During my recent road trip, I reread Octavia Butler's trilogy that's variously called Xenogenesis and Lilith's Brood, made up of the books Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.
They first came out in 1987–1989 and I read them soon after they were all published. I haven't read them since, and had pretty much forgotten what happened in them. I only retained a general impression of liking them but thinking they were kind of weird: that they weren't my favorites of her books.
As a basic outline, the stories deal with a set of people after a nuclear war has happened and destroyed almost all human life on earth. A far superior and essentially benign alien race came to the Earth soon after and rescued the remaining humans, but they want something in return.
This reread made me wonder about my younger self and appreciate Butler's imagination and foresight more than ever. While the books deal with many themes, including questions about what is human and the nature of consent, they also confront the innate homophobia of toxic masculinity (which had not been named as such at the time, as far as I know). And Butler directly names the human biological drive toward hierarchy as incompatible with the continuation of advanced-technology human civilization... which felt accurate during the Reagan era of nuclear escalation, and possibly even more accurate now.
Reading my copy of Dawn also reminded me that it has one of the worst pieces of cover art ever created in the long history of bad cover art in science fiction. Octavia Butler is, rather famously, a Black woman. The main character of Dawn is also a Black woman, who awakens other people from suspended animation. So what does the cover portray?
A white woman awakening another white woman from suspended animation.
Still, it's a signed first edition, so I have to keep it. I'll bet Butler cringed every time she saw it.
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