Octavia E. Butler


Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
Butler was born in Pasadena, California. After her father died, she was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction.
She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library.

Early life

Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshine man. Butler's father died when she was 7. She was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment.
Growing up in the racially integrated community of Pasadena allowed Butler to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of racial segregation. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work, where the two entered white people's houses through back doors, as workers. Her mother was treated poorly by her employers.
From an early age, an almost paralyzing shyness made it difficult for Butler to socialize with other children. Her awkwardness, paired with a slight dyslexia that made schoolwork a torment, made Butler an easy target for bullies, and led her to believe that she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless". As a result, she frequently passed the time reading at the Pasadena Central Library. She also wrote reams of pages in her "big pink notebook". Hooked at first on fairy tales and horse stories, she quickly became interested in science fiction magazines, such as Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She began reading stories by John Brunner, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon.
At the age of 10, Butler begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter, on which she "pecked stories two fingered". At 12, she watched the televised version of the film Devil Girl from Mars and concluded that she could write a better story. She drafted what would later become the basis for her Patternist novels. Happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of 13, when her well-intentioned aunt Hazel said: "Honey... Negroes can't be writers." But Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, and even asked her junior high school science teacher, Mr. Pfaff, to type the first manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine.
After graduating from John Muir High School in 1965, Butler worked during the day and attended Pasadena City College at night. As a freshman at PCC, she won a college-wide short-story contest, earning her first income as a writer. She also got the "germ of the idea" for what would become her novel Kindred. An African-American classmate involved in the Black Power Movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. As Butler explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks were a catalyst that led her to respond with a story providing historical context for the subservience, showing that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival. In 1968, Butler graduated from PCC with an associate of arts degree with a focus in history.

Rise to success

Although Butler's mother wanted her to become a secretary in order to have a steady income, Butler continued to work at a series of temporary jobs. She preferred less demanding work that would allow her to get up at two or three in the morning to write. Success continued to elude her. She styled her stories after the white-and-male-dominated science fiction she had grown up reading. She enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, but switched to taking writing courses through UCLA Extension.
During the Open Door Workshop of the Writers Guild of America West, a program designed to mentor minority writers, her writing impressed one of the teachers, noted science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. There, Butler met the writer Samuel R. Delany, who became a longtime friend. She also sold her first stories: "Childfinder" to Ellison, for his anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, and "Crossover" to Robin Scott Wilson, the director of Clarion, who published it in the 1971 Clarion anthology.
For the next five years, Butler worked on the series of novels that later become known as the Patternist series: Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, and Survivor. In 1978, she was finally able to stop working at temporary jobs and live on her writing. She took a break from the Patternist series to research and write Kindred, and then finished the series with Wild Seed and Clay's Ark.
Butler's rise to prominence began in 1984 when "Speech Sounds" won the Hugo Award for Short Story and, a year later, Bloodchild won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. In the meantime, Butler traveled to the Amazon rainforest and the Andes to do research for what would become the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago . These stories were republished in 2000 as the collection Lilith's Brood.
During the 1990s, Butler worked on the novels that solidified her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. In 1995, she became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, an award that came with a prize of $295,000.
In 1999, after her mother's death, Butler moved to Lake Forest Park, Washington. The Parable of the Talents had won the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Science Novel, and she had plans for four more Parable novels: Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. However, after several failed attempts to begin The Parable of the Trickster, she decided to stop work in the series. In later interviews, Butler explained that the research and writing of the Parable novels had overwhelmed and depressed her, so she had shifted to composing something "lightweight" and "fun" instead. This became her last book, the science-fiction vampire novel Fledgling.

Writing career

Early stories, Patternist series, and ''Kindred'': 1971–1984

Butler's first work published was "Crossover" in the 1971 Clarion Workshop anthology. She also sold the short story "Childfinder" to Harlan Ellison for the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. "I thought I was on my way as a writer", Butler recalled in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. "In fact, I had five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me before I sold another word."
Starting in 1974, Butler worked on a series of novels that would later be collected as the Patternist series, which depicts the transformation of humanity into three genetic groups: the dominant Patternists, humans who have been bred with heightened telepathic powers and are bound to the Patternmaster via a psionic chain; their enemies the Clayarks, disease-mutated animal-like superhumans; and the Mutes, ordinary humans bonded to the Patternists.
The first novel, Patternmaster, eventually became the last installment in the series' internal chronology. Set in the distant future, it tells of the coming-of-age of Teray, a young Patternist who fights for position within Patternist society and eventually for the role of Patternmaster.
Next came Mind of My Mind, a prequel to Patternmaster set in the 20th century. The story follows the development of Mary, the creator of the psionic chain and the first Patternmaster to bind all Patternists, and her inevitable struggle for power with her father Doro, a parapsychological vampire who seeks to retain control over the psionic children he has bred over the centuries.
The third book of the series, Survivor, was published in 1978. The titular survivor is Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have traveled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark infection. Captured by a local tribe called the Tehkohn, Alanna learns their language and adopts their customs, knowledge which she then uses to help the Missionaries avoid bondage and assimilation into a rival tribe that opposes the Tehkohn. Butler would later call Survivor the least favorite of her books, and withdraw it from reprinting.
After Survivor, Butler took a break from the Patternist series to write what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred, as well as the short story "Near of Kin". In Kindred, Dana, an African-American woman, is transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a black freewoman forced into slavery later in life. In "Near of Kin" the protagonist discovers a taboo relationship in her family as she goes through her mother's things after her death.
In 1980, Butler published the fourth book of the Patternist series, Wild Seed, whose narrative became the series' origin story. Set in Africa and America during the 17th century, Wild Seed traces the struggle between the four-thousand-year-old parapsychological vampire Doro and his "wild" child and bride, the three-hundred-year-old shapeshifter and healer Anyanwu. Doro, who has bred psionic children for centuries, deceives Anyanwu into becoming one of his breeders, but she eventually escapes and uses her gifts to create communities that rival Doro's. When Doro finally tracks her down, Anyanwu, tired by decades of escaping or fighting Doro, decides to commit suicide, forcing him to admit his need for her.
In 1983, Butler published "Speech Sounds", a story set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where a pandemic has caused most humans to lose their ability to read, speak, or write. For many, this impairment is accompanied by uncontrollable feelings of jealousy, resentment, and rage. "Speech Sounds" received the 1984 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
In 1984, Butler released the last book of the Patternmaster series, Clay's Ark. Set in the Mojave Desert, it focuses on a colony of humans infected by an extraterrestrial microorganism brought to Earth by the one surviving astronaut of the spaceship Clay's Ark. As the microorganism compels them to spread it, they kidnap ordinary people to infect them and, in the case of women, give birth to the mutant, sphinx-like children who will be the first members of the Clayark race.

