OCTAVIA BUTLER LIVED the last seven years of her life in a modest midcentury home in Lake Forest Park, a bedroom community northeast of Seattle. On a high hillside overlooking Lake Washington, the neighborhood comprises mostly comfortable, unshowy ranch-style houses buffered by big yards and gardens and marvelously tall trees. Butler’s former house is now painted gray on gray and occupied by a family of 4.
Knowing that an creator who wrote unsparingly about humanity’s capability for violence and oppression dwelled amid such picturesque Pacific Northwest ordinariness is reassuring. This quiet, unremarkable place would suit a diligent recluse, which Butler reportedly was. Her stories, whether set on alien planets or fictionalized Earths, rarely depicted such nurturing environments.
However the world beyond — besieged by man-made climate disasters, battered by an interminable pandemic, struggling to squelch a dangerous rise in neo-fascism — exists exactly as she imagined. She wouldn’t be surprised, and he or she wouldn’t be pleased.
Butler wrote novels and short stories with dispassionate, almost clinical prose, then centered them on principal characters driven by powerful, humane sensitivities. She’s renown equally for heady, multivolume interstellar sci-fi that explores startling alien cultures and for speculative fiction, stories that unfold on a recognizable Earth but aren’t any less compelling of their imaginings. Even her most far-flung narratives were grounded in themes of bodily autonomy, hierarchical leadership, interdependence, genetics, evolution, sexuality, race, gender, power.
She was first published within the mid-Nineteen Seventies and kept on at a prolific pace — some 15 novels and a group of short stories — just about until she died in Seattle in 2006 at 58 years old.
Butler belongs to that small class of authors — James Baldwin, N. Scott Momaday, Ursula Le Guin — who’re appreciated for what they achieved in addition to for who they were. Butler wasn’t the primary Black science fiction author, and he or she wasn’t the primary woman science fiction author, but she was the primary Black woman science fiction author to attain at the best heights of her field.
In 1995, she was the primary science fiction author ever awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, aka “Genius Grant,” which brought a money prize that helped her buy her Lake Forest Park home in 1999. Throughout the remaining of her profession, she racked up Nebulas and Hugos, science fiction’s most prestigious awards. She claimed that her fans got here from three categories: Black readers, science-fiction fans and feminists. The fourth might be the person on the intersection of that Venn diagram — the socially conscious, liberation-minded nerd who’s more visible now, almost 20 years after Butler’s death, because she helped establish the archetype herself.
IN FACT, ALL of mainstream culture is finally catching up with Octavia Butler. This arrival is partly resulting from the sad proven fact that the inklings of toxic nationalism, climate refugeeism and acute economic disparity she observed in her time and magnified in her books at the moment are entrenched in our lives. Her oracular insight, especially in her 1993 masterwork “Parable of the Sower,” reads today like journalism, and has been iconified in the shape of tote bags and T-shirts bearing the slogans “Octavia Butler tried to warn us” and “Octavia Butler knew.”
This moment can be the direct results of the precedent Butler set as a person. Her brilliance planted the seed for others like her — daring, uncompromising Black visionaries — to exist, and now that seed is germinating. At the very least five adaptations of her stories are within the works for film and streaming TV, all involving celebrated Black creatives: the postapocalyptic alien-genetic-science story “Dawn” by Ava DuVernay’s production company for Amazon; “Wild Seed,” a centuries-spanning romantic drama involving immortal superhumans co-written by award-winning sci-fi novelist Nnedi Okorafor and produced by Viola Davis for Amazon; a feature film version of “Parable of the Sower” directed by Oscar-nominated documentarian Garrett Bradley for A24; an adaptation of Butler’s last book, the revisionist vampire drama “Fledgling,” produced by Issa Rae and J.J. Abrams for HBO; and a serialized tackle the 1979 time travel/American slavery novel “Kindred,” created by fellow MacArthur Genius and playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, which premieres on FX/Hulu Dec. 13.
This Octavia Butler boom comes after not a single one among her stories was adapted to film or television during her lifetime. And it, too, she predicted.
