Octavia E. Butler: Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy (Loa #393): Dawn / Adulthood Rites / Imago
by Octavia Butler

For the first time in a deluxe, hardcover collector’s edition, the landmark post-apocalyptic trilogy from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and “Bloodchild.”

From the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winning author Octavia E. Butler, here in its spellbinding entirety is Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy—a classic of Afrofuturist speculative fiction conceived against the backdrop of Reagan-era nuclear brinksmanship. Butler offers profound reflections on race, biology, colonialism, resistance, consent, sexuality, community, hybridity, technology, power, and the future of humankind.

At the beginning of Dawn, Butler’s heroine Lilith Iyapo is awakened in a white cell after centuries of suspended animation. She is a survivor of a nuclear apocalypse—and is now being healed aboard an alien spaceship by the terrifying and awe-inspiring Oankali. These advanced, uncanny beings, driven to acquire new genetic combinations, are drawn to Lilith’s cancer for the powers it will give them. But should she—and the few of her kind that remain—agree to become one with their extraterrestrial saviors?

Adulthood Rites tells the story of Lilith’s son, Akin, as he comes of age on a newly repopulated Earth. A “construct,” part-human and part-Oankali, he is raised among human “resisters” who live apart from Oankali technology. Negotiating interspecies politics and his own hybrid identity, he emerges as a leader forging a new path on Mars for the human/Oankali future.

Imago follows another of Lilith’s hybrid progeny, Jodahs, through the jungles of a regenerating Earth. Raised as a male child, he discovers in adolescence that he is becoming the first part-human ooloi—a member of the Oankali’s shapeshifting, astonishingly powerful third sex. This discovery carries intense personal and planetary consequences.

Continuing the Library of America’s definitive edition of Butler’s works, this volume offers authoritative texts of the novels, helpful notes, and a chronology of Butler’s life and career.