''Bloodchild'' and the Xenogenesis trilogy: 1984–1989

Butler followed Clay's Ark with the critically acclaimed short story "Bloodchild". Set on an alien planet, it depicts the complex relationship between human refugees and the insect-like aliens who keep them in a preserve to protect them, but also to use them as hosts for breeding their young. Sometimes called Butler's "pregnant man story", "Bloodchild" won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award.
Three years later, Butler published Dawn, the first installment of what would become known as the Xenogenesis trilogy. The series examines the theme of alienation by creating situations in which humans are forced to coexist with other species to survive and extends Butler's recurring exploration of genetically-altered, hybrid individuals and communities. In Dawn, protagonist Lilith Iyapo finds herself in a spaceship after surviving a nuclear apocalypse that destroys Earth. Saved by the Oankali aliens, the human survivors must combine their DNA with an ooloi, the Oankali's third sex, in order to create a new race that eliminates a self-destructive flaw in humans—their aggressive hierarchical tendencies. Butler followed Dawn with "The Evening and the Morning and the Night", a story about how certain female sufferers of "Duryea-Gode Disease", a genetic disorder which causes dissociative states, obsessive self-mutilation, and violent psychosis, are able to control others afflicted with the disease.
Adulthood Rites and Imago, the second and the third books in the Xenogenesis trilogy, focus on the predatory and prideful tendencies that affect human evolution, as humans now revolt against Lilith's Oankali-engineered progeny. Set thirty years after humanity's return to Earth, Adulthood Rites centers on the kidnapping of Lilith's part-human, part alien child, Akin, by a human-only group who are against the Oankali. Akin learns about both aspects of his identity through his life with the humans as well as the Akjai. The Oankali-only group becomes their mediator, and ultimately creates a human-only colony in Mars. In Imago, the Oankali create a third species more powerful than themselves: the shape-shifting healer Jodahs, a human-Oankali ooloi who must find suitable human male and female mates to survive its metamorphosis and finds them in the most unexpected of places, in a village of renegade humans.

The Parable series: 1993–1998

In the mid-1990s, Butler published two novels later designated as the Parable series. The books depict the struggle of the Earthseed community to survive the socioeconomic and political collapse of 21st-century America due to poor environmental stewardship, corporate greed, and the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. The books propose alternate philosophical views and religious interventions as solutions to such dilemmas.
The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower, introduces the fifteen-year-old protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, and is set in a dystopian California in the 2020s. Lauren, who suffers from a syndrome causing her to literally feel any physical pain she witnesses, struggles with the religious beliefs and physical isolation of her hometown Robledo. She forms a new belief system, Earthseed, which posits a future for the human race on other planets. When Robledo is destroyed and Lauren's family and neighbors killed, she and two other survivors flee north. Recruiting members of varying social backgrounds along the way, Lauren relocates her new group to Northern California, naming her new community Acorn.
Her 1998 follow-up novel, Parable of the Talents, is set sometime after Lauren's death and is told through the excerpts of Lauren's journals as framed by the commentary of her estranged daughter, Larkin. It details the invasion of Acorn by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Lauren's attempts to survive their religious "re-education", and the final triumph of Earthseed as a community and a doctrine.
In between her Earthseed novels, Butler published the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, which includes the short stories "Bloodchild", "The Evening and the Morning and the Night", "Near of Kin", "Speech Sounds", and "Crossover", as well as the non-fiction pieces "Positive Obsession" and "Furor Scribendi".

Late stories and ''Fledgling'': 2003–2005

After several years of writer's block, Butler published the short stories "Amnesty" and "The Book of Martha", and her second standalone novel, Fledgling. Both short stories focus on how impossible conditions force an ordinary woman to make a distressing choice. In "Amnesty", an alien abductee recounts her painful abuse at the hand of the unwitting aliens, and upon her release, by humans, and explains why she chose to work as a translator for the aliens now that the Earth's economy is in a deep depression. In "The Book of Martha", God asks a middle-aged African-American novelist to make one important change to fix humanity's destructive ways. Martha's choice—to make humans have vivid and satisfying dreams—means that she will no longer be able to do what she loves, writing fiction. These two stories were added to the 2005 edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories.
Butler's last publication during her lifetime was Fledgling, a novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in mutualistic symbiosis with humans. Set on the West Coast, it tells of the coming-of-age of a young female hybrid vampire whose species is called Ina. The only survivor of a vicious attack on her families that left her an amnesiac, she must seek justice for her dead, build a new family, and relearn how to be Ina.