“I shall be a bestselling author,” reads the primary line of a handwritten note she penned on the back cover of a spiral notebook in 1988. “My books will likely be read by tens of millions of individuals. So be it!” Thirty-three years later, in November 2021, “Parable of the Sower” finally made it to The Recent York Times bestseller list. Once more, Butler wrote the long run.
And she or he wrote herself into the long run — a stylistic selection that puts her squarely on the forefront of the aesthetic movement often known as Afrofuturism. She not only envisioned her real-world success as an creator but made a lot of her protagonists Black women, complex and fallible, strong-willed and sturdy. They appeared on interstellar spaceships and antebellum plantation homes, as juvenile vampires and shape-shifting healers — settings and forms that seldom had included Black people. At first of her profession, these characters were hidden by publishers that intentionally kept cover art neutral in skin tone and body shape to avoid any indication of race, though Butler wrote clear racial identities. Today it’s exactly these identities which can be gaining increasingly screen time across all genres, and specifically in sci-fi, fantasy and superhero stories.
Similarly, network television and the film studio establishment of the ’80s and ’90s had little motivation to attach Black storytellers to broad audiences. Over the past 20 years, a latest generation of Black creators and audiences has joined the conversation, amassing power and influence through financial success and cultural ascendance. The demand for these stories is bigger than ever, and the prominence of streaming allows for more means to present them.
In some ways, the world is finally ready for Octavia Butler. Which is a blessing, since the world needs Octavia Butler.
BUTLER’S STORIES SERVE as cautionary tales, warning us away from the worst facets of human behavior and their ramifications, while her empathy offers an example of how we are able to and may live. She wrote characters who were innately attuned to the nurturing and relationship-building required to thrive in community with others, especially amid apocalyptic circumstances.
Lauren Olamina, the 15-year-old protagonist of “Sower,” is afflicted by a condition called hyperempathy that causes her to literally feel other people’s pain. In a story that was published in 1993 and takes place in 2024, she leads a ragtag group from climate-ravaged, economically fractured Southern California to a safer life up north. Set amid the transatlantic slave trade, “Wild Seed” tells the story of Anyanwu, an ageless woman who can heal other living beings and even transform into them by tasting their cellular composition — one other type of enhanced empathy. The Ina, the vampire-like race in “Fledgling,” engage in mutually supportive relationships with their bite victims.
In line with friends and colleagues, Butler herself held a bone-deep concern for others in addition to for the natural world. She never married, had no children and lived alone, but she connected intensely with the few friends she kept and tended to affect those she encountered even briefly. Her home was filled with books and magazines through which she sustained a reading practice as disciplined as her writing practice, and he or she was an avid patron of NPR. She loved the landscapes of Washington, from the coast to the Cascade Mountains, and was so enamored of Mount Rainier that she’d take out-of-town visitors in a hired van on pilgrimage-like trips. She doted on other people’s pets.
The extremes of admonishment and compassion in Butler’s writing, together with the dignified but caring way she carried herself, add as much as a form of stern, sanguine humanity. This persona contributes to the virtually saintly reverence Butler elicits from fans, scholars and fellow artists all over the world. That the Pacific Northwest inspired her, and that its people were in turn inspired by her, is a badge of honor for this region. The years she spent here forge a novel, localized intimacy with each the girl and her work.
BUTLER FIRST VISITED from her hometown of Pasadena in 1985, when she was an instructor at Seattle’s renowned Clarion West writers workshop. (Over time, Clarion West instructors have included George R.R. Martin, Frank Herbert, N.K. Jemison, Ursula Le Guin, Neil Gaiman and plenty of more luminaries of sci-fi and fantasy.) After ramping up her profession, Butler reportedly sought to relocate to a small community with good public transportation and a bookstore she could walk to, as she never drove, inside proximity to a giant city. Third Place Books opened its first store in Lake Forest Park in 1998, at which point the enclave checked all of Butler’s boxes.
She arrived shortly before receiving the Nebula Award for “Parable of the Talents,” the follow-up to “Sower,” and immediately found herself affected by author’s block. In line with interviews and private journals, she made many matches and starts toward her next book, none of which gained momentum. Though the “Parable” series was critically acclaimed, the story itself is reasonably bleak, and the means of writing it had sent Butler right into a funk. The dulling effects of the hypertension medication she took added to her frustration. Perhaps the disruption attributable to the move contributed, as well. In that case, it was also the answer.
