Her last novel, Fledgling, was published in 2005. Besides novels, Octavia wrote award-winning short stories and novellas (like Blood Child), and became the first science-fiction writer to win the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant” in 1995.ĭuring her career, Octavia also received the Hugo and Nebula awards, the Langston Hughes Medal, and a PEN Lifetime Achievement award. The books that comprise her Xenogenesis and Earthseed series would also prove to be popular. Kindred would be Octavia’s most successful novel. In 1979, Octavia wrote Kindred, a novel inspired by the indignities she’d quietly witnessed her mother and countless others experience under the oppression of a racist society, and by the flippancy with which the younger generations seemed to regard the ancestral sacrifices made on their behalf. In 1976, Doubleday published Patternmaster, the first novel in a five book series often referred to as the Patternist Series.
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She also attended writing workshops sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, through which she met acclaimed science fiction writer, Harlan Ellison…through which she was invited to participate in Clarion’s Writers Workshop (in 1970)…through which she received her first publication credit, a story included in an anthology.īefore going to work, Octavia would consistently wake up in the wee hours of the morning to hone her writing skills. Having already written several short stories by the age of 10, Octavia’s first published series of novels was the result of stories she began writing as a youth, after having watched a bad science fiction movie on television and knowing she could create something much better.Īfter graduating high school in 1965, Octavia worked and attended college simultaneously, taking a variety of writing courses along the way. She was also creative, a thoughtful reader, and a keen observer of life’s complexities and injustices. An only child whose father died when she was just a baby, Octavia grew up tall, painfully shy, and dyslexic. Octavia Estelle Butler was born on Jin Pasadena, California to Laurice and Octavia M. They remain amazingly relevant and poignant today…as does her body of work overall. Butler, penned these words for an article in the May 2000 issue of Essence Magazine (A Few Rules for Predicting the Future). You can be one of them if you choose to be.'”Īward-winning, Vanguard Young Adult Author, Octavia E. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least.
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‘I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. ‘No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?’ He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.
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‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’ ‘I didn’t make up the problems,’ I pointed out.
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The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming. “‘So do you really believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?’ a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk.