How Octavia E. Butler ReimaginesSex and SurvivalThe parasites, hybrids, and vampires of herscience fiction make the price of persistingviscerally real.By Julian Lucas March 8, 2021
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Butler’s prodigies of survival are forced to confront adaptation’s hidden costs.Photograph by Alice
Arnold
In Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower” (1993), a climate-change Book of Exodus set in a scorched mid-twenty-twentiesCalifornia, a preacher’s daughter named Lauren Oya Olamina tries toconvince a friend that their world has veered off course. Disastersurrounds their fortified suburb of Los Angeles: water shortages, ameasles epidemic, fires set by drug-addicted pyromaniacs, and
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bandits who prey on the unhoused multitudes that roam the lawlesshighways. Outsiders throw severed limbs over the walls of theirneighborhood, “gifts of envy and hate.” Lauren knows it’s time to getout:
I’m talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate,crazy people outside decide to come in. I’m talking about whatwe’ve got to do before that happens so that we can survive andrebuild—or at least survive and escape to be something other thanbeggars. . . . We’ll be hit and hit and hit, then the big hit will come.And if we’re not ready for it, it will be like Jericho.
Her friend demurs: “My mother is hoping this new guy, PresidentDonner, will start to get us back to normal.” Others take refuge incriminal enterprises, Christian worship, or even indentured servitude,exchanging their freedom for security in a neo-feudal company town.Only Lauren, a teen-ager afflicted with “hyperempathy,” has thecourage (or inexperience) to imagine an alternative: a survivalistgospel of constant adaptation that she calls Earthseed. She leads aband of refugees north, dreaming of an extraterrestrial future; in asequel, “Parable of the Talents” (1998), her small sect confronts afundamentalist President who wants to “make America great again.”
It’s often observed that the “Parables,” already prescient when theywere published, now read like prophecy. Isaac Asimov captured thespirit of Pax Americana in his mid-century “Foundation” series, a sagaof galactic expansion through soft power and advanced economics;Butler may have a similar relationship to our own stunned era of slow-motion ecological catastrophe. Earthseed’s precepts have inspired anopera, by the folksinger Toshi Reagon, and, last September, “Parableof the Sower” débuted on the Times best-seller list nearly three
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decades after its first publication. (A few days later, the Bobcat Fireprompted evacuation warnings in Butler’s home town of Pasadena.)
Now the Library of America has published the first volume of hercollected works. Butler is the sixth science-fiction writer to befeatured in the landmark series, and the first Black science-fictionwriter. (One hopes that Samuel R. Delany, who once taught Butler, willbe next.) Nisi Shawl, a writer and a close friend of Butler’s, who editedthe volume with the scholar and biographer Gerry Canavan,introduces the book by heralding the “canonization of discomfort.”
The volume collects Butler’s essays and short stories as well as hertwo stand-alone novels: “Kindred” (1979), the classic neo–slavenarrative, and “Fledgling” (2005), a late-life vampire story. In someways, it’s an unusual assortment, gathering short works by a writerwho preferred the capaciousness of trilogies and tetralogies. (“Shortstory writing,” she notes in the preface to “Bloodchild and OtherStories,” “has taught me much more about frustration and despairthan I ever wanted to know.”) But the collection’s variety also revealsthe clarity of purpose in a body of work that ranged broadly amongspecies, genres, and millennia.
Butler’s great subject was intimate power, of the kind that transformsrelationships into fulcrums of collective destiny. She explored theways that bodies could be made instruments of alien intentions, amotif that recurs throughout her fiction in ever more fantastic guises:mind control, gene modification, body-snatching, motherhood. Herprotagonists often begin as fugitives or captives, but emerge asprodigies of survival, improvising their way through unprecedentedsituations only to find that adaptation exacts hidden costs.
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Butler began writing early. Growing up in Pasadena, where she wasborn in 1947, she was a shy only child, embarrassed by herconspicuous height. She first tried her hand at magic-horse stories,and switched to science fiction after a formative viewing of theschlocky British space adventure “Devil Girl from Mars.” Even attwelve, Butler was convinced that she could do better; soon, she wassubmitting to local story contests and borrowing money from hermother, who cleaned houses for a living, to hire an agent. (He turnedout to be a con artist.)