Butler and friends corresponding to Leslie Howle and Nisi Shawl — local writers she met over time and worked with at Clarion West — dined at restaurants, saw plays and movies, hiked mountains and trails to waterfalls, and explored Washington state by automobile. Together with Ray Bradbury, Steven Spielberg and others, she was a part of the inaugural advisory committee of the Science Fiction Experience, an early wing of the multivalent museum today often known as MoPOP. She taught workshops and mentored students at Clarion West, which is situated in Lake City, and gave occasional readings on the University of Washington and elsewhere. She befriended her only Black neighbor in Lake Forest Park.
Living within the Pacific Northwest rekindled her creative spark. In 2005, she published “Fledgling,” a sci-fi horror story set within the Cascade foothills that recast standard vampire mythology within the context of race, sexuality and power dynamics. One other critical hit, it was her last book.
In February 2006, a neighbor found Butler prone and unconscious on the front walk of her house. She was taken by ambulance to Northwest Hospital on the UW campus, where she was treated for internal bleeding in the top resulting from a fall, perhaps after a stroke or heart attack. Two days later, she died. Her memorial on the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, today often known as MoPop, attracted a whole lot of friends, fans and admirers from all over the world. This 12 months she would’ve turned 75.
OCTAVIA BUTLER WAS a particularly private person. Most of what we find out about her past, her interior life and her writing habits is gleaned from a dozen or so interviews she gave and essays she published. Since her death, her papers have been collected in an archive on the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Among the many manuscripts, personal notes and correspondence is the unfinished draft of the third book within the Parable series, “Parable of the Trickster,” which begins with an epigram that has been attributed to Butler herself. Conveying a poignantly Butlerian mixture of pragmatism and hope on a cosmic scale, it reads, “There may be nothing latest under the sun. But there are latest suns.”
Butler points her readers toward latest suns. Her work inspires other artists, not only via direct adaptations but in addition in music, visual art, literature, even opera. It’s studied in high schools and universities across America. Speculative fiction, visionary fiction, Afrofuturism — ways of seeing that she helped establish that since have seeped into the collective consciousness — are the channels through which all of us can envision latest and higher futures. Futures which can be ours to find out, that include humanity in all its diversity, which can be built on the reciprocal take care of one another and the Earth that Butler’s characters struggled for. Futures that inevitably will confront essentially the most consequential global challenges humankind has ever faced.
Amongst all of Butler’s books and stories, perhaps her most profound contribution is Earthseed, the fictional religion devised by the teenage hyperempath Lauren Olamina in “Parable of the Sower.” Each chapter of the novel begins with a passage from Lauren’s Earthseed journals, which she calls The Books of the Living. The primary spells out Earthseed’s core belief:
All that you simply touch
You alter.
All that you simply change
Changes you.
The one lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Discuss latest suns! Here is a wholly latest way of picturing humanity’s place within the universe: If humans understand god because the only everlasting truth, and the observable universe tells us that the one everlasting truth is change, then the notion that “god is change” is axiomatic. It’s logically provable and in addition feels right at a cellular level. In line with Earthseed, the best power is just not a supreme being but an inexorable process.
With this foundational concept, Earthseed posits adaptability — the tendency toward change despite its difficulties and discomforts — because the human characteristic that may save us from ourselves. It won’t heal the damage we’ve done to one another and the planet, but it may well ease us into the very uncertain future, and help us shape that future to make sure everyone seems to be cared for.
Earthseed spawned a latest type of real-world social organizing often known as emergent strategy, which asks that we embrace change as a discipline as we transition out of our harmful, competitive lifestyle into something more collaborative and more sustainable. It could be the one way we survive as a species and achieve Earthseed’s ultimate goal: ensuring humankind’s future by voyaging into the celebs.
That voyage is yet one more story by Octavia Butler, who actually would have words for the oligarchs who direct humanity’s contemporary space explorations.
Butler’s legacy is ever-present, living and evolving after her death. We’re tuning into it on the last possible moment, at the sting of the precipice she saw us inching ever closer to, while it possibly can still do us some good. How very human.