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Here in its entirety is Octavia E. Butler’s wildly imaginative saga of human survival and transformation, Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy. Conceived against the backdrop of 1980s Cold War brinksmanship, these classics of Afrofuturist speculative fiction from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning author of Kindred and the Parable books ask prophetic questions about genetics and hybridity, colonization and consent, gender and sexuality, family and community, technology and the future of humankind.

Dawn opens with Butler’s heroine Lilith Iyapo in a bare white cell, waking after centuries of suspended animation. A survivor of nuclear apocalypse, she is being healed aboard an alien spaceship by the grotesque yet apparently benevolent Oankali, implacable, uncanny beings combing the galaxy for new combinations of DNA to acquire and trade and new species to absorb. Should Lilith and the handful of humans who remain agree to cooperate with their would-be saviors, or fight assimilation and erasure?

Adulthood 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 taken from Lilith as a child and raised among human “resisters,” insurgents who reject Oankali interference in their lives even though they are no longer able to conceive children without the aliens’ assistance. Negotiating the complexities of interspecies politics and his own hybrid identity, Akin emerges as a leader, forging a new path on Mars for the human-Oankali future.

A novel full of radical metamorphoses and unexpected twists, Imago brings Butler’s trilogy to a stunning conclusion. On a slowly regenerating Earth, nature finds a way: some humans, it turns out, remain fertile. Even more surprisingly, for humankind and Oankali alike, Lilith’s son Jodahs emerges from puberty as the first part-human ooloi, a member of the Oankali’s shape-shifting, preternaturally powerful third sex. What follows is a journey with far-reaching implications, not only for Jodahs’s identity and survival, but for the shared future of the two species.

Imani Perry, editor, is the author of nine books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018), May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (2018), the National Book Award–winning South to America: A Journey Below the Mason–Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2022), and Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). A 2023 MacArthur Fellow, she is Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Stu-dies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.