Butler, Octavia Estelle

▪ 2007

      American author (b. June 22, 1947, Pasadena, Calif.—d. Feb. 24, 2006, Lake Forest Park, Wash.), was chiefly noted for her science-fiction novels about future societies and superhuman powers. They provided a unique synthesis of science fiction, mysticism, mythology, and African American spiritualism. Butler was educated at Pasadena City College (A.A., 1968), California State University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Encouraged by Harlan Ellison, she began her writing career in 1970. The first of her novels, Patternmaster (1976), was the beginning of her five-volume Patternist series about an elite group of mentally linked telepaths ruled by Doro, a 4,000-year-old immortal African. Other novels in the series included Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay's Ark (1984). In Kindred (1979) a contemporary black woman is sent back in time to a pre-Civil War plantation, becomes a slave, and rescues her white slave-owning ancestor. Her later novels included the Xenogenesis trilogy—Dawn: Xenogenesis (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—The Parable of the Sower (1993), and The Parable of the Talents (1998). Butler's short story “Speech Sounds” won a Hugo Award in 1984, and her “Bloodchild,” about human male slaves who incubate their alien masters' eggs, won both Hugo and Nebula awards. Her collection Bloodchild and Other Stories was published in 1995. That same year Butler became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and in 2000 she received a PEN award for lifetime achievement.

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