Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler (1947-2006) was born and raised in Pasedena, California, and attended Pasedena City College. She received a Remington typewriter at age 10. Despite many discouragments and battles with self-doubt, Butler never looked back, a dedicated writer the rest of her too-brief life. I remember Harlan Ellison writing about her in the late 70s, soon after she had him as a teacher in a writer’s workshop. In 1984 I read her short story “Bloodchild” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and like the rest of the science fiction world, I was rocked. She captured the strangeness and the drama of a radical new perspective on humanity that binded together Cordwainer Smith and Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr. and Michael Bishop. It signaled that the science fiction would not be the same from then on.
In 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, bookending this exciting news with The Parable of the Sower (1993) beforehand and The Parable of the Talents (1998) afterwards. She eventually moved to Washington state, struggling with high blood pressure and her own pressure on her work. Her influence on the next generation of writers was already being discerned when she died of a stroke at 58. Fifteen years and counting afterwards, the appreciation of what she did and what it meant for writers and readers grows year to year. The Library of America published its first volume of her work in January 2021, and a few months later NASA named the landing site of the Mars explorer Perseverance after her (a wonderfully appropriate connection).
Imago: A Lilith's Brood Novel
Imago: A Lilith's Brood Novel
From the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower:After the near-extinction of humanity, a new kind of alien-human hybrid must come to terms with their identity — before their powers destroy what is left of humankind.
Since a nuclear war decimated the human population, the remaining humans began to rebuild their future by interbreeding with an alien race — the Oankali — who saved them from near-certain extinction. The Oankalis' greatest skill lies in the species' ability to constantly adapt and evolve, a process that is guided by their third sex, theooloi, who are able to read and mutate genetic code.
Now, for the first time in the humans' relationship with the Oankali, a human mother has given birth to anooloichild: Jodahs. Throughout his childhood, Jodahs seemed to be a male human-alien hybrid. But when he reaches adolescence, Jodahs develops theooloiabilities to shapeshift, manipulate DNA, cure and create disease, and more. Frightened and isolated, Jodahs must either come to terms with this new identity, learn to control new powers, and unite what's left of humankind — or become the biggest threat to their survival.