Readers might see a heroic version of themselves in “hyperempathic” Olamina, who physically feels other people’s pain and studies survivalist manuals. The blended family of Parable’s black teenage narrator, Lauren Oya Olamina, lives in a gated community in Southern California, somewhat insulated from the chaos outside, “like an island surrounded by sharks.” People work from home as much as possible, and the importance of community is paramount. The book’s arrival into the mainstream perhaps mirrored the biblical lesson itself: the characters and ideas that Butler had sown twenty-seven years earlier had taken root over the intervening decades, a few fallen seeds finding the right conditions to sprout and “ fruit an hundredfold.” The resonances are hard to ignore. In Parable of the Sower, she included them all: “The freeway crowd is a heterogeneous mass-black and white, Asian and Latin, whole families are on the move with babies on backs.” have been absent” from most science-fiction literature.

In her 1980 essay “Lost Races of Science Fiction,” Butler-for many years the only black female science-fiction writer of renown-asks, “Why have there been so few minority characters in science fiction?” If science fiction routinely visits other worlds, dimensions, realities, then why can’t it “reach into the lives of ordinary, everyday humans who happen not to be white?” She laments that “Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Amerindians . . . More crucially, unlike Orwell and Atwood, Butler was intimately attuned to this country’s racial fault lines. The recent Butler renaissance has been somewhat different-partly because her profile was more obscure (though she was the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur grant). In the early days of the Trump presidency, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale surged in popularity, as though dystopian science fiction could decode our new collective dread. (As of December, Butler’s books occupied the top seven spots on Amazon’s Black and African-American Science Fiction list, with a garish new graphical adaptation of Parable at No. 12.) Butler, who died in 2006 at the age of fifty-eight, would have savored this: as late as 2004, she told an interviewer how much she longed for such validation. Set in the 2020s, as society collapses under a blowhard president named Donner, the novel entered the New York Times paperback list fourteen years after Butler’s death. Last September, as the country grappled with a new kind of mass death and seethed after a summer of police brutality and protest, the novel Parable of the Sower (1993) became Octavia E. Butler’s first bestseller. $35.Ī Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E.

Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories, by Octavia E. Butler.

Octavia butler parable series order