The book is told by Mina Simpson, a trans Lebanese doctor who travels to the Greek island of Lesbos to treat Syrian refugees. Identities such as race, homeland, gender, and career fold into one another and into the present. “So when she creates these communities, like the Earthseed, this ragtag group of people coming together because they have to find their humanity-I think that’s her wish for us.Rabih Alameddine’s sixth novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope, the California Book Club’s August selection, is attentive to how different aspects of a single self intertwine. “I think she could kind of bore into that feeling of what would it be like to float?,” says George. She was an introvert, so she would get, as she said, ‘peopled out.’ ”īutler’s introversion seems to have given her a meaningful perspective on togetherness, beyond political sloganeering.

She knew there were times she had to self-isolate because she was working or thinking. “And there’s that great line, which I’m sure you’ve run across: ‘I’m a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles.’ I love it because it is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also true about her. “She would constantly update her literary biography to give to publishers or people,” George says. In July, it was announced that Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Garrett Bradley ( Time) will write and direct her take on Parable of the Sower as a feature film to be distributed by A24.Īll the producers and writers wish that Butler were here to see her vision embraced so enthusiastically by so many. Ava DuVernay has also teamed up with Amazon on a TV adaptation of Dawn. Viola Davis’s production company, JuVee, has teamed up with Amazon to bring Wild Seed, the first book from Butler’s Patternist series, to the small screen with Wanuri Kahiu, who made the lesbian Kenyan film Rafiki, in the director’s chair. Abrams have teamed up to executive produce a Fledgling pilot for HBO. Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has written and is executive producing the pilot for a series adaptation of Kindred for FX, which Zola filmmaker Janicza Bravo will direct. Today, more than a decade and a half after Butler’s death in 2006 at age 58, those questions will be asked again as writers and directors adapt several of her novels and stories for film and television. And she just kept asking those questions: What if?” Her imagination allowed her to leap, but it was grounded in the things that were happening around us.

“A lot of these subjects were in her mind for decades, and she was really informed. “You would just open up these boxes and find folders full of things that piqued her imagination-threads she was following, from climate and politics to disease and vampires in literature,” George tells me. When Los Angeles native and journalist Lynell George was researching her book A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The Works of Octavia Butler, she was astounded by the depths of the author’s curiosity. Whatever we find novel and confounding in the current news cycles was almost certainly happening back when Butler was writing, and the many newspaper clippings in her collection of papers at Huntington Library in San Marino prove it.

If she sounds impressively ahead of her time, it’s because she was steeped in the goings-on of her era. Born and raised in Pasadena, where she also lived for much of her adult life, Butler was deeply interested in what drought and segregation in California would mean for the state’s most vulnerable populations, especially Black women, a theme she explored with unflinching intensity in Parable of the Sower. For Butler-unlike Le Guin, who died in 2018, and Delany, who is 79-the peak of her recognition has arrived posthumously.īutler’s books-from the Xenogenesis trilogy to the Parable series to her later work, including Fledgling-tackled environmental destruction, border conflicts, intergenerational trauma, and the intricacies of race, gender, and reproduction. In recent years, we’ve seen the tremendous literary contributions of these politically insightful sci-fi writers fêted rather than ghettoized.

But genre fiction was historically not considered the breeding ground for the great American novel, especially if you were Black, gay, and/or a woman (all three authors were at least one of the above). Le Guin were the only significant science fiction authors attempting such ideologically ambitious stories within the genre, placing left-of-center national politics and local histories right at the core of their plots. In the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when Butler published the bulk of her work, she, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Butler covered in her 15 novels and two story collections is traceable-but you need time.

Octavia e. butler transgender