She became the first science fiction author to receive a MacArthur “genius grant” and her literary honors included Nebula Awards for “Bloodchild” and “Parable of the Talents.” She was shy and often reclusive and would describe herself as “A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” Through the 1980s and ‘90s, her readership and reputation grew. Jemisin and others remember that the original cover for “Dawn” featured a white woman, making Jemisin all the more surprised when she read the book and realized the protagonist was black. Her first novel, “The Patternmaster,” came out in 1976, although it took her years to be able to support herself and for the industry to catch up to her. Her feelings of isolation led her to the reading, and writing, of science fiction and fantasy stories even as an aunt told her, “Honey … Negroes can’t be writers.”Īt a writers workshop in the 1970s, Harlan Ellison read her work and became an early supporter, publishing one of her stories in a science fiction anthology. “I believed I was ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless,” she once explained. Born and raised in Pasadena, California, she was black, poor and stood 6-feet-tall. “It’s hard not to read the books and think ‘How did she know?’”īutler’s own life trained her to think in new ways. “She (Butler) seems to have seen the real future coming in a way few other writers did,” says Gerry Caravan, an associate professor at Marquette University who is co-editing Butler’s work for the Library of America. Jarret’s campaign theme: “Help us to make America great again.” But these days when more half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.” “There was never such a time in this country. Religious tolerance does not suit him,” Butler wrote. “Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, ‘simpler’ time. In her 1998 novel “Parable of the Talents,” the right-wing Andrew Steele Jarret runs for president in 2032 with a message familiar to current readers. “There is something about seeing yourself in the imagination’s playground that opens up your world.”Īlys Eve Weinbaum, a professor of English at the University of Washington, says Butler broke open a genre “dominated by white men and white readers.” She is now praised as a visionary who anticipated many of the issues in the news today, from the coronavirus to climate change to the election of President Donald Trump. “I felt included in the narrative in a way I had never felt reading anything before,” said Davis, who has a deal with Amazon Studios.
Davis, in a recent interview with The Associated Press, said she began reading Butler while attending the Juilliard school 30 years ago. Grand Central Publishing is reissuing many of her novels this year and the Library of America welcomes her to the canon in 2021 with a volume of her fiction.Ī generation of younger writers cite her as an influence, from Jemisin and Tochi Onyebuchi to Marlon James and Nnedi Okarafor, currently working on a screenplay for the Butler novel “Wild Seed” for the production company run by Davis and her husband, Julius Tennon.
#OCTAVIA E BUTLER MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN SERIES#
Toshi Reagon has adapted “Parable of the Sower” into an opera, and Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay are among those working on streaming series based on her work. Her novels, including “Dawn,” “Kindred” and “Parable of the Sower,” sell more than 100,000 copies each year, according to her former literary and the manager of her estate, Merrillee Heifetz. And it’s a pretty scary place.A revolutionary voice in her lifetime, Butler has only become more popular and influential since her death 14 years ago, at age 58. As Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone last year, saying Trump “must never have heard of Google,” President Ronald Reagan “made ‘Make America Great Again’ a backbone of his campaign.” But that’s because Trump’s slogan isn’t an original one. It may seem uncanny that Butler predicted the slogan nearly 20 years before Trump literally trademarked it. Photo of a page from Parable of the Talents by writer Kashmir Hill notes: And, as a couple people have pointed out, his fictional campaign uses the same slogan as real-life presidential candidate Donald Trump: Make America Great Again. In Butler’s grim future, a hardcore patriarchal religious leader named Andrew Steele Jarret is running for president as the head of the Christian Americans party. The two books in the series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, were published in 19, but feel terribly resonant today. As water and food become scarce, private companies and religious fundamentalists take over. In a near future, America is crumbling from climate change. Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series is a master work of dystopian science fiction. A “Make America Great Again” Christmas Cookie.
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