Later years and death

During her last years, Butler struggled with writer's block and depression, partly caused by the side effects of medication for high blood pressure. She continued writing and taught at Clarion's Science Fiction Writers' Workshop regularly. In 2005, she was inducted into Chicago State University's International Black Writers Hall of Fame.
Butler died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, aged 58. Contemporary news accounts were inconsistent as to the cause of her death, with some reporting that she suffered a fatal stroke, and other indicating that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her cobbled walkway. Another suggestion, backed by Locus magazine, is that a stroke caused the fall and hence the head injuries.
Butler maintained a longstanding relationship with the Huntington Library and bequeathed her papers including manuscripts, correspondence, school papers, notebooks, and photographs to the library in her will. The collection, comprising 9062 pieces in 386 boxes, 1 volume, 2 binders and 18 broadsides, was made available to scholars and researchers in 2010.

Themes

The critique of present-day hierarchies

In multiple interviews and essays, Butler explained her view of humanity as inherently flawed by an innate tendency towards hierarchical thinking which leads to intolerance, violence and, if not checked, the ultimate destruction of our species.
"Simple peck-order bullying", she wrote in her essay "A World without Racism", "is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world." Her stories, then, often replay humanity's domination of the weak by the strong as a type of parasitism. These "others", whether aliens, vampires, superhuman, or slave masters, find themselves defied by a protagonist who embodies difference, diversity, and change, so that, as John R. Pfeiffer notes, "n one sense fables are trials of solutions to the self-destructive condition in which she finds mankind."

The remaking of the human

In his essay on the sociobiological backgrounds of Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, J. Adam Johns describes how Butler's narratives counteract the death drive behind the hierarchical impulse with an innate love of life, particularly different, strange life. Specifically, Butler's stories feature gene manipulation, interbreeding, miscegenation, symbiosis, mutation, alien contact, rape, contamination, and other forms of hybridity as the means to correct the sociobiological causes of hierarchical violence. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, "n narratives the undoing of the human body is both literal and metaphorical, for it signifies the profound changes necessary to shape a world not organized by hierarchical violence." The evolutionary maturity achieved by the bioengineered hybrid protagonist at the end of the story, then, signals the possible evolution of the dominant community in terms of tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and a desire to wield power responsibly.

The survivor as hero

Butler's protagonists are disenfranchised individuals who endure, compromise, and embrace radical change in order to survive. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, her stories focus on minority characters whose historical background makes them already intimate with brutal violation and exploitation, and therefore the need to compromise to survive. Even when endowed with extra abilities, these characters are forced to experience unprecedented physical, mental, and emotional distress and exclusion to ensure a minimal degree of agency and to prevent humanity from achieving self-destruction. In many stories, their acts of courage become acts of understanding, and in some cases, love, as they reach a crucial compromise with those in power. Ultimately, Butler's focus on disenfranchised characters serves to illustrate both the historical exploitation of minorities and how the resolve of one such exploited individual may bring on critical change.

The creation of alternative communities

Butler's stories feature mixed communities founded by African protagonists and populated by diverse, if similar-minded individuals. Members may be humans of African, European, or Asian descent, extraterrestrial, from a different species, and cross-species. In some stories, the community's hybridity results in a flexible view of sexuality and gender. Thus, Butler creates bonds between groups that are generally considered to be separate and unrelated, and suggests hybridity as "the potential root of good family and blessed community life". Many of her books feature father figures as wanderers and not tied to family units, perhaps due to her growing up without a father. Doro in 'Mind of my Mind' and the alien/human bred males in the Xenogenesis Trilogy for example. They also often feature the subservient protagonist being used for breeding plans planning and finally overcoming the authority figures.

Relationship to Afrofuturism

Butler's work has been associated with the genre of Afrofuturism, a term coined by Mark Dery to describe "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture". Some critics, however, have noted that while Butler's protagonists are of African descent, the communities they create are multi-ethnic and, sometimes, multi-species. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai explain in their 2010 memorial to Butler, while Butler does offer "an afro-centric sensibility at the core of narratives", her "insistence on hybridity beyond the point of discomfort" exceeds the tenets of both black cultural nationalism and of "white-dominated" liberal pluralism.

