Photo Credit: Hachette Book Group
Octavia E. Butler (June 22, 1947 to February 24 2006)
“I’m a 48-year-old writer who can
remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer.
I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if
I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of
ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
I've had ten novels published so far: Patternmaster, Mind of my Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, and Parable of the Sower, as well as a collection of my shorter work, entitled Bloodchild. I've also had short stories published in anthologies and magazines. One, "Speech Sounds," won a Hugo Award as best short story of 1984. Another, "Bloodchild," won both the 1985 Hugo and the 1984 Nebula awards as best novelette.” —Octavia Butler, 1995
Of Special Note: In 1995 Octavia E. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Grant. In what is popularly called the genius program, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation rewards creative people who push the boundaries of their fields.
Octavia Butler on Charlie Rose original air date, 1 June 2000
Conversations With Octavia Butler
Click to order via Amazon
Edited by Consuela Francis
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (March 15, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 160473275X
ISBN-13: 978-1604732757
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
Octavia Butler spent the majority of her prolific career as the only
major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and
Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur "genius" grant, the first for a science
fiction writer, Butler created worlds that challenged notions of race, sex,
gender, and humanity. Whether in the postapocalyptic future of the Parable
stories, in the human inability to assimilate change and difference in the
Xenogenesis books, or in the destructive sense of superiority in the
Patternist series, Butler held up a mirror, reflecting what is beautiful,
corrupt, worthwhile, and damning about the world we inhabit.
In interviews ranging from 1980 until just before her sudden death in 2006,
Conversations with Octavia Butler reveals a writer very much aware of
herself as the "rare bird" of science fiction even as she shows frustration
with the constant question,"How does it feel to be the only one?" Whether
discussing humanity's biological imperatives or the difference between
science fiction and fantasy or the plight of the working poor in America,
Butler emerges in these interviews as funny, intelligent, complicated, and
intensely original.
Kindred
Click to order via
Amazon
Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press (September 15, 1988)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0807083054
ISBN-13: 978-0807083055
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
"One of my personal favorites" 'AALBC.com founder Troy Johnson
The #14 Bestselling eBook on AALBC.com for 2012!
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. With more than 100,000 copies in print, Kindred is a classic time travel novel by an acclaimed African-American science fiction writer.
Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest
New-Wave TrajectoryHardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Ohio State University Press; 2 edition (May 8, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0814210783
Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory, edited by Marleen S. Barr, is the first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. The contributors, including Hortense Spillers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor. They articulate a platform for scholars to mount a vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a range of black women's writing that would otherwise be excluded. Afro-Future Females builds upon Barr's previous work in black science fiction and fills a gap in the literature. It is the first critical anthology to address the "blackness" of outer space fiction in terms of feminism, emphasizing that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. Black science fiction writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself. The work's main point: black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the nascent twenty-first century.
About the Editor: Marleen S. Barr
is a science fiction pioneer who broke new ground in feminist science
fiction criticism with her book Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction
and Feminist Theory. She won the Science Fiction Research Association
Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement in science fiction criticism.
Fledgling
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 1583226907
Format: Hardcover, 352pp
Pub. Date: October 2005
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Fledgling, Octavia Butler's first new novel in seven years, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted-and still wants-to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of "otherness" and questions what it means to be truly human.
Griots Beneath the Baobab:
Tales from Los Angeles
Click to order via Amazon
Randy Ross (Editor)
Paperback: 190 pages
Publisher: Larod Publishing Company (April 5, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0966267516
ISBN-13: 978-0966267518
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
Griots Beneath the Baobab, the latest anthology published by International Black Writers and Artists of Los Angeles (IBWA-LA), honors the creative spirit of some of America's most insightful griots'by way of L.A. Griots features powerful stories by noted, award-winning, and best-selling writers Donald Bakeer, Octavia E. Butler, Wanda Coleman, Stanley Crouch, Eric Jerome Dickey, Sikivu Hutchinson, Silas Jones, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Gary Phillips, Randy Ross, Jervey Tervalon, and Ellery Washington.
Lilith's
Brood
Click to order via Amazon
AALBC.com Top 10 Seller October 2000
Format: Paperback, 752pp.