A practical aunt counselled her that “Negroes” couldn’t be writers. Yetalthough Butler had “never read a printed word that I knew to havebeen written by a Black person,” she was undeterred. “Positiveobsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraidand full of doubts,” she wrote in a 1989 essay for Essence. “Positiveobsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”
She was a library-dweller, a writer of affirmations, an aficionada ofself-hypnosis, and a diligent apprentice at her craft. After she’dearned an associate’s degree at Pasadena City College, she enrolledin workshops that competed for time with gigs like telephone solicitorand potato-chip inspector. (Sometimes she woke up at 2 A.M. to writebefore work.) Her career has been as inspiring as her books for thewriters who consider themselves—to crib the title of adrienne mareebrown and Walidah Imarisha’s 2015 anthology—“Octavia’s Brood.”
The first story Butler sold,“Childfinder,” was written for a workshop ledby Harlan Ellison, in 1971. A vignette about a racial schism in aclandestine organization of telepaths, it looked ahead to the series ofnovels that inaugurated her literary career, though five difficult yearspassed before her first book, “Patternmaster,” was published. A down-
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and-out L.A. haunts the periphery of her fiction: factory workers withabusive lovers, fights on city buses, killings in a city whose inhabitantssuddenly lose the ability to speak. The volatile bonds of desperatepeople living and working in close quarters seem to have provided amodel for telepathy in her fiction, an ability that tortures its adeptswith the mental noise of others’ pain. Empathy, in her work, is oftenless a virtue than a vulnerability or a weapon.
“Patternmaster” takes place in a depopulated future Earth ruled bydespotic telepaths, who draw their strength from a “vast network ofmental links” called the Pattern. It’s an engaging story about a psychicsuccession struggle, with glimmers of the devious reproductivequandaries that would become Butler’s watermark. She also hints at amysterious immortal “Founder,” whose machinations drive two laterprequels. (The novel and its four prequels are collected in the singlevolume “Seed to Harvest.”)
The Patternist novels established Butler as a science-fiction writer; adegree of crossover appeal came with “Kindred,” in 1979. She won aHugo and a Nebula for the story “Bloodchild,” in the mid-nineteen-eighties, but spent years trying to move beyond the genre market.Outside of it, her work was noticed by such Black women writers asToni Cade Bambara and Thulani Davis, and excerpted in Essence—oneof whose writers seemed surprised to find nuanced ideas in a genreassociated with “overgrown juveniles.” But mainstream literary editors,including Toni Morrison, at Random House, didn’t buy manuscriptsthat Butler wanted to set before a wider audience.
The nineties were a breakout decade. Frustrated by publishers’refusals to send her on book tours, she signed with an independentpress, which promoted her work to Black and feminist booksellers.
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“Parable of the Sower” won critical acclaim, and in 1995 Butlerbecame the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur grant.The honor coincided with a growing interest in how Black writers,artists, and musicians drew on the dislocation of the past in criticallyreflecting on the future. The critic Mark Dery called it “Afrofuturism,”and Butler has become its most widely recognized literary avatar.
Perhaps her greatest talent was the clear evocation of thinking in acrisis. The thrill of her fiction lies in its learn-or-die urgency, conveyedin a streamlined prose of situational awareness. The brinkmanship ofthe Reagan era inspired her standout Xenogenesis trilogy, collected inthe volume “Lilith’s Brood.” (Ava DuVernay is producing a TV seriesbased on the first installment, “Dawn.”) It begins in a womblike cell ona living spaceship, where Lilith Iyapo, one of the only survivors of anuclear war, waits for her captor-saviors to show themselves. They arepart of a galactic diaspora of tentacled bipedal “gene traders,” theOankali, who propose a merger of the species. The scheme is not onlythe price they exact for repopulating Earth but a biological necessity.“We are committed to the trade as your body is to breathing,” oneexplains. “We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will bedone—to the rebirth of your people and mine.” Lilith is to be the firstmother of this hybrid species, and an evangelist for Oankali-humaninterbreeding to fellow-survivors, many of whom consider her a traitor.
