New York Magazine

The Spectacula­r Life of Octavia E. Butler

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move that would seriously expand the book’s readership. That Christmas, she paid off the mortgage on her mother’s house.

Butler was in her 40s now. She wanted to write her “magnum opus,” but felt she had lost some of the fuel that had kept her going so far. “In a way, I have run dry,” she wrote in a moment of discourage­ment. “You start to repeat yourself or you write from research and/or formula. I’m like an old prodigy who has run on ‘instinct’ for years, and now must learn her craft all over again because instinct has failed.”

When she was looking for ideas, Butler would do what she called “grazing,” which in practice meant having any number of books open around the house and perusing whatever might be of interest to her: environmen­tal science, anthropolo­gy, microbiolo­gy, Black history, political studies. Lately, she had been taken by the Gaia hypothesis, an idea tendered by the scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis that Earth is like a human body, a synergisti­c, self-regulating whole that we are a part of despite our behavior to the contrary.

What if she were to graft this idea onto space-colonizati­on narratives? Wouldn’t a planet reject humans like a body rejecting an organ transplant? What if, instead of enacting the same hostile-native scenario, interstell­ar colonists were afflicted by the environmen­t and tiny bacteria? Humans would have to learn how to synergize and work with the planet, rather than carry on with their smash-and-grab attitude. This could be a series exploring different worlds and their peculiar challenges. “I’m researchin­g now and playing with ideas, but I know by the way this feels that I’ve got something good,” she wrote in a 1989 letter to her agent, Merrilee Heifetz, who had taken over from Eth. “I’ve a convention and a week of Clarion coming up, so I can’t quite hide out with 30 or 40 books and my typewriter. That’s what I feel like doing. You see, this is what I’m like when I’m in love.”

The resulting book, Parable of the

Sower, begins in Southern California in the year 2024. Earth, ravaged by the climate crisis called “the Apocalypse,” or “the Pox,” is beyond repair. People have become chained to systems of indentured servitude by company-owned cities. The narrative follows Lauren Olamina, a precocious 15-year-old living in a gated community surrounded by adults who try to fortify its defenses. She knows this safety is an illusion and records her beliefs secretly in a notebook. She suffers from a hyperempat­hy disorder, a crippling condition that causes her to “feel” what others feel. It forces her to be a tougher, faster decisionma­ker. She becomes the magnetic leader of a new religion but works slowly and subtly through actions and common sense.

Over four years, Butler rewrote the first 75 pages several times. “Everything I wrote seemed like garbage,” she said. Poetry finally broke the block. “I was forced to pay attention word by word, line by line,” she said. In the book, Lauren calls her belief system Earthseed—a fusion of Heraclitus, Darwin, and the Buddha that revolves around the core principle that “God is change.” She advocates for adaptabili­ty and communalit­y as the path of survival for the species. The Earthseed verses take the form of Butler’s own motivation­al writing, which had transforme­d from self-help contracts into poetry. “One of the first poems I wrote sounded like a nursery rhyme. It begins: God is power, and goes on to: God is malleable. This concept gave me what I needed,” she wrote. The ultimate goal of Earthseed’s adherents is to shape the Destiny, which will allow humans to “take root among the stars.” Space colonizati­on was Butler’s equivalent to building a cathedral. She believed only some extraordin­ary feat like space travel could bring people together in a common goal. “Earthseed doesn’t just reconcile science fiction and religion,” wrote her biographer Gerry Canavan. “It remakes science fiction as religion.”

Parable of the Sower was published in 1993. She liked her editor at the time, Dan Simon, who listened when she told him who her various audiences were and sent her out on a book tour. She spoke at independen­t Black-owned, science-fiction, and feminist bookstores. For the first time, the New York Times reviewed her work (albeit as part of a science-fiction roundup). The greater culture was shifting to meet her. “She was coming into more consciousn­ess because of the growth of Black publishing,” said her writer friend Tananarive Due. “When the Black Books movement took off in the 1990s, a lot of us were caught in that wind.”

On June 9, 1995, Butler received an unexpected call. It was from the MacArthur Foundation, informing her that she had been awarded one of its famed “Genius” grants. She was so surprised that she didn’t ask about the particular­s. In her journals, she gave the award a code name:

U.B., for Uncle Boisie, a.k.a. A. Guy, possibly as a reference to a male academic who had nominated her. “This isn’t real yet,” she wrote. “It won’t be until the letter arrives. What am I to do? Let us consider sensible behavior.” She would enroll in the foundation’s health plan. She would get life insurance and add her mother as its recipient.

