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Dawn, written by Octavia Butler, is the first novel in the xenogenesis trilogy (retitled Lilith’s Brood in later editions of the collection) and was published in 1987. The book deals largely with the main character Lilith’s struggles to balance the scale between loyalty to humanity and her will to survive.

Setting
The story is set after a nuclear war, presumably started by the United States and the Soviet Union, has devastated the human population of the world, as well as severely damaged the ecosystem, especially in North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. The surviving humans are largely situated in the southern hemisphere, or remote locations in the north, where bombings were less severe.

Plot
The story starts after the narrator, a black American woman named Lilith Iyapo, awakes in a strange room that has no doors and no windows. A disembodied voice questions her, and though she resists at first, she begins to answer the questions for the sake of company. When she tries to question back, the voice is stubbornly silent. After several instances of awaking from what she interprets to be long sleeps, unlike the normal sleeping she does when she gets tired, she is introduced first to a young boy, and then later to her hosts.

The people keeping her are not people at all, but an alien race called the Oankali. She meets an Oankali face to face named Jdahya, who explains that his race rescued the surviving humans from the dying earth and placed them in stasis, awakening them occasionally to ask questions and learn about them. At that time, Lilith and the other humans had been rescued 250 years earlier. Meanwhile, the Oankali had been revitalizing earth to make it habitable again.

While Lilith is at first repulsed by the alien, who instead of eyes, a face, or any human sensory organs, is covered in sensory tentacles all across its body, she eventually overcomes the xenophobia and is able to trust Jdahya somewhat.

After meeting Jdahya’s family, including his offspring Ooloi (a third sex in Oankali life) named Nikanj, Lilith is told why she was awakened and brought out of her room. The plan is that she will help awake the other humans and help them become accustomed to the Oankali, so that they can be returned to earth, but also so that the exchange may occur. This exchange is the way in which the Oankali, a species that can manipulate genetics to perfection, is able to evolve, as they interbreed and merge with other species.

Lilith is horrified by this idea, and while she agrees to work for them and learn, harbors thoughts of escape for the human colonists once they reach earth.

In order to help prepare Lilith, she is paired with Jdahya’s child, Nikanj, who is able to manipulate her genes so that she has perfect memory, is physically stronger, and can use some of the biological technology that makes up the Oankali’s ship and tools.

After two years with Nikanj where Lilith is trained in survival, she is isolated and given a dossier of forty humans that she will have to wake. She begins slowly, waking mostly women at first, each time doing one or two at a time and trying to explain the situation. Eventually it becomes necessary to wake more, and many that are awakened are distrustful of Lilith, who they are dependent on for food, and who can build walls and make doorways in the living ship. While Lilith does gather a small group of loyal friends, she is constantly in struggle for control of the group against those who don’t believe the story she tells and who think she is just as much a jailer of theirs as the Oankali.

Some of these doubts are then dispersed, as per the terms of the agreement with Lilith, the Oankali introduce themselves since she had awakened all the humans. However, the group’s transport to a simulated rainforest while asleep, reawakens the doubts and fears, as many of the humans, Lilith included, begin to wonder whether they are still on the ship or whether they’ve actually been taken to earth.

While in the jungle, Lilith teaches the humans how to collect food and build tools and shelter. Much of the group has split up into pairs of men and women, and for each group, an ooloi has attached itself, performing a strangely alluring sexual role in their lives through direct neural stimulation. However, groups of people eventually begin deserting the camp, striking off in the belief that they really are on earth. The humans leave behind their ooloi, who become despondent, as if dependent on the human contact. Eventually, Lilith and her lover, Joseph, as well as a few others strike out as well.

Waking up in their makeshift camp however, Lilith is set upon by Curt, a former cop who challenged her authority from the start and has his own band. In the fight, Lilith is knocked out. She wakes up to find Nikanj and several other ooloi, who take her to the body of Joseph, whom Curt killed. Tracking the humans, the ooloi incapacitate the violent humans, but Nikanj is severely wounded in the fight. Lilith stays with it for an unspecific amount of time to help it heal, at the end of which, Nikanj informs her that she is pregnant with Joseph’s and Nikanj’s child, the first human-oankali hybrid. While she is upset Nikanj did this without asking permission, she forgives it because she feels abandoned by her friends, who let Curt kill Joseph and left her behind to die as well. The conversation ends when Nikanj informs her that the others will be sent down, but that Lilith must stay on the ship to parent another group. Lilith leaves with it, determining to better teach the next group to “learn and run” so that the human race won't be destroyed in the joining with the Oankali.