The first thing Octavia Butler did to me was lock me in a room.
That's how her novel Dawn opens — Lilith Iyapo waking, again, in a featureless cell with no windows, no answers, and a voice asking her questions she's already answered. By page ten I wasn't reading about Lilith. I was Lilith: bewildered, furious, and stuck dealing with it anyway, because what else is there? No rescue coming. No appeal. Just the next impossible conversation with captors who insist they're saving you.
Butler made that slide into Lilith's skin so easy it should be studied. (It is, actually — which is how I got here.)
This spring, I took a class at University of Maryland called "Science Fiction, Afrofuturism, and Colonialism"(!) The argument was blunt: a huge amount of early SF runs on colonial fuel.
We read 18th- and 19th-century explorer narratives alongside Wells, Doyle, and Burroughs, and the connections stopped being subtle fast. The lost world, the alien other, the noble savage, the rescuer-hero — same road, different vehicles. The genre didn't just mirror colonialism. It helped make it feel like an adventure.
Which is exactly why Dawn lands so hard. Butler takes the whole kit — alien contact, rescued humanity, the civilizing mission — and turns it inside out. The Oankali really have saved what's left of us after nuclear war. They're also rewriting us, genetically, without anything you could honestly call consent. Lilith's "rescue" is the velvet glove on something much older and uglier, and Butler never lets you settle into either reading. Are the Oankali saviors or colonizers? Yes.
All this got under my skin as a writer. I write first-contact stories. I've spent years in worlds where species meet and negotiate and change each other. Butler made me sit with how often "contact" in our genre is just conquest with better lighting — and how rarely we let the reader feel it from inside the body being changed.
If Dawn grabs you, please don't stop there. Adulthood Rites, the second book in the Lilith's Brood trilogy, reorients the whole story in a way that's shocking and deeply satisfying — the same trick N.K. Jemisin pulls in the Broken Earth trilogy, where the sequel exposes the hidden shape of the book you thought you'd read.
Then find Butler's short story "Bloodchild." It's Dawn in miniature: one household, one bargain, the same impossible tangle of dependence, bodily autonomy, and the line between care and coercion. Small in scale, enormous in force. (and great twist!)
We also read about the genocides in California in the 19th century, and the story of Ishi, who was "championed" by Ursula K. Le Guin's anthopologist father years before she was born. Then we read Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness — and if you haven't yet, what are you waiting for? Her envoy Genly Ai arrives on a winter planet certain he understands the people he meets, and the book spends three hundred pages showing him how wrong he is. A very colonial mistake, but Le Guin turns it into something else: a story about how real understanding means surrendering your assumptions, not just collecting exotic data.
The Afrofuturist half of the class was the answer to all this fear — work that flips the colonial script and puts Black people, Black thought, and Black futures at the center of the speculative frame. Not "who do we fear?" but "who gets to be human, and who gets to decide?"
And it's a deep well once you start drawing from it. Sun Ra was claiming outer space for Black liberation back in the 1950s, decades before the word "Afrofuturism" existed. Samuel R. Delany was writing some of the genre's most formally daring novels while the field was still nearly all white. Nnedi Okorafor's work imagines futures rooted in the African continent itself (she prefers the term Africanfuturism).
And then there's the story from this class that I can't stop thinking about: Derrick Bell's "The Space Traders" (PDF). Aliens arrive offering the U.S. gold, clean energy, and environmental restoration. The price: every Black citizen, handed over, destination unknown. The country puts it to a vote. Bell was a law professor, not a novelist, and it shows in the best way — the story is a thought experiment with teeth, the colonial bargain stripped of every euphemism. Read it alongside Dawn and the two books interrogate each other: who gets traded, who gets "saved," and who never gets asked.
(There's plenty more beyond our syllabus — Nalo Hopkinson, Rivers Solomon, Janelle Monáe's android albums, and of course Wakanda and District 9)
That's what the class has really given me: science fiction as a tool for thinking about power and embodiment, not an escape from them.
Start with Dawn. Wake up in that room. See how long you last before you're Lilith too.
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