There are the beautiful, bold affirmations which she wrote to frame her motives for writing: “Tell Stories Filled With Facts. Curator Natalie Russell describes the collection as including “8,000 manuscripts, letters and photographs and an additional 80 boxes of ephemera.” On display there now are numerous treasures, including working manuscript pages from The Parable of the Sower covered in her brightly colored notes: “More Sharing More Sickness More Death More Racism More Hispanics More High Tech.” Her many papers now reside at the Huntington, a private library in San Marino, California. In 2006, Butler died of a stroke outside her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington. Already a Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer, Butler soon became the first science fiction writer to ever receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” She said she hoped the prize, which at the time was $295,000, would help her to complete her work on the trilogy.Ī year later she published a sequel, The Parable of the Talents, in which a religion based on Lauren’s diaries, called “Earthseed,” struggles against Christian fundamentalism. At the time, Butler spoke in interviews about her ideas for the third book, The Parable of the Trickster, in which adherents of Earthseed would attempt to build a new society on another planet.īut, struggling for years with depression and writer’s block, Butler would not finish the trilogy as she planned, though she would complete several new stories and a novel, Fledgling, about a race of vampires trying to co-exist with humans. The Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and became a New York Times Notable Book the following year.

Literacy is deteriorating-and, oh yeah, there’s a charismatic President promising to make the country great again. Whole towns are being privatized by individual companies. Told through Lauren’s diaries, the novel envisions the crises facing America thirty-some years later with eerie accuracy. In this way, she created the shattered America described by Lauren Oya Olamina, a black fifteen-year-old with “hyperempathy” living in a walled-up town outside of LA in 2024. To do this, she amalgamated her own memories of growing up in the racially integrated Pasadena of the 1950s with contemporaneous news reports about rises in global warming, racism, violence, prison populations, and mega-corporations. The Parable of the Sower would be a starkly realist novel about where American might carry itself in a few short decades - if this goes on.

She had mastered the first two categories, and was intrigued by the third. In a lecture at MIT titled “‘The Devil Girl From Mars’: Why I Write Science Fiction,” Butler recalled reading that Robert Heinlein had once delineated three kinds of science fiction stories: “The what-if category the if-only category and the if-this-goes-on category.” Butler’s best-known novels, Kindred, tells the story of a modern-day black woman who travels back in time to the antebellum South to save the life of a white, slaveholding ancestor. Many of Butler’s novels featured black women protagonists who are strong, physically and mentally, and intelligent. She then drafted a story that would later become the basis for her Patternist novels.īutler realized that black people were only occasional characters in science fiction stories, and then were usually portrayed as feeble-witted. At twelve, she watched the televised version of the film, Devil Girl from Mars, and was convinced she could write a better story. “I began writing about power because I had so little”īutler began writing stories as a child and soon turned to science fiction. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established by the Carl Brandon Society to provide support to students of color to attend the Clarion Writers Workshop where Butler got her start decades before. Butler sold her first two stories at the workshop. Butler’s mother gave Butler the money she had been saving for dental work to pay the rest of the fee. He encouraged Butler to attend the 6-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania and contributed $100 towards her application fee. Butler became a protégée of the renowned science fiction writer, Harlan Ellison. Butler earned an Associate’s degree from Pasadena City College in 1968, and later studied at California State University, Los Angeles.

Octavia e butler death