humans start getting physically aggressive and kill the main character's love interest, I felt nothing. That whole romance subplot was really half-arsed. It was basically just "These two characters are having a threesome with an alien... and that's it". Butler put her finger squarely on the conflict: The earthlings were given no choice. They were unquestionably manipulated before they were given any chance to comment on these things. They had also just blown their entire planet into an extinction event. Did they deserve a say? Butler gives Lilith the words to complain about the earthlings' treatment and the Oankali to explain but not apologize the whys of it. I began reading with trepidation. A looming fear that I might encounter something so unsettling it would leave me unnerved for days.

And leave us not to forget that, in this troubled passage in US and world history, the present Golden Age of Sci Fi on Screen will gift us with the first-ever adaptation of a Butler novel, this one, by no less a new voice than Ava DuVernay. She is the talent behind the good-buzzed adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time! John Dawson is kept in a house with a jail in the basement. Elisha and a group of "brothers" from the Movement, sat and waited for the confirmation that Moshe was to be hanged. The radio confirmed that night the execution of David Ben Moshe is to happen at dawn. When the announcement was finished, "The Voice of Freedom" came on. This underground station is used by the Movement to get information out to the people. The "Voice of Freedom" is a woman named Ilana, who happens to be in love with Gad. Later in the night when the broadcast is finished, Ilana came to the house where John Dawson was being kept. The group of people at the house were sitting and talking about how they have escaped death and about Dawson's execution.The Haganah by definition was the underground Jewish militia in Palestine founded in 1920 that became the national army of Israel after the partition of Palestine in 1948. It was founded to defend against the Palestinian Arabs. The Jewish people believed that the British military forces could not protect their families against the Arab revolts. They believed it was impossible to depend on the British authorities for safety. I do wish we had the chance to know a little more about Lilith as a person, and indeed about other humans when we meet them, since while Butler puts us very in touch with Lilith’s experiences and thoughts, even her less pleasant ones, we only get her past in broad outlines, making the whole book feel something like a continual stream of consciousness. Curtis, Claire P. "Utopian Possibilities: Disability, Norms, and Eugenics in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis. " Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 9.1 Jan. 2015, pp.19–33. The story races to its conclusion much as a dark, ominous thunderstorm descends out of a hot summer sky.