Critical reception

Most critics praise Butler for her unflinching exposition of human flaws, which she depicts with striking realism. The New York Times regarded her novels as "evocative" and "often troubling" explorations of "far-reaching issues of race, sex, power". The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction called her examination of humanity "clear-headed and brutally unsentimental", and The Village Voices Dorothy Allison described her as "writing the most detailed social criticism" where "the hard edge of cruelty, violence, and domination is described in stark detail". Locus regarded her as "one of those authors who pay serious attention to the way human beings actually work together and against each other, and she does so with extraordinary plausibility." The Houston Post ranked her "among the best SF writers, blessed with a mind capable of conceiving complicated futuristic situations that shed considerable light on our current affairs."
Scholars, on the other hand, focus on Butler's choice to write from the point of view of marginal characters and communities and thus "expanded SF to reflect the experiences and expertise of the disenfranchised". While surveying Butler's novels, critic Burton Raffel noted how race and gender influence her writing: "I do not think any of these eight books could have been written by a man, as they most emphatically were not, nor, with the single exception of her first book, Pattern-Master, are likely to have been written, as they most emphatically were, by anyone but an African American." Robert Crossley commended how Butler's "feminist aesthetic" works to expose sexual, racial, and cultural chauvinisms because it is "enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the depiction of enslavement both in the real past and in imaginary pasts and futures."
Butler has been praised widely for her spare yet vivid style, with Washington Post Book World calling her craftsmanship "superb". Burton Raffel regards her prose as "carefully, expertly crafted" and "crystalline, at its best, sensuous, sensitive, exact, not in the least directed at calling attention to itself".

Influence

In interviews with Charles Rowell and Randall Kenan, Butler credited the struggles of her working-class mother as an important influence on her writing. Because Butler's mother received little formal education herself, she made sure that young Butler was given the opportunity to learn by bringing her reading materials that her white employers threw away, from magazines to advanced books.
She also encouraged Butler to write. She bought her daughter her first typewriter when she was 10 years old, and, seeing her hard at work on a story casually remarked that maybe one day she could become a writer, causing Butler to realize that it was possible to make a living as an author. A decade later, Mrs. Butler would pay more than a month's rent to have an agent review her daughter's work. She also provided Butler with the money she had been saving for dental work to pay for Butler's scholarship so she could attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, where Butler sold her first two stories.
A second person to play an influential role in Butler's work was the American writer Harlan Ellison. As a teacher at the Open Door Workshop of the Screen Writers Guild of America, he gave Butler her first honest and constructive criticism on her writing after years of lukewarm responses from composition teachers and baffling rejections from publishers. Impressed by her work, Ellison suggested she attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop and even contributed $100 towards her application fee. As the years passed, Ellison's mentorship became a close friendship.
Butler herself has been highly influential in science fiction, particularly for people of color. In 2015, adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha co-edited Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, a collection of 20 short stories and essays about social justice inspired by Butler. Toshi Reagon adapted Parable of the Sower into an opera. In 2020, adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon began collaborating on a podcast called Octavia's Parables.

Point of view

Butler began reading science fiction at a young age, but quickly became disenchanted by the genre's unimaginative portrayal of ethnicity and class as well as by its lack of noteworthy female protagonists. She then set to correct those gaps by, as De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai point out, "choosing to write self-consciously as an African-American woman marked by a particular history"—what Butler termed as "writing myself in". Butler's stories, therefore, are usually written from the perspective of a marginalized black woman whose difference from the dominant agents increases her potential for reconfiguring the future of her society.

Audience

Publishers and critics have labelled Butler's work as science fiction. While Butler enjoyed the genre deeply, calling it "potentially the freest genre in existence", she resisted being branded a genre writer. Her narratives have drawn attention of people from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds. She claimed to have three loyal audiences: black readers, science-fiction fans, and feminists.

