Octavia E. Butler

As an African American woman, Octavia Butler broke numerous barriers with her extraordinary fiction, emerging at a time when few writers of color could be found in the field.

Butler produced two major series. The five-volume Patternist series tells of a society that is run by a specially-bred group of telepaths. Her Xenogenesis trilogy deals with the destruction of humanity by nuclear war and gene-swapping extraterrestrials. A standalone book, Kindred, relocates a present-day black woman to a pre-Civil War plantation through time travel.

Butler’s later novels Parable of the Sower (a Nebula award nominee), and Parable of the Talents (a Nebula award winner), form a diptych of a dystopian near-future America, seen through the eyes of a remarkable black woman, Lauren Olamina, and her daughter Larkin.

In 1995 Octavia E. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for pushing the boundaries of science fiction. In 2000, she received the PEN Center West Lifetime Achievement Award.

Induction Year: 2010

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Survivor (1979)
Parable of the Sower (1993)
Mind of My Mind (1994)
Patternmaster (1995)
Clay's Ask (1996)
Xenogenesis Series (1997 – 2000)
Wild Seed (2001)
Bloodchild and Other Stories (2003)
Kindred (2009)