The three volumes of this science fiction series (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago) were previously collected in the now out-of-print omnibus edition Xenogenesis.

[1] The first novel in the trilogy, Dawn, begins with Lilith Iyapo, a Black human woman, alone in what appears to be a prison cell.

They perceive the interbreeding as mutually beneficial; in particular, it will solve what the Oankali think is the humans' fatal combination of intelligence and hierarchical tendencies.

This creates a great deal of tension and strain as the humans consider their lives meaningless without reproduction, especially as they see themselves being outbred by the Oankali-human constructs.

Akin is kidnapped by the resisters as an infant, when the only evidence of his construct status is a tentacle-like tongue through which he samples his world in the Oankali manner of identifying DNA.

The Oankali allow the resisters to keep him for a sustained period of time so that he might understand his human nature more fully, but at the cost of the connection to his paired sibling that would have happened had he stayed with his family.

Akin's proposal for a Mars colony in the previous book has been realized, providing an opportunity for humans who wish to live independently from the Oankali.

Many humans have already migrated there, though the most hateful and barbaric of them still resist so that the Oankali render them unconscious and store them on the ship for genetic material.

When, for instance, Jodahs and Aaor are captured, they heal the guards of their disease and deformities, demonstrating their goodwill and softening resistance to them.

In her 2000 interview with Charles Brown, Butler identified the Cold War under the Reagan Administration as a main motivator for the trilogy: "I was pretty despairing when I began the Xenogenesis books.

"[2] Butler later expanded her explanation in an interview with Joshunda Sanders: I thought there must be something basic, something really genetically wrong with us if we're falling for this stuff [Reagan’s rhetoric].

[3] What I intended to do when I began the novels...was change [human] males enough so that the hierarchical behavior would no longer be a big problem.

The human-Oankali hybrids feel that they have somehow betrayed their human side by integrating into Oankali society, but at the same time, because of the vast power imbalance, they never really had another viable option.

In addition to allegorizing slavery, the trilogy more generally is written "in the context of colonization,"[5] as Nelson puts it, raising broad questions of coercion and agency.

Joan Slonczewski, a biologist, published a review of the series in which she discusses the biological implications of the ooloi and how they can, through genetic engineering, achieve positive effects from "bad" genes such as a predisposition for cancer.

[5] Orson Scott Card commends the Xenogenesis trilogy as "more satisfying as hard science fiction" than Butler's earlier Patternist novels, specifically in that they show "how much power her storytelling has gained" in the intervening years.

"[9] Similarly, Ted White from The Washington Post finds Imago verbose and "wandering" and concludes that, as an end to the trilogy, it is "anticlimactic.

[12] On February 26, 2020, Amazon Studios acquired the streaming rights with Victoria Mahoney writing and directing the pilot episode based on Dawn, and will produce the series with Bain, Pearl, and Carter's Bainframe, Ava DuVernay's Array Filmworks and Charles D. King's MACRO.