The ground Octavia E. Butler covered in her 15 novels and two story collections is traceable—but you need time. In the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when Butler published the bulk of her work, she, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin were the only significant science fiction authors attempting such ideologically ambitious stories within the genre, placing left-of-center national politics and local histories right at the core of their plots. But genre fiction was historically not considered the breeding ground for the great American novel, especially if you were Black, gay, and/or a woman (all three authors were at least one of the above). In recent years, we’ve seen the tremendous literary contributions of these politically insightful sci-fi writers fêted rather than ghettoized. For Butler—unlike Le Guin, who died in 2018, and Delany, who is 79—the peak of her recognition has arrived posthumously.
Butler’s books—from the Xenogenesis trilogy to the Parable series to her later work, including Fledgling—tackled environmental destruction, border conflicts, intergenerational trauma, and the intricacies of race, gender, and reproduction. Born and raised in Pasadena, where she also lived for much of her adult life, Butler was deeply interested in what drought and segregation in California would mean for the state’s most vulnerable populations, especially Black women, a theme she explored with unflinching intensity in Parable of the Sower. If she sounds impressively ahead of her time, it’s because she was steeped in the goings-on of her era. Whatever we find novel and confounding in the current news cycles was almost certainly happening back when Butler was writing, and the many newspaper clippings in her collection of papers at Huntington Library in San Marino prove it. When Los Angeles native and journalist Lynell George was researching her book A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The Works of Octavia Butler, she was astounded by the depths of the author’s curiosity. “You would just open up these boxes and find folders full of things that piqued her imagination—threads she was following, from climate and politics to disease and vampires in literature,” George tells me. “A lot of these subjects were in her mind for decades, and she was really informed. Her imagination allowed her to leap, but it was grounded in the things that were happening around us. And she just kept asking those questions: What if?”
Today, more than a decade and a half after Butler’s death in 2006 at age 58, those questions will be asked again as writers and directors adapt several of her novels and stories for film and television. Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has written and is executive producing the pilot for a series adaptation of Kindred for FX, which Zola filmmaker Janicza Bravo will direct. Issa Rae and J.J. Abrams have teamed up to executive produce a Fledgling pilot for HBO. Viola Davis’s production company, JuVee, has teamed up with Amazon to bring Wild Seed, the first book from Butler’s Patternist series, to the small screen with Wanuri Kahiu, who made the lesbian Kenyan film Rafiki, in the director’s chair. Ava DuVernay has also teamed up with Amazon on a TV adaptation of Dawn. And that’s not all. In July, it was announced that Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Garrett Bradley (Time) will write and direct her take on Parable of the Sower as a feature film to be distributed by A24.
It’s a tremendous amount of interpretation by an impressive slate of Black talent, a gift that seems to have fallen from the heavens. Merrilee Heifetz, Butler’s former agent and current literary executor from Writers House, handles the options for Butler’s oeuvre alongside the author’s cousin Ernestine Walker. When I ask what she expects from all these adaptations, she says, “All you can do is try to bring it to people whose vision you feel you can trust. And you look at someone like Janicza [Bravo], her visual style is incredible. I can’t wait to see what she does.” Years ago, when Heifetz saw that Jacobs-Jenkins was interested in writing a Kindred adaptation, she went to see his play Everybody at the Signature Theatre in New York and was impressed. Jacobs-Jenkins, who worked on the HBO miniseries Watchmen, became a huge Butler fan in high school, and when Breaking Bad was in its heyday, he realized Kindred would make a great show. He told his agent he wanted the rights.
But there was a hitch. “Kindred was under option almost the entire time that I represented Octavia, going back to the mid-’80s,” Heifetz says. “I remember people trying to get it made, and I would say, ‘Can’t you find some great Black actress [to attach] to it?’ And they said, ‘Well, young Black actresses don’t want to play somebody who is essentially a slave at some point.’ And I thought, Oh boy, you’re not getting them to read the book. People aren’t understanding what this is. But it was a question of the times.” Then a young Black producer named Courtney Lee-Mitchell was on a trip to Philadelphia with her family when she wondered aloud what it would be like if she and her loved ones were transported back in time to the city during slavery. Her husband informed her that Butler had already written that novel, but that Kindred could make a great movie. A recent Juilliard graduate, Mallori Johnson, has been cast in the lead role.
I spoke to Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee-Mitchell on the day they wrapped the pilot episode shoot for Kindred, and they were in high spirits. “As more information [about the pilot] is rolled out to the public, the response has been so encouraging and affirming,” Jacobs-Jenkins says. “It’s been a long time coming, we’ve been developing this for a long time, but I feel very happy to be where we are. It’s kind of a miracle.”
Even before news of these adaptations, Butlermania was on the rise with graphic novel interpretations and multiple in-depth podcasts. (In March, a NASA Mars landing site was named after her.) Lee-Mitchell believes the 2016 election of Donald Trump spiked interest in Butler’s work: “So many of [her books] seem to be very prescient about the circumstances around him. I think people just started talking about her in those terms. Then people who hadn’t heard of her started reading her books.”
All the producers and writers wish that Butler were here to see her vision embraced so enthusiastically by so many. “She would constantly update her literary biography to give to publishers or people,” George says. “And there’s that great line, which I’m sure you’ve run across: ‘I’m a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles.’ I love it because it is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also true about her. She knew there were times she had to self-isolate because she was working or thinking. She was an introvert, so she would get, as she said, ‘peopled out.’ ”
Butler’s introversion seems to have given her a meaningful perspective on togetherness, beyond political sloganeering. “I think she could kind of bore into that feeling of what would it be like to float?,” says George. “So when she creates these communities, like the Earthseed [in the Parable series], this ragtag group of people coming together because they have to find their humanity—I think that’s her wish for us.”
This story has been updated.
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