In Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower” (1993), a climate-change Book of Exodus set in a scorched mid-twenty-twenties California, a preacher’s daughter named Lauren Oya Olamina tries to convince a friend that their world has veered off course. Disaster surrounds their fortified suburb of Los Angeles: water shortages, a measles epidemic, fires set by drug-addicted pyromaniacs, and bandits who prey on the unhoused multitudes that roam the lawless highways. Outsiders throw severed limbs over the walls of their neighborhood, “gifts of envy and hate.” Lauren knows it’s time to get out:
Her friend demurs: “My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.” Others take refuge in criminal enterprises, Christian worship, or even indentured servitude, exchanging their freedom for security in a neo-feudal company town. Only Lauren, a teen-ager afflicted with “hyperempathy,” has the courage (or inexperience) to imagine an alternative: a survivalist gospel of constant adaptation that she calls Earthseed. She leads a band of refugees north, dreaming of an extraterrestrial future; in a sequel, “Parable of the Talents” (1998), her small sect confronts a fundamentalist President who wants to “make America great again.”
It’s often observed that the “Parables,” already prescient when they were published, now read like prophecy. Isaac Asimov captured the spirit of Pax Americana in his mid-century “Foundation” series, a saga of galactic expansion through soft power and advanced economics; Butler may have a similar relationship to our own stunned era of slow-motion ecological catastrophe. Earthseed’s precepts have inspired an opera, by the folksinger Toshi Reagon, and, last September, “Parable of the Sower” débuted on the Times best-seller list nearly three decades after its first publication. (A few days later, the Bobcat Fire prompted evacuation warnings in Butler’s home town of Pasadena.)
Now the Library of America has published the first volume of her collected works. Butler is the sixth science-fiction writer to be featured in the landmark series, and the first Black science-fiction writer. (One hopes that Samuel R. Delany, who once taught Butler, will be next.) Nisi Shawl, a writer and a close friend of Butler’s, who edited the volume with the scholar and biographer Gerry Canavan, introduces the book by heralding the “canonization of discomfort.”
The volume collects Butler’s essays and short stories as well as her two stand-alone novels: “Kindred” (1979), the classic neo–slave narrative, and “Fledgling” (2005), a late-life vampire story. In some ways, it’s an unusual assortment, gathering short works by a writer who preferred the capaciousness of trilogies and tetralogies. (“Short story writing,” she notes in the preface to “Bloodchild and Other Stories,” “has taught me much more about frustration and despair than I ever wanted to know.”) But the collection’s variety also reveals the clarity of purpose in a body of work that ranged broadly among species, genres, and millennia.
Butler’s great subject was intimate power, of the kind that transforms relationships into fulcrums of collective destiny. She explored the ways that bodies could be made instruments of alien intentions, a motif that recurs throughout her fiction in ever more fantastic guises: mind control, gene modification, body-snatching, motherhood. Her protagonists often begin as fugitives or captives, but emerge as prodigies of survival, improvising their way through unprecedented situations only to find that adaptation exacts hidden costs.
Butler began writing early. Growing up in Pasadena, where she was born in 1947, she was a shy only child, embarrassed by her conspicuous height. She first tried her hand at magic-horse stories, and switched to science fiction after a formative viewing of the schlocky British space adventure “Devil Girl from Mars.” Even at twelve, Butler was convinced that she could do better; soon, she was submitting to local story contests and borrowing money from her mother, who cleaned houses for a living, to hire an agent. (He turned out to be a con artist.)
A practical aunt counselled her that “Negroes” couldn’t be writers. Yet although Butler had “never read a printed word that I knew to have been written by a Black person,” she was undeterred. “Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts,” she wrote in a 1989 essay for Essence. “Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”
She was a library-dweller, a writer of affirmations, an aficionada of self-hypnosis, and a diligent apprentice at her craft. After she’d earned an associate’s degree at Pasadena City College, she enrolled in workshops that competed for time with gigs like telephone solicitor and potato-chip inspector. (Sometimes she woke up at 2 A.M. to write before work.) Her career has been as inspiring as her books for the writers who consider themselves—to crib the title of adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s 2015 anthology—“Octavia’s Brood.”