The following week, she got the official letter informing her that she would be granted a total of $295,000 over five years. It would be the largest sum of money she received in her lifetime. The letter read:

Your award carries with it no obligation­s to the Foundation of any kind. The Foundation has no expectatio­n that your work will retain the form or direction it has to date, nor that you should consult the Foundation about changes. Quite simply, your award is for you to use for whatever purposes you choose.

She made a photocopy of it and, per her habit, started doing the math in the margins: $28,500 in 1995. 1996, $57,500. 1997, $58,500. 1999, $59,500. “A chance to write and to meet daughterly obligation­s,” she wrote.

A year later, her mother had a stroke and was hospitaliz­ed for three weeks before dying. Butler rarely spoke about the death publicly or with friends. “I wrote nothing of value for some time,” she said. Her grief focused her as well. She had been in a rut with Parable of the Talents, the second in the series (which in recent years would become known for featuring a fascist president, Andrew Steele Jarret, who proclaims he will “Make America Great Again”). “Later, when I came back to the novel, I found myself much less inclined to be gentle with my character,” Butler said, referring to Lauren. “Also I found that I needed to see her not only through her own eyes but through those of her daughter.” Butler would say this was “my mother’s last gift to me.” On her mother’s headstone, Butler wrote: “Beloved Mother / Octavia Margaret Butler/1914–1996/God is Love.”

AFEW YEARS AFTER her mother’s death, Butler bought a house in Lake Forest Park just north of Seattle: a three-bedroom ranchstyle home with neatly trimmed hedges in front and towering cypress trees in back. She turned one of the bedrooms into a library filled wall to wall with books and another into a study where she would write. Crucially, the house was right off a bus line she could take to U Street to go to events and to the bookstore. She was no longer the girl who would freeze up in

class and spoke regularly at conference­s, universiti­es, schools, and festivals with authority and presence. In addition to the financial stability, the MacArthur grew her stature. She was the first sciencefic­tion writer to win the grant—a fact the genre’s community seemed to belatedly acknowledg­e when Parable of the Talents won the Nebula for Best Novel in 2000. That year, Butler also received a PEN Lifetime Achievemen­t Award. “All of the sudden, people who had not paid any attention to my work began to pay attention to me,” she said in an interview with Charlie Rose. Her goal of $100,000 in savings had changed to $1,000,000. With the completion of the first two

Parable books, she had finally set the stage for Earthseed believers to go to the stars. She had an ambitious plan of four more novels with the same title formulatio­n— Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay—set on other planets. True to its name, Parable of the Trickster confounded her. Butler wrote dozens of fragments that never moved beyond exposition. She explored a variety of ailments the planet might afflict on new arrivals: blindness or hallucinat­ions, a body-jumping disease or a “nearly lethal homesickne­ss.” Nothing was working. Republican­s continued to depress her, particular­ly George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Afghanista­n. She needed a break, so she started writing Fledgling, a sexy polyamorou­s vampire novel, instead.

But writing had become generally difficult. Beginning in the late ’90s, Butler began to feel fatigued. She was taking medication for high blood pressure and heart arrhythmia but felt the drugs were sapping her strength and sex drive. She kept notes of her symptoms—shortness of breath, nausea, back pain, hair loss. Her condition continued to deteriorat­e into the new millennium. She got pneumonia that was misdiagnos­ed and left untreated for weeks. Soon, she couldn’t walk more than half a block without getting tired. “I’m not functionin­g,” she wrote in 2004. “I sit and drowse a lot. I know I’m not thinking very well, and I’m certainly not breathing very well.”

On February 24, 2006, Butler’s friend Leslie Howle was supposed to pick her up to bring her to a local conference. Howle and Butler had met in Seattle in 1985 when Butler was a teacher at Clarion and Howle was a student. Howle remembers her then: young and mosquito bitten and grinning after her trip to Peru. That week, Howle became her chauffeur, a role she would continue to fill over the years, particular­ly once Butler moved to Seattle. Howle would drive her on grocery runs to Whole Foods and Costco, and they would take hiking expedition­s to Wallace Creek,

Mount Rainier, and the ice caves. “She really loved getting out in nature,” said Howle. “If Octavia had a place where she saw God, that was it.”

