Humanity, a Mirror in Octavia E. Butler's Dawn

As part of my MFA, I have to complete twelve close readings. This is number three. For this reading, I chose to write about Octavia E. Butler's Dawn, the first book in her Xenogenesis Trilogy. If you haven't read Dawn yet but you are planning to, this essay may contain some spoilers that you might otherwise wish to avoid. Just an alert!

I wasn’t trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people. -- Octavia E. Butler

Science fiction novels have long been a means for writers to disguise social commentary as entertainment easily digestible by the masses, and Octavia E. Butler’s depictions of both humans and aliens, which she calls the Oankali, in Dawn, Book One of her Xenogenesis Trilogy masterfully weaves together the themes of xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and social hierarchy in a book that is deceptively easy to read. Tackling dark themes sometimes o…