The first story Butler sold,“Childfinder,” was written for a workshop led by Harlan Ellison, in 1971. A vignette about a racial schism in a clandestine organization of telepaths, it looked ahead to the series of novels that inaugurated her literary career, though five difficult years passed before her first book, “Patternmaster,” was published. A down-and-out L.A. haunts the periphery of her fiction: factory workers with abusive lovers, fights on city buses, killings in a city whose inhabitants suddenly lose the ability to speak. The volatile bonds of desperate people living and working in close quarters seem to have provided a model for telepathy in her fiction, an ability that tortures its adepts with the mental noise of others’ pain. Empathy, in her work, is often less a virtue than a vulnerability or a weapon.
“Patternmaster” takes place in a depopulated future Earth ruled by despotic telepaths, who draw their strength from a “vast network of mental links” called the Pattern. It’s an engaging story about a psychic succession struggle, with glimmers of the devious reproductive quandaries that would become Butler’s watermark. She also hints at a mysterious immortal “Founder,” whose machinations drive two later prequels. (The novel and its four prequels are collected in the single volume “Seed to Harvest.”)
The Patternist novels established Butler as a science-fiction writer; a degree of crossover appeal came with “Kindred,” in 1979. She won a Hugo and a Nebula for the story “Bloodchild,” in the mid-nineteen-eighties, but spent years trying to move beyond the genre market. Outside of it, her work was noticed by such Black women writers as Toni Cade Bambara and Thulani Davis, and excerpted in Essence—one of whose writers seemed surprised to find nuanced ideas in a genre associated with “overgrown juveniles.” But mainstream literary editors, including Toni Morrison, at Random House, didn’t buy manuscripts that Butler wanted to set before a wider audience.
The nineties were a breakout decade. Frustrated by publishers’ refusals to send her on book tours, she signed with an independent press, which promoted her work to Black and feminist booksellers. “Parable of the Sower” won critical acclaim, and in 1995 Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur grant. The honor coincided with a growing interest in how Black writers, artists, and musicians drew on the dislocation of the past in critically reflecting on the future. The critic Mark Dery called it “Afrofuturism,” and Butler has become its most widely recognized literary avatar.
Perhaps her greatest talent was the clear evocation of thinking in a crisis. The thrill of her fiction lies in its learn-or-die urgency, conveyed in a streamlined prose of situational awareness. The brinkmanship of the Reagan era inspired her standout Xenogenesis trilogy, collected in the volume “Lilith’s Brood.” (Ava DuVernay is producing a TV series based on the first installment, “Dawn.”) It begins in a womblike cell on a living spaceship, where Lilith Iyapo, one of the only survivors of a nuclear war, waits for her captor-saviors to show themselves. They are part of a galactic diaspora of tentacled bipedal “gene traders,” the Oankali, who propose a merger of the species. The scheme is not only the price they exact for repopulating Earth but a biological necessity. “We are committed to the trade as your body is to breathing,” one explains. “We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done—to the rebirth of your people and mine.” Lilith is to be the first mother of this hybrid species, and an evangelist for Oankali-human interbreeding to fellow-survivors, many of whom consider her a traitor.
Nearly all of Butler’s protagonists face the accusation that their survival is a form of complicity, and none more acutely than the protagonist of “Kindred.” Dana, a twenty-six-year-old Black writer living in nineteen-seventies Altadena, California, is transported back in time to a small plantation in antebellum Maryland each time her white ancestor Rufus Weylin is in danger. Rufus grows up to inherit the plantation, while Dana, who repeatedly saves his life, attempts to awaken him to the injustice of slavery. “Not all children let themselves be molded into what their parents want them to be,” she reasons. Her white husband, Kevin, who accompanies her to the plantation, is skeptical, objecting that she’s “gambling against history.”