Interviews

interviewed Octavia Butler in 2000 soon after the award of a MacArthur Fellowship. The highlights are probing questions that arise out of Butler's personal life narrative and her interest in becoming not only a writer, but a writer of science fiction. Rose asked, "What then is central to what you want to say about race?" Butler's response was, "Do I want to say something central about race? Aside from, 'Hey we're here!'?" This points to an essential claim for Butler that the world of science fiction is a world of possibilities, and although race is an innate element, it is embedded in the narrative, not forced upon it.
In an interview by Randall Kenan, Butler discusses how her life experiences as a child shaped most of her thinking. As a writer, she was able to use her writing as a vehicle to critique history under the lenses of feminism. In the interview, she discusses the research that had to be done in order to write her bestselling novel, Kindred. Most of it is based on visiting libraries as well as historic landmarks with respect to what she is investigating. Butler admits that she writes science fiction because she does not want her work to be labeled or used as a marketing tool. She wants the readers to be genuinely interested in her work and the story she provides, but at the same time she fears that people will not read her work because of the "science fiction" label that they have.
In an interview with Joshunda Sanders, Butler commented on the space race and its influence on her work. She noted, "I think of the space race as a way of having a nuclear war without having one." She claimed that Ronald Reagan believed a nuclear war against the Soviet Union was winnable. Butler admitted to being very confused by this idea, and said that it contributed to her idea for the Xenogenesis books. She said "there must be something basic, something really genetically wrong with us if we're falling for this stuff." Butler then commented on how she felt a real fear about nuclear war during the Cold War and that these ideas had a real influence on some of her early works.
In an interview with Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating, for MELUS, Octavia Butler talked about how biology is used to keep groups of people out of power. She said, "hat's made of biology is that the people who are in power are going to figure out why this is a good reason for them to stay in power. Look at the tests that show that women have better linguistic abilities: Yet, how many of our ambassadors are women? How many of the politicians are women? This is not looked at; instead, the argument goes that women don't have the mathematical abilities... every now and then. So we're much more likely now to be penalized for whatever we're assumed not to have. We're much more likely to find that whatever little genetic thing that's discovered is going to be used against us." The issue of biology defining women and what they can and can't do has long been a part of feminism.

Adaptations

Parable of the Sower was adapted as Parable of the Sower: The Opera, written by American folk/blues musician Toshi Reagon in collaboration with her mother, singer and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon. The adaptation's libretto and musical score combine African-American spirituals, soul, rock and roll, and folk music into rounds to be performed by singers sitting in a circle. It was performed as part of The Public Theater's 2015 Under the Radar Festival in New York City.
Kindred was adapted as a graphic novel by author Damien Duffy and artist John Jennings. The adaptation was published by Abrams ComicsArts on January 10, 2017. To visually differentiate the time periods in which Butler set the story, Jennings used muted colors for the present and vibrant ones for the past to demonstrate how the remnants and relevance of slavery are still with us. The graphic novel adaption debuted as number one New York Times hardcover graphic book bestseller on January 29, 2017.
Dawn is currently being adapted for television by producers Ava DuVernay and Charles D. King's Macro Ventures, alongside writer Victoria Mahoney. This is the first time that Octavia Butler's work has been adapted for television. There is no projected release date for the adaptation yet.

Awards and honors

In 2006, the Carl Brandon Society established the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship in Butler's memory, to enable writers of color to attend the annual Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Writers' Workshop, descendants of the original Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where Butler got her start. The first scholarships were awarded in 2007.
In March 2019, Butler's alma mater, Pasadena City College, announced the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship for students enrolled in the Pathways program and committed to transfer to four-year institutions.
The memorial scholarships sponsored by the Carl Brandon Society and Pasadena City College support three of the life's goals Butler had handwritten in a notebook from 1988:
"I will send poor black youngsters to Clarion or other writer's workshops
"I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons
"I will help poor black youngsters go to college"

Selected works

A complete bibliography of Butler's work and secondary was compiled in 2008 by Calvin Ritch.

Series

Patternist series
Xenogenesis series
Parable series

Standalone novels

1970s–1980s