Fiction of Octavia E. Butler

Spurred by a question I was asked in March—“are you an expert on Octavia Butler?” I recently finished rereading everything she wrote that is still in print. The question came after I delivered a presentation at a virtual conference on climate change predictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Those two novels are her best, I think, although rereading all of her fiction doesn’t make me an expert. It does make me—and will probably make you—an even more devoted fan of her work.

The process of rereading produced a couple of unexpected pleasures. I owned only three out of four of the “Patternist” series novels, so I found a copy of Clay’s Ark, third in the series, and read it for what seemed like the first time. (There was a fifth novel written for the series, Survival, but Butler disavowed it and it’s no longer in print.) And although I’d read the prize-winning story “Bloodchild” before, I didn’t remember reading the other stories in Bloodchild and Other Stories.

I enjoyed reading the Patternist novels in order: Wild Seed, Mind of my Mind, Clay’s Ark, Patternmaster. Clay’s Ark is about a family living in isolation for fear of starting a worldwide pandemic, so rereading it now is timely. I loved the foreshadowing at the beginning of the novel when a parent “had gotten into the habit of reassuring her without really listening to her fears; there were so many of them.” I remember doing that with my daughter.

The ark of the title is a spaceship, one created by Clay Dana, who “feared turn-of-the-century irrationality—religious overzealousness on one side, destructive hedonism on the other, with both heated by ideological intolerance and corporate greed. The Dana faction feared humanity would extinguish itself on Earth.” Ironically, the ship returns to Earth with microbes that rewrite human DNA, and the infected humans produce sentient offspring, the creatures called clayarks in Patternmaster.

I really enjoyed rereading what has come to be called the Xenogenesis series in order: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago. They are good science fiction, with complicated and interesting aliens.

Kindred is, of course, a stand-alone masterpiece, close behind the Parable novels in terms of being one of Butler’s best. I didn’t like Fledgling, the vampire novel, as much this time around; it’s a fine story but it seems like vampire stories are a dime a dozen these days.

What’s great about Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents is the way we see that belief in change helps prepare the protagonist, Lauren, to survive, as she sees that those who look to the past—to some possibility of living the way we used to–perish. Parable of the Talents was published in 1998 as a sequel to the events in the Parable of the Sower (1993), and it describes the election of a president who “insists on being a throwback to some earlier, ‘simpler’ time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping on anyone who was different” (18). The fictional president actually uses the phrase “make America great again” (18).

Many of Butler’s other predictions from these two novels have come true. Readers may well wonder how much farther we have to go until we’re living, armed and homeless, in the world of the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents, after a “period of upheaval…from 2015 through 2030” (PT, 8).

The last public gathering I attended was a performance of an opera entitled The Parable of the Sower by Toshi and Bernice Johnson Reagon at Royce Hall, UCLA on Saturday, March 7, 2020. There was a sing-along in the middle, and everyone clapped in time to songs about change. Change has overtaken us more suddenly than anyone thought it might; reading Octavia Butler’s fiction might help you come to terms with some of it in the present and prevent the worst dangers she saw coming for us in the future.