The novel’s enduring power lies in how it forces Dana not simply to experience slavery but also to accept it as a condition of her own existence: “Was that why I was here? . . . To insure my family’s survival, my own birth.” The double bind deepens when Dana learns that this survival depends on Rufus’s enslavement and rape of a free Black woman named Alice. Dana doesn’t just fail in her efforts to enlighten Rufus (empathy lessons being no match for lust and impunity); she also becomes an unwilling accomplice in his depredations. Rufus uses her as a go-between with Alice, figuring that Dana, who needs Alice as an ancestor, might discourage her from taking the potentially fatal step of resisting him or running away.
“Kindred” helped to create a genre, the neo–slave narrative, that still flourishes. Its dark fairy-tale conceit has marked not only a recent crop of literary descendants—books such as Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Water Dancer”—but the art of Kara Walker, the domestic horror of films like “Get Out,” the speculative scholarship of Saidiya Hartman (who cites Dana’s odyssey in her influential essay “Venus in Two Acts”), and the broader culture of remembrance, to the extent that even those who have never read the novel are familiar with the motif of a plantation looming over the present like a ghostly double. Maybe too familiar: the “Kindred”-like film “Antebellum,” starring Janelle Monáe, was widely panned.
The genre’s evolution has thrown some of the novel’s weaknesses into relief. Its big-house entourage is crammed with stereotypes, from the world-weary auntie in the kitchen to the hysterical laudanum-sipping mistress. “Kindred” also sidelines contact among the enslaved in favor of the drama between Black and white. The narrative revolves around Dana’s relationships with Rufus and Kevin, falling back—despite Butler’s original treatment of hybridity elsewhere—on the perennial cliché of interracial contacts pregnant with the future of the country. (Danzy Senna lampooned this trope in her essay “Mulatto Millennium.”) Meanwhile, Alice, Dana’s ancestress, never becomes much more than a moral quandary: a stubborn victim who is unable to adapt.
Even so, the novel’s premise feels newly mordant in an era when Black women have been hailed as the saviors of American democracy, whether they like it or not. “Kindred” takes place during the United States bicentennial, and Dana’s last trip back to the plantation takes place on July 4th. Her time-travelling mission begins to look less like an opportunity to change history than like a confirmation that it couldn’t have been otherwise. Or is it that Dana, in saving Rufus, has by extension saved America?
In one uncomfortable scene, Dana compliments Kevin by saying that he looks like “a heroic portrait” of Andrew Jackson. Whether it’s sarcasm, an earnest moment of interracial patriotism, or a cry from the sunken place, this certainly wasn’t the future that Alice might have hoped for. “We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” goes one popular affirmation; Butler raises the disquieting proposition that we are, at least some of the time, their parasites.
Dana is forced to confront the monstrosity of her origins. Shori, the Black vampire protagonist of Butler’s final novel, “Fledgling,” is herself a monstrosity, the half-human result of an experiment to create an “Ina,” as the novel’s vampires call themselves, who can endure the sun. Butler didn’t invent the melanin-armored daywalker (the Marvel superhero Blade was there first), but she did give it a new political charge: Shori and her family are attacked by agents of a conservative, old-line Ina family—night-supremacist blue-blood-suckers—who consider her a threat to their species’ integrity. With the help of other Ina, she confronts them in a vampire trial of the millennium.
Shori is the archetypal hybrid of destiny: confused, persecuted, yet ultimately more powerful than the monoracials. She begins the novel in a cave, severely wounded after an attack, completely unaware of who or what she might be. Soon, she hitches a ride with Wright, a young white man who smells delicious. Shori looks about eleven—though she’s really fifty-three—and Wright offers to drive her to the police station or the hospital. After she bites him, the destination shifts to Wright’s cabin. Blood-sucking, predictably, turns out to be highly erotic.