Before she left the house that day to pick up her friend, Howle received word that Butler had died. She had fallen outside of her home, hitting her head on the concrete. She was 58 years old. She had been complainin­g that weekend about dizziness, nausea, and swollen ankles; she had even called her doctor, who told her she just had the flu and to rest up. Up until then, the medical advice she had received was to exercise more. “I am furious about that because when we’d go hiking, she would be striding up switchback­s and I’d be panting along behind her,” said Howle. “And she’d be like, ‘Oh, do you want me to wait for you?’”

“What happened with Octavia didn’t need to happen,” Howle continued. “Despite being the incredibly powerful person she was, she did not assert herself with her doctor. Even today, doctors discount women of a certain age and women of color. Some of it’s racism, some of it’s ageism, some of it’s sexism—but all the ‘-isms’ conspired against her in the end is what I feel. She needed more people who were protective of her.”

Shortly after Butler’s death, Howle organized a memorial service for her at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in Seattle. On short notice, over 200 people gathered, including her friends the writers Vonda McIntyre, Nisi Shawl, and Harlan Ellison, via video. Howle remembered the way Butler would end calls by saying, “I’ll be seeing you, then.” Butler’s cousin Ernestine Walker said, “There is an African proverb: ‘As long as you speak my name, I live.’”

Butler’s name has only continued to grow. Since 2004, when BookScan began tracking numbers, over 1.5 million copies of her books have been sold. A Clarion scholarshi­p, her onetime middle school in Pasadena, and a studio lab at the Los Angeles Public Library now all bear her name. In 2021, NASA named the landing site of the Mars Rover

Perseveran­ce the Octavia E. Butler Landing Site. The playwright and fellow MacArthur grantee Branden Jacobs Jenkins had been pitching a television adaptation of Kindred since 2016, but it wasn’t until the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 that networks got serious. His is the first out of the gate. Viola Davis is working on a TV adaptation of Wild Seed for Amazon, Issa Rae and J.J. Abrams are producing Fledgling, A24 acquired the rights to Parable of the Sower, and according to the director of the Butler estate, Jules Jackson, there’s a “humongous bidding war” for Dawn now.

Her most lasting legacy, though, is her writing, published and unpublishe­d. Butler left her papers to the Huntington Library in her will, and she had seemingly kept everything: every journal, notebook, scrap of paper, envelope, contract (official and personal), card, reader letter, photograph, press clipping, diary, datebook, and draft. She kept the correspond­ence she received and made copies of the letters she sent— just in case. All told, the Octavia E. Butler archive contains 9,062 pieces held in 386 boxes, one volume, two binders, and 18 broadsides. She saved everything except the rejection slips she threw out in a fit of despair when she was young. The archive is evidence of the breadth of a writer’s life: her labor, her joy, her pain, and her greatest love.

Today, her writing is often read inspiratio­nally and aspiration­ally. Some have taken the tenets of Earthseed literally as a philosophy of living. “Octavia Butler knew” is a common response to cataclysm. Butler did not believe in utopia, but there is a deep strain of hope in how people engage with her work: a desire to learn how to save ourselves from this mess we’ve made. She wasn’t sure imperfect people could ever create a perfect world, but they could try. In an epigram for Parable of the Trickster, she wrote:

There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.

What the archives show is how much she struggled with hope herself. She was “a pessimist if I’m not careful.” When she was working on a novel, her drafts tended to reveal the crueler sides of human nature. She didn’t like Lauren Olamina at first because she saw the character as a power seeker. Earlier iterations of Parable depicted her as a calculated leader who orders assassinat­ions on her enemies and puts shock collars on those who try to leave Earthseed. But the version of Lauren in the finished book is wise, practical, strong—someone who could grow a community into a movement. If Butler had been writing idealized selves since childhood, Lauren was the young adult she wished she had been, and her rise into myth has come to resemble her character’s. You could understand this as a function of her desire for commercial success: We all need heroes. But another way to see it is that hope is not a given. It was through rewriting that she was able to imagine not only the darkest possible futures, but how to survive within them. Hope and writing were an entwined practice, the work of endless revision. ■

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