Nearly all of Butler’s protagonists face the accusation that theirsurvival is a form of complicity, and none more acutely than theprotagonist of “Kindred.” Dana, a twenty-six-year-old Black writerliving in nineteen-seventies Altadena, California, is transported back intime to a small plantation in antebellum Maryland each time her whiteancestor Rufus Weylin is in danger. Rufus grows up to inherit theplantation, while Dana, who repeatedly saves his life, attempts to
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awaken him to the injustice of slavery. “Not all children let themselvesbe molded into what their parents want them to be,” she reasons. Herwhite husband, Kevin, who accompanies her to the plantation, isskeptical, objecting that she’s “gambling against history.”
The novel’s enduring power lies in how it forces Dana not simply toexperience slavery but also to accept it as a condition of her ownexistence: “Was that why I was here? . . . To insure my family’ssurvival, my own birth.” The double bind deepens when Dana learnsthat this survival depends on Rufus’s enslavement and rape of a freeBlack woman named Alice. Dana doesn’t just fail in her efforts toenlighten Rufus (empathy lessons being no match for lust andimpunity); she also becomes an unwilling accomplice in hisdepredations. Rufus uses her as a go-between with Alice, figuring thatDana, who needs Alice as an ancestor, might discourage her fromtaking the potentially fatal step of resisting him or running away.
“Kindred” helped to create a genre, the neo–slave narrative, that stillflourishes. Its dark fairy-tale conceit has marked not only a recentcrop of literary descendants—books such as Colson Whitehead’s “TheUnderground Railroad” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Water Dancer”—but the art of Kara Walker, the domestic horror of films like “Get Out,”the speculative scholarship of Saidiya Hartman (who cites Dana’sodyssey in her influential essay “Venus in Two Acts”), and the broaderculture of remembrance, to the extent that even those who have neverread the novel are familiar with the motif of a plantation looming overthe present like a ghostly double. Maybe too familiar: the “Kindred”-like film “Antebellum,” starring Janelle Monáe, was widely panned.
The genre’s evolution has thrown some of the novel’s weaknesses intorelief. Its big-house entourage is crammed with stereotypes, from the
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world-weary auntie in the kitchen to the hysterical laudanum-sippingmistress. “Kindred” also sidelines contact among the enslaved in favorof the drama between Black and white. The narrative revolves aroundDana’s relationships with Rufus and Kevin, falling back—despiteButler’s original treatment of hybridity elsewhere—on the perennialcliché of interracial contacts pregnant with the future of the country.(Danzy Senna lampooned this trope in her essay “MulattoMillennium.”) Meanwhile, Alice, Dana’s ancestress, never becomesmuch more than a moral quandary: a stubborn victim who is unable toadapt.
Even so, the novel’s premise feels newly mordant in an era when Blackwomen have been hailed as the saviors of American democracy,whether they like it or not. “Kindred” takes place during the UnitedStates bicentennial, and Dana’s last trip back to the plantation takesplace on July 4th. Her time-travelling mission begins to look less likean opportunity to change history than like a confirmation that itcouldn’t have been otherwise. Or is it that Dana, in saving Rufus, hasby extension saved America?
In one uncomfortable scene, Dana compliments Kevin by saying thathe looks like “a heroic portrait” of Andrew Jackson. Whether it’ssarcasm, an earnest moment of interracial patriotism, or a cry fromthe sunken place, this certainly wasn’t the future that Alice might havehoped for. “We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” goes one popularaffirmation; Butler raises the disquieting proposition that we are, atleast some of the time, their parasites.
Dana is forced to confront the monstrosity of her origins. Shori, theBlack vampire protagonist of Butler’s final novel, “Fledgling,” is herselfa monstrosity, the half-human result of an experiment to create an
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“Ina,” as the novel’s vampires call themselves, who can endure thesun. Butler didn’t invent the melanin-armored daywalker (the Marvelsuperhero Blade was there first), but she did give it a new politicalcharge: Shori and her family are attacked by agents of a conservative,old-line Ina family—night-supremacist blue-blood-suckers—whoconsider her a threat to their species’ integrity. With the help of otherIna, she confronts them in a vampire trial of the millennium.
Shori is the archetypal hybrid of destiny: confused, persecuted, yetultimately more powerful than the monoracials. She begins the novelin a cave, severely wounded after an attack, completely unaware ofwho or what she might be. Soon, she hitches a ride with Wright, ayoung white man who smells delicious. Shori looks about eleven—though she’s really fifty-three—and Wright offers to drive her to thepolice station or the hospital. After she bites him, the destination shiftsto Wright’s cabin. Blood-sucking, predictably, turns out to be highlyerotic.
