#Octavia e. butler books list free

I have that first edition with a white woman on the cover, and it’s something precious. So, many of her fans and readers did not know she was a Black woman for quite some time. The first edition of the book has a white woman on the cover, not a black woman. It’s her first examination of, ‘If we don’t get ourselves together, humans will destroy the planet and ourselves.’ It’s the idea that women would save. Those who have read Dawn are true Butler fans. Is there a Butler deep cut that you love? Perhaps one that only the “real” fans know?

If you’re new to speculative fiction, I’d say start with Kindred or the “Patternist” series, which starts with Wild Seed. If someone’s new to the Butler canon, where should they start? We won’t always be the colonizers in a cosmic sense, and that’s the idea that she examines in many of her books. Even if we dismantle one thing, something else is going to come in its place to assert dominance over another people. She always said that human beings are hierarchical. She was more concerned about what humans hold with our need for dominance. She was not as race conscious as I thought she would be.

However, when I met her she was not as political as I thought she would be. I was all about dismantling white supremacy and the patriarchy. I thought I was radicalized, and I was just discovering feminism and racial politics. The Globe spoke to Zoboi about Butler’s enduring legacy, the best of her books to start with and what she was like outside of her writing.īutler was a mentor to you, and you were able to spend some time with her. She observed, studying the world with a scientist’s eye, says Zoboi. While she wasn’t a “sage or a shaman,” Zoboi says, Butler was a deep thinker who watched current events closely, using critical analysis and imagination to translate what she was seeing into stories that were somehow fantastical and utterly plausible at the same time. (And that’s four years after the 2016 election, which her 1998 Parable of the Talents spookily seemed to predict, right down to the election of a populist president whose slogan was – I kid you not – “Make America Great Again.”) It would take more than 50 years, but Butler did become a best-selling author, first hitting The New York Times bestseller list in 2020 with Parable of the Sower. My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication.” She sealed this impassioned bit of speaking-something-into-being with a phrase, underlined and repeated twice, that feels part incantation and part plea to the universe: “So be it. Not for a lack of manifesting, however: She famously wrote in her journal, “I write bestselling novels. “And when you’re ahead of your time, it takes a while for people to catch onto what you’re saying.”ĭespite winning a MacArthur Fellowship and several other prestigious literary honours – including multiple Hugos and Nebulas, science fiction’s most-prized gongs – Butler was not a best-selling author in her lifetime. “Butler was ahead of her time, in many ways,” says Ibi Zoboi, a best-selling author of young adult fiction who wrote a biography of Butler’s girlhood for children called Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler. In the last few years, Butler – a visionary, groundbreaking science fiction author who published 15 novels and short story collections in her lifetime while overcoming the compounding hurdles of being female and Black in a pale, male genre – has found a new audience for her work, thanks in part to the eerie prescience of her writing (more on that soon) and a string of television adaptations, including Kindred, which premiered on FX in December, and Fledgling, in the works at HBO and executive produced by Issa Rae. A piece of speculative fiction first published 30 years ago, by an author who died in 2006? A strange occurrence, to say the least.īut it was not entirely unexpected. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and, not unlike a flying saucer streaking across the sky, it came and went from the charts so quickly you couldn’t be entirely sure you really saw it. This Unexpected Fiction Object was Octavia E.

#Octavia e. butler books list free