Goodbye Octavia

I have always loved science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Being an African-American child in the 60's, sometimes I was considered a little strange. Addicted to things like Lost in Space, the Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, I think my mom thought me a little weird :-). It was nothing for me to me to stay awake all night to watch Fantastic Features (old horror movies) on TV. I still remember the host of the show ,"Sivad"(Davis spelled backwards) our Monster of Ceremonies. So, it was a natural progression that my favorite books would also come from those same genres.

I read my first Stephen King Book, Carrie, back in 1974 and became a Stephen King junkie at that point. During that financially challenging time of my life, all my reading selections came from the library, second-hand stores (a.k.a. The Goodwill) or mass-market paperbacks at the grocery store checkout. I managed to read a lot of very good books by a lot of great authors.

It wasn't until 1988 that I was introduced to the writings of Octavia Butler. The Book was named Kindred it was part of a Black Women Writers Series. I was absolutely enthralled. It was so exciting for me to see science fiction written by black women with a black heroine. I immediately knew, I had to find out more out this author, and I had to read everything she had in print. I was surprised and embarrassed that this author had so many books in print, and that I had never heard of her. Me, the bibliophile, me the scifi-aholic, had never heard of this queen of sci-fi.

I am proud to say that I own every one of Ms. Butler's books, except Survivor which is currently out of print. (However I have read it thanks to a LA cyber friend who checked it out from the library, fed-ex'ed it to me to read, afterwards which I sent it back to her :-)

If you have never read one of Ms. Butler's books, I suggest Kindred to get you started. This book is classified as sci-fi, but really doesn't have a lot of hard science. It is more a speculative work of fiction. However, once you start to read her other series, prepare yourself for a wild ride. Below please find a list of books by Ms. Butler you owe it to yourself to read at least one of these books.


Bibliography - Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947-February 24, 2006)

Patternist series (In the Series Intended Order)

• Wild Seed (1980) - Prequel to Mind of My Mind. Two immortals, one who changes bodies and another who has perfect control of her own, struggle to live together over generations, as one concentrates on creating a new race through his own breeding program. - James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner
• Mind of My Mind (1977) - An immortal's breeding program has created a society of networked telepaths that he struggles to control.
• Patternmaster (1976) - Far in the future, regular humans are dominated by a society of networked telepathic humans who, in turn, are ruled by the most powerful telepath: the Patternmaster. Also hostile to the remaining regular humans are Clayarks, mutant humans created long ago by disease unwittingly brought back to Earth from outer space by astronauts. The story revolves around the aging of the current Patternmaster, spawning a battle among telepaths to see who will become the next Patternmaster.
• Clay's Ark (1984) - A colony of people mutated by a disease that astronauts have unwittingly brought back to Earth from outer space struggle to keep themselves isolated enough that the disease does not spread throughout all humanity. (Butler was reportedly unsatisfied with this novel.)

Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood series

• Dawn (1987) - After the near-extinction of humanity, a woman is resurrected by the alien Oankali as part of a plan to colonize the earth with alien-human hybrids.
• Adulthood Rites (1988) - An alien-human hybrid child is abducted by sterile human resisters.
• Imago (1989) - An androgynous being comes of age and integrates human and alien societies.
  The three volumes of this series are also collected into two omnibus editions, Xenogenesis (out of print) and Lilith's Brood.

Parable series

• Parable of the Sower (1993) - A girl with heightened empathy develops a benign philosophical and religious system during her childhood in a walled suburb in a dystopian anarchic future Los Angeles. When the suburb's security is compromised, her home destroyed, and her family murdered, she travels north with some survivors to try to start a community where her religion can grow.
• Parable of the Talents (1998) - As the U.S. continues to fall apart, the protagonist's community is attacked and taken over by a bloc of religious fanatics who inflict brutal atrocities like rape and murder. The novel contains a harsh indictment of fundamentalism and has been compared in that respect to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Parable of Talents won the Nebula Award for best novel in 2000.
• Parable of the Trickster - Butler had originally planned to write a third Parable novel, tentatively titled Parable of the Trickster, which would have focused on the community's struggle to survive on a new planet. She began this novel after finishing Parable of the Talents, mentioning her work on it in a number of interviews, but at some point encountered a form of writer's block. She eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in the novel Fledgling (see below).
  

Other

• Kindred (1979) - Often shelved in Literature or African-American literature, rather than with science fiction. Story of a modern African-American woman who keeps falling back through time to rescue her white, slave-owning ancestor.
• Survivor (1978) - With Earth being ravaged by the disease that was brought back from outer space, and telepaths now asserting control over what remains of humanity, regular humans are caught in the middle, and one group of them has decided to escape it all to a new planet, where they now, as aliens, must struggle to co-exist with the race that already lives there. Although this novel can be connected to the Patternist series, it is consider by others to be a stand alone novel. (Octavia Butler, herself, ultimately came to dislike this novel.)
• Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) - A collection whose title story, "Bloodchild" (1984), won the Hugo and Nebula awards. The collection also includes four other stories and two essays. The pieces span Butler's career, the first finished in 1971 and the last in 1993. In 2005, Seven Stories Press released a second edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories, expanded to include two newer short stories copyrighted by Butler in 2003.
• Fledgling (2005) - A vampire novel. ISBN 1583226907 Although Butler herself passed Fledgling off as a lark, the themes of race and sexual permeate the novel. Although ostensibly about vampires, the novel is connected to her other works through the exploration of race, sexuality, and what it means to be a member of a community, and what it means to be an outsider. Moreover, the novel continues the theme raised explicitly in Parable of the Sower that diversity is a biological imperative.