Wright becomes Shori’s “symbiont,” growing as dependent on hervenom as she is on his blood. He’s the first of many in the diverseflock that Shori gathers while fleeing her attackers, and, as they makecontact with other Ina, the outlines of a society emerge. Each adult Ina“feeds” on half a dozen or so human symbionts, who lose theirfreedom but gain in health and life span. They all live together,improvising a spectrum of familial and sexual relationships. Butler’sdomestic Draculas reside not in towers or sarcophagi but in cozysubdivisions with chosen families of human beings.
Beginning with the squicky idea of a vampire-girl with an adult maledependent, Butler’s Ina families pose characteristically unsettlingquestions. Don’t all intimate relationships—not only those deemed
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taboo—involve power imbalances? And what can “consent” meanwhen one being needs another to sustain one’s life? After one bite, it’sdifficult to tell where choice ends and compulsion begins. Butlersuggests that the Ina-symbiont relationship might be no worse thanthe forms of dependency that humans already take for granted. Oneof Shori’s symbionts is an elderly widow who gladly exchanges alonely life of unmet needs for a place within an Ina family.
These suggestive dynamics are undermined by the hokey hunt forShori: repetitive shoot-outs; a courtroom finale stuffed withunnecessary new characters; a relative who shows up to deliverexpository monologues on Ina society only to be killed a few chapterslater, like a tutorial character in a video game. Butler herself wasn’tsatisfied with “Fledgling,” which she wrote as a diversion whilestruggling with her never-finished “Parable of the Trickster.”
But certain of its weaknesses are characteristic of a writer whosometimes let intellect and adrenaline outpace attention to themessier aspects of her creations’ inner lives. Butler’s narrator-protagonists often sound like variations on the same courageous,cerebral pragmatist. They rarely notice anything that doesn’t pertainto their emergency, as though the world were a fluorescent-lit escaperoom. Minor characters who question their efforts—Alice in “Kindred,”the alien skeptics in “Lilith’s Brood”—come across merely as obstinatefoils. This straightforwardness gives Butler’s narratives their urgency.Yet what’s the worth of survival if all other values fall before it?
Butler’s stature feels most certain when these doubts—the guilt of thesurvivor-creator—enter her writing. They are best exemplified by “WildSeed,” Butler’s fourth Patternist novel and the first chronologically, acaptivating transatlantic creation myth that may be the most brilliant
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of her books. (The novel is being adapted for television by the writersNnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu.) It’s a duet between immortals—Anyanwu, a shape-shifting healer, and Doro, the Founder alluded to in“Patternmaster”—whose stormy relationship doubles as a custodybattle over humanity’s future.
They meet in West Africa, at the close of the seventeenth century.Doro, a body-snatching spirit, has wandered from host to host formillennia. He dreams of fathering a new race, and corrals individualswith rare abilities—especially mental powers, like telepathy andtelekinesis—in concealed “seed villages” on five continents. Anyanwuis the first fellow-immortal he’s encountered, and he covets hercompanionship. More darkly, he wants to breed her with his othersubjects, selecting for her abilities and longevity. Doro seduces herwith an irresistible promise: “I can show you children you will neverhave to bury.”
Doro is the ultimate survivor, and millennia of cunning have made himcruel: “Everyone has always been temporary for him—wives, children,friends, even tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies buthim.” If any of his children refuse to mate in accordance with hiswishes, he takes their bodies and does it himself.
Anyanwu travels with him to his village in upstate New York, on a shipcrowded with “wild seed” taken from slavers. (Slavers are alternatelyDoro’s rivals and his accomplices.) For the next half century, she bearschildren who then become hostages in her struggle to tame or defeathim. Anyanwu’s only leverage is Doro’s fear of killing her, his one peerin the universe.
Butler published “Wild Seed” a year after “Kindred,” which, in early
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drafts, was itself supposed to fit within the Patternist series. Thenovels feel separated at birth; both are stories of enslavement,codependence, control of the future, and women whose will to sustainlife is perverted by men. “Wild Seed,” though, goes beyond itspredecessor in juxtaposing the particular experience of Americanslavery with a fantasy that hints at the fundamental sources of humanparasitism. Doro’s mission forms a slant rhyme with history; a fantasticdouble of Colonial slave society, it makes the original less familiar,throwing its atrocities into relief. His settlement in New York flagrantlyviolates the taboos of the surrounding society—incest, miscegenation—in pursuit of its own distinctive eugenics.