Wright becomes Shori’s “symbiont,” growing as dependent on her venom as she is on his blood. He’s the first of many in the diverse flock that Shori gathers while fleeing her attackers, and, as they make contact with other Ina, the outlines of a society emerge. Each adult Ina “feeds” on half a dozen or so human symbionts, who lose their freedom but gain in health and life span. They all live together, improvising a spectrum of familial and sexual relationships. Butler’s domestic Draculas reside not in towers or sarcophagi but in cozy subdivisions with chosen families of human beings.
Beginning with the squicky idea of a vampire-girl with an adult male dependent, Butler’s Ina families pose characteristically unsettling questions. Don’t all intimate relationships—not only those deemed taboo—involve power imbalances? And what can “consent” mean when one being needs another to sustain one’s life? After one bite, it’s difficult to tell where choice ends and compulsion begins. Butler suggests that the Ina-symbiont relationship might be no worse than the forms of dependency that humans already take for granted. One of Shori’s symbionts is an elderly widow who gladly exchanges a lonely life of unmet needs for a place within an Ina family.
These suggestive dynamics are undermined by the hokey hunt for Shori: repetitive shoot-outs; a courtroom finale stuffed with unnecessary new characters; a relative who shows up to deliver expository monologues on Ina society only to be killed a few chapters later, like a tutorial character in a video game. Butler herself wasn’t satisfied with “Fledgling,” which she wrote as a diversion while struggling with her never-finished “Parable of the Trickster.”
But certain of its weaknesses are characteristic of a writer who sometimes let intellect and adrenaline outpace attention to the messier aspects of her creations’ inner lives. Butler’s narrator-protagonists often sound like variations on the same courageous, cerebral pragmatist. They rarely notice anything that doesn’t pertain to their emergency, as though the world were a fluorescent-lit escape room. Minor characters who question their efforts—Alice in “Kindred,” the alien skeptics in “Lilith’s Brood”—come across merely as obstinate foils. This straightforwardness gives Butler’s narratives their urgency. Yet what’s the worth of survival if all other values fall before it?
Butler’s stature feels most certain when these doubts—the guilt of the survivor-creator—enter her writing. They are best exemplified by “Wild Seed,” Butler’s fourth Patternist novel and the first chronologically, a captivating transatlantic creation myth that may be the most brilliant of her books. (The novel is being adapted for television by the writers Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu.) It’s a duet between immortals—Anyanwu, a shape-shifting healer, and Doro, the Founder alluded to in “Patternmaster”—whose stormy relationship doubles as a custody battle over humanity’s future.
They meet in West Africa, at the close of the seventeenth century. Doro, a body-snatching spirit, has wandered from host to host for millennia. He dreams of fathering a new race, and corrals individuals with rare abilities—especially mental powers, like telepathy and telekinesis—in concealed “seed villages” on five continents. Anyanwu is the first fellow-immortal he’s encountered, and he covets her companionship. More darkly, he wants to breed her with his other subjects, selecting for her abilities and longevity. Doro seduces her with an irresistible promise: “I can show you children you will never have to bury.”
Doro is the ultimate survivor, and millennia of cunning have made him cruel: “Everyone has always been temporary for him—wives, children, friends, even tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies but him.” If any of his children refuse to mate in accordance with his wishes, he takes their bodies and does it himself.
Anyanwu travels with him to his village in upstate New York, on a ship crowded with “wild seed” taken from slavers. (Slavers are alternately Doro’s rivals and his accomplices.) For the next half century, she bears children who then become hostages in her struggle to tame or defeat him. Anyanwu’s only leverage is Doro’s fear of killing her, his one peer in the universe.
Butler published “Wild Seed” a year after “Kindred,” which, in early drafts, was itself supposed to fit within the Patternist series. The novels feel separated at birth; both are stories of enslavement, codependence, control of the future, and women whose will to sustain life is perverted by men. “Wild Seed,” though, goes beyond its predecessor in juxtaposing the particular experience of American slavery with a fantasy that hints at the fundamental sources of human parasitism. Doro’s mission forms a slant rhyme with history; a fantastic double of Colonial slave society, it makes the original less familiar, throwing its atrocities into relief. His settlement in New York flagrantly violates the taboos of the surrounding society—incest, miscegenation—in pursuit of its own distinctive eugenics.
