Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler (born June 22, 1947, Pasadena, California, U.S.—died February 24, 2006, Seattle, Washington) was an African American author chiefly noted for her science fiction novels about future societies and superhuman powers. They are noteworthy for their unique synthesis of science fiction, mysticism, mythology, and African American spiritualism.

Butler was educated at Pasadena City College (A.A., 1968), California State University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Encouraged by Harlan Ellison, she began her writing career in 1970. The first of her novels, Patternmaster (1976), was the beginning of her five-volume Patternist series about an elite group of mentally linked telepaths ruled by Doro, a 4,000-year-old immortal African. Other novels in the series are Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984).

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

In Kindred (1979) a contemporary Black woman is sent back in time to a pre-Civil War plantation, becomes a slave, and rescues her white, slave-owning ancestor. Her later novels include the Xenogenesis trilogy—Dawn: Xenogenesis (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—and The Parable of the Sower (1993), The Parable of the Talents (1998), and Fledgling (2005). Butler’s short story Speech Sounds won a Hugo Award in 1984, and her story Bloodchild, about human male slaves who incubate their alien masters’ eggs, won both Hugo and Nebula awards. Her collection Bloodchild and Other Stories was published in 1995. That same year Butler became the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and in 2000 she received a PEN Award for lifetime achievement.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")