Octavia E. Butler writes: "I'm a 48-year-old writer who can
remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer.
I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if
I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of
ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
I've had ten novels published so far: Patternmaster, Mind of my
Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay's Ark, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, and Parable
of the Sower, as well as a collection of my shorter work, entitled Bloodchild. I've also
had short stories published in anthologies and magazines. One, "Speech Sounds,"
won a Hugo Award as best short story of 1984. Another, "Bloodchild," won both
the 1985 Hugo and the 1984 Nebula awards as best novelette."�Octavia Butler
Of Special Note: In 1995 Octavia E. Butler was awarded a
MacArthur Grant. In what is popularly called the genius program, the John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation rewards creative people who push the boundaries of their fields.
Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest
New-Wave Trajectory
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Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Ohio State University Press; 2 edition (May 8, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0814210783
Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest
New-Wave Trajectory, edited by Marleen S. Barr, is the first combined
science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus
upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a
dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate
fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms
of gender. The contributors, including
Hortense
Spillers,
Samuel R. Delany,
Octavia E. Butler,
and
Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by
repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as
a broader fantastic endeavor. They articulate a platform for scholars to
mount a vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to
encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a
range of black women's writing that would otherwise be excluded.
Afro-Future Females builds upon Barr's previous work in black science
fiction and fills a gap in the literature. It is the first critical
anthology to address the "blackness" of outer space fiction in terms of
feminism, emphasizing that it is necessary to revise the very nature of
a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new
black participants. Black science fiction writers alter genre
conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself. The
work's main point: black science fiction is the most exciting literature
of the nascent twenty-first century.
About the Editor: Marleen S. Barr
is a science fiction pioneer who broke new ground in feminist science
fiction criticism with her book Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction
and Feminist Theory. She won the Science Fiction Research Association
Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement in science fiction criticism.
Fledgling, Octavia Butler's first new novel in seven years, is the story of
an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and
abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically
modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her
stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted-and still
wants-to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself.
Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of "otherness" and
questions what it means to be truly human.
Griots Beneath the Baobab:
Tales from Los Angeles
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Randy Ross (Editor)
Paperback: 190 pages
Publisher: Larod Publishing Company (April 5, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0966267516
ISBN-13: 978-0966267518
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
Griots Beneath the Baobab, the latest anthology published by International Black
Writers and Artists of Los Angeles (IBWA-LA), honors the creative spirit of some
of America's most insightful griots�by way of L.A. Griots features powerful
stories by noted, award-winning, and best-selling writers Donald Bakeer,
Octavia
E. Butler, Wanda Coleman,
Stanley Crouch,
Eric Jerome Dickey, Sikivu Hutchinson,
Silas Jones, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Gary Phillips, Randy Ross, Jervey Tervalon, and
Ellery Washington.
Format: Paperback, 752pp.
ISBN: 0446676101
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Pub. Date: June 2000
The classic trilogy complete in one volume: Dawn, Adulthood Rites,
and Imago
The acclaimed trilogy that comprises Lilith's Brood is
multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winner Octavia E. Butler at her best.
Presenting three complete novels in one volume, Lilith's Brood is
a profoundly evocative, sensual--and disturbing--epic of human
transformation.
Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when
war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected--by miraculously
powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to
heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging
genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the
world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: their own children.
This is their story...
The award-winning author of The Parable of the Sower explores the
paradoxes of power and inequality in this highly imaginative
collection of parables for the contemporary world. "Bloodchild, "
the title piece, has received both Hugo and Nebula Awards.
Synopsis
This volume comprises five stories and two essays by the science
fiction writer. The title story "takes place on a distant world
whose dominant species--highly intelligent, egg laying
'worms'--live in a symbiotic relationship with human beings. . . .
The first humans to arrive on this planet were refugees, in flight
from members of their own species 'who would have killed or
enslaved them.' In exchange for permanent asylum, the humans
provide an indispensable service to their hosts." ―N Y Times Book
Rev
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Date Published: October 1998
In this long-awaited
novel, Butler revisits familiar themes of a society in 2032 whose very fabric has been
torn, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to
meet. 30,000 first print.
Author: with Robert Crossley (Introduction)
Publisher: Beacon Press
Date Published: August 1988
Format: Trade Paper
"One of my personal favorites" �AALBC.com founder
Troy Johnson
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with
her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California
and transported to the antebellum South. With more than 100,000 copies in
print, Kindred is a classic time travel novel by an acclaimed
African-American science fiction writer.
The
Parable of the Sower
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Amazon
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: December 1994
Format: Trade Paper
A stirring portrait of 21st-century America by the author of Wild Seed. Forced to flee an
America where anarchy and violence have completely taken over, empath Lauren Olamina--who
can feel the pain of others and is crippled by it--becomes a prophet carrying the hope of
a new world and a new faith christened "Earthseed." Previous publisher: Four
Walls/Eight Windows.
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: March 1997
Format: Mass Market Paperbound
Lilith lyapo awoke from a centuries-long sleep to find herself aboard the vast spaceship
of the Oankali. Creatures covered in writhing tentacles, the Oankali had saved every
surviving human from a dying, ruined Earth. They healed the planet, cured cancer,
increased strength, and were now ready to help Lilith lead her people back to Earth--but
for a price.
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: March 1997
Format: Trade Paper
Told in the haunting voice of Lilith, the heroine of "Dawn", this book is
thestory of Lilith's only son, Akin. Though he resembles a normal human, Akin isthe first
"construct"--part man/part alien.
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published: June 1994
Format: Trade Paper
For 4,000 years, an immortal has spread the seeds of a master race, using the downtrodden
as his private breeding stock. But now a young ghetto telepath has found a way to
awaken--and rule--her superhuman kind, igniting a psychic battle as she challenges her
creator for her right to free her people.
Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest
New-Wave Trajectory
Fledgling
Griots Beneath the Baobab:
Tales from Los Angeles
Bloodchild:
And Other Stories
Parable
of the Talents
Kindred
The
Parable of the Sower
Dawn
Adulthood
Rites
Clay's
Ark
Mind
of My Mind