She explored the ways that bodies could be made instruments of alien intentions, a motif that recurs throughout her fiction in ever more fantastic guises: mind control, gene modification, body-snatching, motherhood. (“Short story writing,” she notes in the preface to “ Bloodchild and Other Stories,” “has taught me much more about frustration and despair than I ever wanted to know.”) But the collection’s variety also reveals the clarity of purpose in a body of work that ranged broadly among species, genres, and millennia.īutler’s great subject was intimate power, of the kind that transforms relationships into fulcrums of collective destiny. In some ways, it’s an unusual assortment, gathering short works by a writer who preferred the capaciousness of trilogies and tetralogies. The volume collects Butler’s essays and short stories as well as her two stand-alone novels: “ Kindred” (1979), the classic neo–slave narrative, and “ Fledgling” (2005), a late-life vampire story. Delany, who once taught Butler, will be next.) Nisi Shawl, a writer and a close friend of Butler’s, who edited the volume with the scholar and biographer Gerry Canavan, introduces the book by heralding the “canonization of discomfort.” Butler is the sixth science-fiction writer to be featured in the landmark series, and the first Black science-fiction writer.

Now the Library of America has published the first volume of her collected works. (A few days later, the Bobcat Fire prompted evacuation warnings in Butler’s home town of Pasadena.) Earthseed’s precepts have inspired an opera, by the folksinger Toshi Reagon, and, last September, “Parable of the Sower” débuted on the Times best-seller list nearly three decades after its first publication.

Isaac Asimov captured the spirit of Pax Americana in his mid-century “ Foundation” series, a saga of galactic expansion through soft power and advanced economics Butler may have a similar relationship to our own stunned era of slow-motion ecological catastrophe.

It’s often observed that the “Parables,” already prescient when they were published, now read like prophecy. She leads a band of refugees north, dreaming of an extraterrestrial future in a sequel, “Parable of the Talents” (1998), her small sect confronts a fundamentalist President who wants to “make America great again.” Only Lauren, a teen-ager afflicted with “hyperempathy,” has the courage (or inexperience) to imagine an alternative: a survivalist gospel of constant adaptation that she calls Earthseed. Her friend demurs: “My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.” Others take refuge in criminal enterprises, Christian worship, or even indentured servitude, exchanging their freedom for security in a neo-feudal company town.

Wild seed octavia butler series