The terror of “Wild Seed” is not only that one’s body can be made avector for somebody else’s future but that this dynamic is in someways unavoidable. Late in the novel, Anyanwu escapes to Louisianaand builds her own community of mutants on a remote plantation. It’san island of freedom, and yet Anyanwu finds herself behaving as anauthority: selecting, governing, marrying, and occasionally exiling herwards. “Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid becoming aslave,” she tells Doro earlier in the novel. Now he accuses her ofbecoming another him.
Like Milton’s Satan, Doro, for all his malevolence, has his creator’ssympathy. Butler gives him many of the virtues that define herheroines: patience, situational awareness, emotional intelligence, and,above all, a flexibility uninhibited by fear, prejudice, or sentimentalattachment. We learn that he, too, was once an underdog: a prisonerof the Egyptians in ancient Nubia, who likely escaped captivity bytaking his captors’ bodies. In another Patternist novel, “Mind of MyMind,” the cycle repeats itself, as one of Doro’s children learns toresist him with psychic abilities that are later used to establish the
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Patternists’ supremacy over non-telepathic “mutes.” The abuse ofpower, Butler suggests, can be distinguished from the art of survivalonly if we acknowledge the intimacy between them.
In other words, the future is made of others’ bodies, if only becausewe cannot sustain life or reproduce it on our own. Butler expressesthis viscerally in her exquisite short story “Bloodchild.” In it, Gan, ayoung man on an unnamed planet, must decide whether to allowhimself to be impregnated by his family’s alien patron, a velvetycentipede-like being with a stinging tail named T’Gatoi. (Butler wasinspired by certain botflies that lay their eggs in human wounds.)
It’s a terrifying conceit that, characteristically, Butler’s coolly reasonednarrative makes seem logical and necessary. The clawed parasiteT’Gatoi is, of all things, a politician—even a liberal—who wants to find areasonable accommodation between the humans and her ownspecies. As Gan says, “She parceled us out to the desperate and soldus to the rich and powerful for their political support. . . . Only shestood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallowus.” It’s supposedly an honor to have T’Gatoi in the family; all that Ganhas to do is let her insert her ovipositor and use his body as feed forher grubs.
Some readers saw “Bloodchild” as a story about slavery, a readingthat took Butler aback. Gan’s choice is, if constrained, nonethelessfree. Freedom is always a negotiation with others—even for thepowerful—and to forget this, Butler suggests, is ultimately to denigratethe oppressed. It’s an ethic that recurs in “Amnesty,” a late-careerstory originally published online. Its appearance—three years beforeshe died, in 2006, of a fall, at the age of fifty-eight—dispels anysuspicion that Butler’s talent was atrophying in her final years.
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The story is about a fraught détente between humans and the“Communities,” a species of extraterrestrials who have forciblyoccupied the world’s deserts. These entities, each one a foliage-likeswarm of organisms, are eager to communicate with their newneighbors, preferably by “enfolding” their bodies and feeling theirmovements. Butler’s protagonist, a woman named Noah, wasabducted by the Communities as a child, but goes on to work for themconsensually as a “translator,” developing an interspecies language oftouch. She has learned to enjoy the sensation of a “stranger-Community . . . drawing her upward and in among its many selves.”
At the end of “Amnesty,” Noah faces a skeptical crowd of recruits, whointerrogate her about her loyalty to the “weeds.” Everyone unpacks aparticular kit of preconceptions: a woman sees the Communities ascolonizers, a man thinks that translators must have been hypnotizedand drugged. They can’t accept that Noah is neither a victim nor aturncoat but, much like her Biblical namesake, the only one preparingto live in a world made new.
If there’s a cardinal sin in Butler’s universe, it’s expecting your way oflife to go on forever, or, in more intimate terms, expecting yourdescendants to be like you. But our histories—evolutionary, diasporic—teach otherwise. The future isn’t a mirror. There is a grace inlearning, like Noah, to lose oneself in stranger-Communities. ♦
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