Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss Dawn By Octavia E. Butler
In-Person Meeting
Sunday, June 22, 2025
4:30-6:00 pm Pacific
In-person, SF location
Address provided to registrants the week of the meeting
HCSF Members: Free, but RSVP required
Non-Members: $10 Not a member? Register here for membership!
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Registration ends Friday, June 20
Dawn
by Octavia E. Butler
1987, 258 pages
Butler’s best-known book is 1993’s Parable of the Sower, which takes place in an imagined 2024 uncannily like our own. But in 2025, consider picking up the science-fiction matriarch’s Xenogenesis series instead, starting with Dawn. The novel revolves around Lilith lyapo, a woman still mourning the death of her husband and child in a car accident when the world collapses during a nuclear war. At the book’s start, she wakes up and finds herself alone in a locked cell. Where is she, and who are her captors? The shocking truth: 250 years have passed since the war, which left Earth uninhabitable—and she’s one of the few humans left in the universe. She’s been preserved by the Oankali, an alien species so different from us in their senses, family systems, and even genders that she has a hard time making herself look at them at first. Like Lilith, readers are thrust into a foreign environment in which technology is as alive as fungi. In her uniquely straightforward style, Butler asks you to abandon preconceived ideas of what sentient life looks like and what survival really means. Once that perspective shift occurs, though, Butler’s universe—and the questions she’s raising—frees you to imagine whole new ways of being.
(From The Atlantic: "Five Books That Offer Readers Intellectual Exercise")
Questions? Contact
Kirsten Miclau
HCSF Reading Group Organizer
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org