ISBN: 0446676101
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Pub. Date: June 2000
The classic trilogy complete in one volume: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago
The acclaimed trilogy that comprises Lilith's Brood is multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winner Octavia E. Butler at her best. Presenting three complete novels in one volume, Lilith's Brood is a profoundly evocative, sensual--and disturbing--epic of human transformation.
Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when
war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected--by miraculously
powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to
heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging
genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the
world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: their own children.
This is their story...
Bloodchild:
And Other StoriesISBN: 1888363363
Format: Paperback, 144pp
Pub. Date: December 1996
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
The award-winning author of The Parable of the Sower explores the
paradoxes of power and inequality in this highly imaginative
collection of parables for the contemporary world. "Bloodchild, "
the title piece, has received both Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Synopsis
This volume comprises five stories and two essays by the science
fiction writer. The title story "takes place on a distant world
whose dominant species--highly intelligent, egg laying
'worms'--live in a symbiotic relationship with human beings. . . .
The first humans to arrive on this planet were refugees, in flight
from members of their own species 'who would have killed or
enslaved them.' In exchange for permanent asylum, the humans
provide an indispensable service to their hosts." ―N Y Times Book
Rev
Parable
of the Talents
Click to order via Amazon
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Date Published: October 1998
In this long-awaited novel, Butler revisits familiar themes of a society in 2032 whose very fabric has been torn, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to meet. 30,000 first print.
The
Parable of the Sower
Click to order via
Amazon
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: December 1994
Format: Trade Paper
A stirring portrait of 21st-century America by the author of Wild Seed. Forced to flee an America where anarchy and violence have completely taken over, empath Lauren Olamina--who can feel the pain of others and is crippled by it--becomes a prophet carrying the hope of a new world and a new faith christened "Earthseed." Previous publisher: Four Walls/Eight Windows.
Dawn:
Book 1 of the Xenogenesis Series
Click to order via
Amazon
Mass Market Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Aspect (April 1, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0446603775
ISBN-13: 978-0446603775
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.7 x 7.4 inches
Lilith lyapo awoke from a centuries-long sleep to find herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. Creatures covered in writhing tentacles, the Oankali had saved every surviving human from a dying, ruined Earth. They healed the planet, cured cancer, increased strength, and were now ready to help Lilith lead her people back to Earth--but for a price.
Amazon Review: n a world devastated by nuclear war
with humanity on the edge of extinction, aliens finally make contact. They
rescue those humans they can, keeping most survivors in suspended animation
while the aliens begin the slow process of rehabilitating the planet. When
Lilith Iyapo is "awakened," she finds that she has been chosen to revive her
fellow humans in small groups by first preparing them to meet the utterly
terrifying aliens, then training them to survive on the wilderness that the
planet has become. But the aliens cannot help humanity without altering it
forever. Bonded to the aliens in ways no human has ever known, Lilith tries
to fight them even as her own species comes to fear and loathe her. A
stunning story of invasion and alien contact by one of science fiction's
finest writers.
“2012 marks the 25th anniversary of this provocative and timeless
novel. Butler, one of the few female African-American science fiction
writers in the genre, paved the way for future authors and readers with her
enthralling stories. Fearlessly questioning social and political norms of
power, gender, race, and sexuality, Butler’s genre-bending literature
constantly encourages humanity to improve, grow, and change.” —N. K.
Jemisin
Adulthood
Rites
Click to order via
Amazon
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: March 1997
Format: Trade Paper
Told in the haunting voice of Lilith, the heroine of "Dawn", this book is thestory of Lilith's only son, Akin. Though he resembles a normal human, Akin isthe first "construct"--part man/part alien.
Clay's
Ark
Click to order via
Amazon
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: November 1996
Format: Mass Market Paperbound
Mind
of My Mind
Click to order via
Amazon
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: June 1994
Format: Trade Paper
For 4,000 years, an immortal has spread the seeds of a master race, using the downtrodden as his private breeding stock. But now a young ghetto telepath has found a way to awaken--and rule--her superhuman kind, igniting a psychic battle as she challenges her creator for her right to free her people.
Related Links
The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship
Administered by the Carl Brandon Society. The mission of the Carl Brandon Society is to increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction.A fan blog for Octavia E. Butler
