Lilith's Brood

In a world devastated by nuclear war with humanity on the edge of extinction, aliens finally make contact. They rescue those humans they can, keeping most survivors in suspended animation while the aliens begin the slow process of rehabilitating the planet. When Lilith Iyapo is "awakened, " she finds that she has been chosen to revive her fellow humans in small groups by first preparing them to meet the utterly terrifying aliens, then training them to survive on the wilderness that the planet has become. But the aliens cannot help humanity without altering it forever. Bonded to the aliens in ways no human has ever known, Lilith tries to fight them even as her own species comes to fear and loathe her. A stunning story of invasion and alien contact by one of science fiction's finest writers. Ingram Known for her African-American feminist perspective, the author presents the first installment of a trilogy exploring the death of the earth as we know it and the advent of interbreeding between humans and extraterrestrials. ----In this sequel to Dawn, Lilith Iyapo has given birth to what looks like a normal human boy named Akin. But Akin actually has five parents: a male and female human, a male and female Oankali, and a sexless Ooloi. The Oankali and Ooloi are part of an alien race that rescued humanity from a devastating nuclear war, but the price they exact is a high one--the aliens are compelled to genetically merge their species with other races, drastically altering both in the process. On a rehabilitated Earth, this "new" race is emerging through human/Oankali/Ooloi mating, but there are also "pure" humans who choose to resist the aliens and the salvation they offer.

Now HERE's the kind of book (I bought it in this trilogy omnibus binding as well) you sit down to read a couple chapters, maybe because a friend has recommended Butler, maybe because of a book review or because her tragic death got her written up in your local paper-- it got recommended to me by a brilliant professor whose class I foolishly didn't get around to taking -- and find yourself feverishly turning pages at 5 a.m., desperately hoping the sun stays down long enough for you to get to the end of the second, or in my case third, book. And now that we're past that tortured sentence, some ground rules. No, if you've never read science fiction before, it's not like what you THINK science fiction is like: check out Ursula LeGuin, Gene Wolfe, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, James Tiptree Jr., Marge Piercy, or the many other SF writers who use the genre as a literature for deep exploration into what it is to be human and what it is NOT to be human. If you're trapped in the genre ghetto and fear (as I once did, shamefully, long after I had a million reasons to know better) that there's something cheesy or wishy-washy about Butler, what with her other books about new religions and African myths and whatnot, all I have to say is GET OVER IT, because her speculative thinking cuts you like a knife and leaves you shivering, and because unlike most SF authors and most mainstream authors, she has an overwhelming sense of the realities of everyday people building relationships (and breaking them) in adversity. The conflicts between people are very real, no one is motivated just by a single issue, and a lot of things come down to slightly unpleasant compromise. Now, to Butler's work, and to the novels at hand. Her books almost always have an intense fascination with the dynamics of power in ordinary relationships, but because this is SF, those "ordinary relationships" become something very strange indeed. Can love exist not just between unequals, but in an inequality that is never going away or even shifting into the background for an instant? What power do the dominated have over those who control or coerce them? What happens when someone needs you more than you need them? Can assimilation ever be fair? Are our choices in these areas even our own? Now, the kicker is this: whatever grotesque-seeming (yet strangely appealing) relationship exists in a Butler book, you suddenly realize that _every_ relationship, no matter how forcefully you try to make it equal, has at least a hint of these issues unacknowledged, bubbling beneath the surface. Butler simply uses every trick of SF to expand them to fill your whole field of view, so you CANNOT turn away. And for that she's a great thinker, and a visionary, and a great writer. Finally, to the books themselves, which are still my favorite Butler and the epitome of all I've just talked about: DAWN introduces the Oankali, a three-sexed race of beings that finds the burning husk of planet Earth (nuclear

I am not a fan of Science Fiction - but "Lilith's Brood" (the collection of 3 novels known as the Xegenosis series consisting of "Dawn", "Adulthood Rites" and "Imago") is among the best I have read in ANY genre. Butler brings a species that is totally beyond anything imagined before and makes them real to the reader. She sttracts you to them, repels you from them - and in the end, makes you love them even though you may not want to. I actually felt like I missed the alien species, known as the Oankali when I finished reading the books. Basic premise for those considering the book: An alien species, the Oankali, finds an Earth shaken by major war. Most everything is wiped out and the Earth is practically unsalvagable. They save almost all the humans they find and make a plan to restore parts of the Earth and make them hospitable for human life again - for a price. The novels are wonderfully believable and complex, using challenging vocabulary and fully engrossing the reader in rich imagery and postulations of "What if... ?". No words other than those Bulter uses can do this collection justice - I would recommend it to anyone with a love for literature or anyone that just loves an EXCELLENT story that makes you feel like, and even possibly wish you were there.

One of the best sci fi books I've read in quite awhile (and I read a lot of them). The complexity and believability of the story make it fantastic. Butler also succeeds at creating a new species and actually showing us our world and society through their eyes, quite a feat to do well. She also creates a diverse atmosphere of all kinds of people (different backgrounds, races, languages) coming together under adversity. The struggles that the humans in the story have with accepting ideas and concepts completely outside of their experiences makes for very thoughtful reading. This book (actually 3) makes for very interesing exciting reading (I couldn't put it down) combined with lots of thought provoking material.

Lilith's Brood, a trilogy set in Earth's distant future, concerns the few remaining humans and their extraterrestial conquerors. Faced with the unpleasant alternatives of extinction or interspecies breeding, the human characters struggle to preserve their cultural and biological heritage against the seemingly insurmountable obstacles set by their keepers. The parallels between their fight to maintain cultural identity and the growing pains facing America's multicultural population in the 21st century are striking. This is the "melting pot" gone one better. Perhaps this is Butler's most biting social satire; surely it is her most thoughtful work since Kindred. As in most of her fiction, Butler is fascinated by the ways society evolves and survives despite our self-destructive impulses. Although this "new" offering from Butler is a collection of three previously published novels, the omnibus format will draw new readers and remind old friends of her substantial powers.