Ooloi can mutate and “evolve” any living thing they touch and build offspring gene by gene using the genetic material from their male and female mates. All Oankali have the ability to perceive biochemistry down to a genetic level, but the Ooloi have the ability to directly manipulate genetic material. Stranger still, the Oankali have three sexes: male, female, and Ooloi. The Oankali don’t have eyes, or ears, or noses, but sensory tentacles over their entire bodies with which they can perceive the world much better than a human can. She meets her saviors/captors and is repulsed by their alienness. The title character Lilith (a black human female) awakens centuries later from stasis on an Oankali ship. The few survivors are plucked from the surface of their dying world by an alien race, the Oankali. The story begins after the United States and the Soviet Union obtained nuclear weapons and their actions resulted in a terrible nuclear war that left the earth uninhabitable. The first novel in the trilogy, Dawn, was published in 1987. The collection was first published under the current title of Lilith's Brood in 2000. The three volumes of this science fiction series ( Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago) were previously collected in the now out of print volume, Xenogenesis. Lilith's Brood is a collection of three works by Octavia Butler.
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