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

Octavia E. Butler's visionary Afrofuturist trilogy of survival and transformation, now in a definitive Library of America edition nThe landmark SF trilogy from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and Bloodchild n nFrom the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and Bloodchild, here in its spellbinding entirety is Octavia E. Butler's epic of human survival and transformation. Conceived against a backdrop of Reagan-era nuclear brinksmanship, Lilith's Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy--a classic of Afrofuturist speculative fiction--offers profound reflections on race, biology, colonialism, resistance, consent, sexuality, community, hybridity, technology, power, and the future of humankind. n nAt the beginning of Dawn, Butler's heroine Lilith Iyapo is awakened in a white cell, after centuries of suspended animation. She is a survivor, as is gradually revealed, of a nuclear apocalypse--and is now being healed, aboard an alien spaceship, by the terrifying and yet awe-inspiring Oankali. Searching the galaxy for new combinations of genes and DNA to acquire and trade, these advanced, uncanny beings are drawn to Lilith's cancer, which will give them new powers: but should she, and the few of her kind that remain, agree to become one with their extraterrestrial saviors? n nAdulthood 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 the complexities of interspecies politics and his own hybrid identity, he emerges as a leader, forging a new path on Mars for the human/Oankali future. n nImago follows another of Lilith's hybrid progeny, Jodahs, on Akin's now-established Mars colony. Raised as a male child, he discovers in his adolescence that he is becoming the first part-human ooloi, a member of the Oankali's shapeshifting, astonishingly powerful and perceptive third sex--a discovery with intense personal and planetary consequences. n nContinuing the Library of America's definitive edition of Butler's works, this volume offers authoritative texts of the novels and a selection of her private letters and notes, some of them previously unpublished.n