Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler was a science fiction author, celebrated for her works such as “Kindred,” “Parable of the Sower” and the Patternist series, among others.

Her 12 novels and collection of short stories featured Black characters and offered commentary on gender, race and other social issues. Butler believed including Black characters in her fiction wasn’t simply a vehicle for talking about issues of race, but that the Black community could use it to see itself in the future, according to Natalie Russell, who curated the Octavia Butler collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif.

Butler was born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1947 and wanted to be a writer from the moment that she understood that writing was a profession, Russell said.

Butler broke barriers in a genre dominated by white men. She wanted to see herself in the stories she loved. All the science fiction she was reading was about white men, so “I wrote myself in,” Butler had said.

She wanted to tell good stories, and she knew that the story had to be good and engage the reader if she wanted to address the social issues that concerned her, according to Russell. She saw science fiction as the perfect way to ask and answer questions about humanity.

She was awarded multiple Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards for her fiction. In 1995, Butler was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” the first science fiction author to be given the prestigious award.

“Parable of the Sower” made The New York Times Best Sellers list in 2020, 14 years after her death.

— Adam DeRose