Science Fiction Annotation

Title: Dawn

Author: Octavia E. Butler

Publication Date: 1997

Genre: Science Fiction

Number of Pages: 256

Summary:

Lilith Iyapo has lost her husband and son to the final nuclear strike that has devastated the Earth. In her final moments, she sleeps.

Lilith awakens hundreds of years later, aboard a spacecraft of unimaginable design. Humanity's saviors, the Oankali, live on this craft as they travel from world to world, forever searching. Forever changing.

For the Oankali do not live and grow and change as the humans do. They are in complete control of their evolutionary designs, and they have settled on humans as the next link in their genetic shift. Humans will return to Earth, to live and grow, and to be the bearers of the next generation of Oankali.

Whether they want to or not.


Characteristics that fit in Science Fiction:

• Speculative fiction set in the future
• Explores moral, social, intellectual, philosophical, and/or ethical questions against a setting outside of everyday reality
• Setting invokes otherness of time, place, and/or reality
• Characters are used to underscore issues and atmosphere; aliens emphasize the otherness

Read-Alikes:

• Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
• The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey
• Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor