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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Dawn, a novel published by Octavia Butler in 1987, follows protagonist Lilith Iyapo as she comes to terms with the end of the world and accepts the extraterrestrial "saviors" of the future. The contemporary novel belongs to the science fiction genre, categorized by its first-contact premise, first seen in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, where Earth is invaded by aliens from Mars. Butler’s Dawn is also a representation of the post-apocalyptic subgenre within science fiction, as Lilith navigates the fate of humanity following a nuclear disaster and the end of civilization. Butler further solidifies Dawn as a science fiction staple through her innovative conception of crossbreeding, confronting socially relevant questions of bodily autonomy, sexual consent, and the limitations of gender.
Butler wrote Dawn during a globally tumultuous period known as the Cold War, which focused on the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Though only proxy wars occurred during this conflict, the tensions between the two superpowers incited fear of a worldwide nuclear war. It was this historical context that framed Butler’s conception of Dawn. At around the same time, Carl Sagan coined the term “nuclear winter,” which hypothesized what the climatic state of the Earth would be following a nuclear war—it was this term that partially inspired the end-of-world event that precedes the plot of Dawn.
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