The terror of “Wild Seed” is not only that one’s body can be made a vector for somebody else’s future but that this dynamic is in some ways unavoidable. Late in the novel, Anyanwu escapes to Louisiana and builds her own community of mutants on a remote plantation. It’s an island of freedom, and yet Anyanwu finds herself behaving as an authority: selecting, governing, marrying, and occasionally exiling her wards. “Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming a slave,” she tells Doro earlier in the novel. Now he accuses her of becoming another him.
Like Milton’s Satan, Doro, for all his malevolence, has his creator’s sympathy. Butler gives him many of the virtues that define her heroines: patience, situational awareness, emotional intelligence, and, above all, a flexibility uninhibited by fear, prejudice, or sentimental attachment. We learn that he, too, was once an underdog: a prisoner of the Egyptians in ancient Nubia, who likely escaped captivity by taking his captors’ bodies. In another Patternist novel, “Mind of My Mind,” the cycle repeats itself, as one of Doro’s children learns to resist him with psychic abilities that are later used to establish the Patternists’ supremacy over non-telepathic “mutes.” The abuse of power, Butler suggests, can be distinguished from the art of survival only if we acknowledge the intimacy between them.
In other words, the future is made of others’ bodies, if only because we cannot sustain life or reproduce it on our own. Butler expresses this viscerally in her exquisite short story “Bloodchild.” In it, Gan, a young man on an unnamed planet, must decide whether to allow himself to be impregnated by his family’s alien patron, a velvety centipede-like being with a stinging tail named T’Gatoi. (Butler was inspired by certain botflies that lay their eggs in human wounds.)
It’s a terrifying conceit that, characteristically, Butler’s coolly reasoned narrative makes seem logical and necessary. The clawed parasite T’Gatoi is, of all things, a politician—even a liberal—who wants to find a reasonable accommodation between the humans and her own species. As Gan says, “She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. . . . Only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us.” It’s supposedly an honor to have T’Gatoi in the family; all that Gan has to do is let her insert her ovipositor and use his body as feed for her grubs.
Some readers saw “Bloodchild” as a story about slavery, a reading that took Butler aback. Gan’s choice is, if constrained, nonetheless free. Freedom is always a negotiation with others—even for the powerful—and to forget this, Butler suggests, is ultimately to denigrate the oppressed. It’s an ethic that recurs in “Amnesty,” a late-career story originally published online. Its appearance—three years before she died, in 2006, of a fall, at the age of fifty-eight—dispels any suspicion that Butler’s talent was atrophying in her final years.
The story is about a fraught détente between humans and the “Communities,” a species of extraterrestrials who have forcibly occupied the world’s deserts. These entities, each one a foliage-like swarm of organisms, are eager to communicate with their new neighbors, preferably by “enfolding” their bodies and feeling their movements. Butler’s protagonist, a woman named Noah, was abducted by the Communities as a child, but goes on to work for them consensually as a “translator,” developing an interspecies language of touch. She has learned to enjoy the sensation of a “stranger-Community . . . drawing her upward and in among its many selves.”
At the end of “Amnesty,” Noah faces a skeptical crowd of recruits, who interrogate her about her loyalty to the “weeds.” Everyone unpacks a particular kit of preconceptions: a woman sees the Communities as colonizers, a man thinks that translators must have been hypnotized and drugged. They can’t accept that Noah is neither a victim nor a turncoat but, much like her Biblical namesake, the only one preparing to live in a world made new.
If there’s a cardinal sin in Butler’s universe, it’s expecting your way of life to go on forever, or, in more intimate terms, expecting your descendants to be like you. But our histories—evolutionary, diasporic—teach otherwise. The future isn’t a mirror. There is a grace in learning, like Noah, to lose oneself in stranger-Communities. ♦
