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Writing career

Early stories, Patternist series, and Kindred: 1971-1984

Butler's first work published was "Crossover" in the 1971 Clarion Workshop anthology. She also sold the short story "Childfinder” to Harlan Ellison for the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. "I thought I was on my way as a writer,” Butler recalled in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. "In fact, I had five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me before I sold another word."

Starting on 1974, Butler worked on a series of novels that would later be collected as the Patternist series, which depicts the transformation of humanity into three genetic groups: the dominant Patternists, humans who have been bred with heightened telepathic powers and are bound to the Pattermaster via a psionic chain; their enemies the Clayarks, disease-mutated animal-like superhumans; and the Mutes, ordinary humans bonded to the Patternists.

The first novel, Patternmaster (1976), eventually was to become the last installment in the series' internal chronology. Set in the distant future, it tells of the coming-of-age of Teray, a young Patternist who fights for position within Patternist society and eventually for the role of Patternmaster.

Next came Mind of My Mind (1977), a prequel to Patternmaster set in the twentieth century. The story follows the development of Mary, the creator of the psionic chain and the first Patternmaster to bind all Patternists, and her inevitable struggle for power with her father Doro, a parapsychological vampire who seeks to retain control over the psionic children he has bred over the centuries.

The third book of the series, Survivor, was published in 1978. The titular survivor is Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have travelled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark infection. Captured by a local tribe called the Tehkohn, Alanna learns their language and adopts their customs, knowledge which she then uses to help the Missionaries avoid bondage and assimilation to a rival tribe opposing the Tehkohn.

After Survivor, Butler took a break from the Patternist series to write what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979) as well as the short story “Near of Kin” (1979). In Kindred, Dana, an African American woman, is transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a black freewoman forced into slavery later in life. In “Near of Kin” the protagonist discovers a taboo relationship in her family as she goes through her mother’s things after her death.

In 1980, Butler published the fourth book of the Patternist series, Wild Seed, whose narrative became the series’ origin story. Set in Africa and America during the seventeenth century, Wild Seed traces the struggle between the four-thousand-year-old parapsychological vampire Doro and his “wild” child and bride, the three-hundred-year old shapeshifter and healer Anyanwu. Doro, who has bred psionic children for centuries, deceives Anyanwu into becoming one of his breeders, but she eventually escapes and uses her gifts to create communities that rival Doro’s. When Doro finally tracks her down, Anyanwu, tired by decades of escaping or fighting Doro, decides to commit suicide, forcing him to admit his need for her.

In 1983, Butler published “Speech Sounds,” a story set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles after a pandemic has caused most humans to lose their ability to read, speak, or write. For many, this impairment is accompanied by uncontrollable feelings of jealousy, resentment, and rage. “Speech Sounds” received the 1984 Hugo award for Short Story.

In 1984, Butler released the last book of the Patternmaster series, Clay’s Ark. Set in the Mojave Desert, it focuses on a colony of humans infected by an extraterrestrial microorganism brought to Earth by the one surviving astronaut of the spaceship Clay’s Ark. As the microorganism compels them to spread it, they kidnap ordinary people to infect them and, in the case of women, give birth to the mutant, sphinx-like children who will be the first members of the Clayark race.

“Bloodchild” and the Xenogenesis trilogy: 1984-1989

Butler followed Clay’s Ark with the critically acclaimed short story “Bloodchild” (1984). Set on an alien planet, “Bloodchild” depicts the complex relationship between human refugees and the insect-like aliens who keep them in a preserve to protect them, but also to use them as hosts for breeding their young. Sometimes called Butler’s “pregnant man story,” “Bloodchild” won the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award.

Three years later, Butler published Dawn, the first installment of what would become known as the Xenogenesis trilogy. The series examines the theme of alienation by creating situations in which humans are forced to coexist with other species to survive and extends Butler’s recurring exploration of genetically-altered, hybrid individuals and communities. In Dawn, protagonist Lilith Iyapu finds herself in a spaceship after surviving a nuclear apocalypse that destroys Earth. Saved by the Oankali aliens, the human survivors must combine their DNA with an ooloi, the Oankali’s third sex, in order to create a new race that eliminates a self-destructive flaw in humans--their aggressive hierarchical tendencies.

Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989) the second and concluding installments of the Xenogenesis trilogy, respectively, focus on the predatory and prideful tendencies that affect human evolution, as humans now revolt against Lilith’s Oankali-engineered progeny. Set thirty years after humanity’s return to Earth, Adulthood Rites centers on the kidnapping of Lilith’s part-human, part alien child, Akin, by a human-only group who are against the Oankali. Akin learns about both aspects of his identity through his life with the humans as well as the Akjai. The Oankali-only group becomes their mediator, and ultimately creates a human-only colony in Mars. In Imago, the Oankali create a third species more powerful than themselves: the shape-shifting healer Jodahs, a human-Oankali ooloi who must find suitable human male and female mates to survive its metamorphosis and finds them in the most unexpected of places, in a village of renegade humans

The Parable series: 1993-1998

In the mid-1990s, Butler published two novels later designated as the Parable (or Earthseed) series. The books depict the struggle of the Earthseed community to survive the socioeconomic and political collapse of twenty-first century America due to poor environmental stewardship, corporate greed, and the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. The books propose alternate philosophical views and religious interventions as solutions to such dilemmas.

The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower (1993), features a fifteen-year old protagonist named Lauren Oya Olamina and is set in a dystopian California in the 2020’s. Lauren, who suffers from a syndrome causing her to literally feel any physical pain she witnesses, decides to escape the corruption and corporatization of her community of Robledo. She forms a new belief system, Earthseed, in order prepare for the future of the human race on another planet. Recruiting members of varying social backgrounds, Lauren relocates her new group to Northern California, naming her new community “Acorn.”

Her 1998 follow-up novel, Parable of the Talents, is set sometime after Lauren’s death and is told through the excerpts of Lauren’s journals as framed by the commentary of her estranged daughter, Larkin. It details the takeover of Acorn by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Lauren’s attempts to survive their religious “re-education,” and the final triumph of Earthseed as a community and a doctrine.

In between her Earthseed novels, Butler published the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995), which includes the short stories “Bloodchild,” “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” “Near of Kin,” “Speech Sounds,” and “Crossover” as well as the non-fiction pieces “Positive Obsession” and “Furor Scribendi.”

Late stories and Fledgling: 2003-2005

After several years of suffering from writer’s block, Butler published the short stories “Amnesty” (2003) and ”The Book of Martha” (2003) as well as her second standalone novel, Fledgling (2005). Both short stories focus on how impossible conditions force an ordinary woman to make a distressing choice. In “Amnesty," an alien abductee recounts her painful abuse at the hand of the unwitting aliens, and upon her release, by humans, and explains why she chose to work as a translator for the aliens now that the Earth’s economy is in a deep depression. In “The Book of Martha,” God asks a middle-aged African American novelist to make one important change to fix humanity’s destructive ways. Martha’s choice--to make humans have vivid and satisfying dreams--means that she will no longer be able to do what she loves, writing fiction. These two stories were added to the 2005 edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Butler’s last publication during her lifetime was Fledgling, a novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in mutualistic symbiosis with humans. Set in the West Coast, it tells of the coming-of-age of a young female hybrid vampire whose species is called Ina. The only survivor of a vicious attack on her families that left her an amnesiac, she must seek justice for her dead, build a new family, and relearn how to be Ina.

Butler bequeathed her papers including manuscripts, correspondence, school papers, notebooks, and photographs to the Huntington Library.