A sparse, omniscient voice narrates Octavia Butler’s Dawn yet information is released according to the experience of the protagonist, Lillith. Expository information is released slowly and carefully, wherein the situation regarding Lillith’s captivity and her history further spirals into complexity with each chapter, resulting in an unsettling novel that engages themes of captivity, colonization, consent, human nature, compost and regeneration, hierarchy and domination, and human and more-than-human and other-than-human relations, among other ideas.

Butler resists simplistic dualisms wherein the Oankali are “good” and the human race is “bad.” Butler’s portrayal of humans (essentially, ruining the earth) is seemingly pessimistic, but the Oankali’s relationship with the “rescued” humans is one that resonates with colonialism, internment camps, and slavery. Given Dawn is the first in a series, the book ends with no resolution to any of the challenges or inequalities posed. Thematically, I’m curious what this choice (complication of the dualism between “good” and “bad” beings wherein both species are flawed) conveys. 

I’m also interested in the role of non-human-animals in this novel (as opposed to human-animals and “aliens”) given the use of non-human-animals as a way for Lillith to capture her experience in language. She describes her captors as being like sea creatures yet she also describes herself as being like a captive non-human-animal. I’m wondering where the politics of animal rights resides in this text (if at all). It is also interesting that the ship itself is alive and, seemingly, composting waste and generating new materials. What is the line between human, non-human-animal, and extraterrestrial in Dawn? Apart from Dawn, how would humans regard non-human-animals if non-human-animals could speak or communicate with humans on their own terms? Furthermore, what does Dawn convey about the power of language and translation to unite, manipulate, and/or exclude?