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).
Adulthood Rites: A Lilith's Brood Novel
Adulthood Rites: A Lilith's Brood Novel
From the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower:After the near-extinction of the human race, one young man with extraordinary gifts will reveal whether the human race can learn from its past and rebuild their future . . . or is doomed to self-destruction.
In the future, nuclear war has destroyed nearly all humankind. An alien race intervenes, saving the small group of survivors from certain death. But their salvation comes at a cost.
The Oankali are able to read and mutate genetic code, and they use these skills for their own survival, interbreeding with new species to constantly adapt and evolve. They value the intelligence they see in humankind but also know that the species—rigidly bound to destructive social hierarchies—is destined for failure. They are determined that the only way forward is for the two races to produce a new hybrid species—and they will not tolerate rebellion.
Akin looks like an ordinary human child. But as the first true human-alien hybrid, he is born understanding language, then starts to form sentences at two months old. He can see at a molecular level and kill with a touch. More powerful than any human or Oankali, he will be the architect of both races' future. But before he can carry this new species into the stars, Akin must reconcile with his own heritage in a world already torn in two.