Deadline and Indiewire are reporting that Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn has been optioned for television by Bainframe, with Allen Bain, Gary Pearl, Thomas Carter and Teddy Smith acting as Executive co-producers.

Dawn is the first book in the trilogy known both as Xenogenesis and Lilith’s Brood, comprised of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). The trilogy is noted for exploring themes of gender, sexuality and race. The trilogy outlines the next stages of humankind’s evolution: a genetic merging with the alien race that saved humanity from extinction by their own hand. In Dawn, mankind has rendered the planet Earth uninhabitable through the use of nuclear weapons, but not before a race of aliens called the oankali save a select few. One of them is the woman named Lilith, who awakens centuries after Earth’s demise and learns that the oankali have three genders: male, female, and ooloi. The ooloi have the unique ability among the oankali to manipulate genetic material, which they eventually do to form oankali/human hybrids…specifically for the purpose of repopulating the now-inhabitable Earth. (See Rob’s Completist column column for more.)

[via Gerry Canavan]