Publication Order of Patternist Books
| Patternmaster | 1976 |
| Mind of My Mind | 1977 |
| Survivor | 1978 |
| Wild Seed | 1980 |
| Clay’s Ark | 1984 |
Publication Order of Xenogenesis Books
| Dawn | 1987 |
| Adulthood Rites | 1988 |
| Imago | 1989 |
Publication Order of Parable Books
| Parable of the Sower | 1993 |
| Parable of the Talents | 1998 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Kindred | 1979 |
| Fledgling | 2005 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Bloodchild and Other Stories | 1995 |
| Unexpected Stories | 2014 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| A Few Rules for Predicting the Future | 2024 |
About Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler (1947 to 2006) was an American science fiction author who won Hugo, Locus and Nebula awards and in 1995 became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She is best known for the time-travel novel “Kindred”, the Patternist and Xenogenesis series and the two Parable novels.
Butler was born in Pasadena, California, the only child of a housemaid and a shoeshiner. Her father died when she was three and she was raised by her mother and grandmother. A shy child, she spent much of her time reading in the library and began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college, and a local writers’ workshop led her to the Clarion Workshop. Her first published work, “Crossover”, appeared in the 1971 Clarion anthology, but she wrote later that five more years of rejection slips followed before she sold anything else.
Her first novel, “Patternmaster” (1976), opened the Patternist series, in which humanity has divided into telepathic Patternists, the disease-mutated Clayarks and ordinary humans known as Mutes. The books were written out of chronological order: “Wild Seed” (1980), set in 17th-century Africa and America, is the origin story. Butler later withdrew the third book, “Survivor”, from reprinting.
“Kindred” (1979), her best-selling novel, follows Dana, an African-American woman who is repeatedly pulled from 1976 Los Angeles to a Maryland plantation in the early 19th century. In the Xenogenesis trilogy, which begins with “Dawn” (1987), survivors of a nuclear war are rescued by an alien species, the Oankali, who require them to merge genetically with their rescuers. “Parable of the Sower” (1993) is set in a collapsing California of the 2020s, where the teenage Lauren Olamina founds a belief system called Earthseed. Its sequel, “Parable of the Talents”, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Her short fiction also won major prizes: “Speech Sounds” took a Hugo in 1984, and “Bloodchild” won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. Her last book was the vampire novel “Fledgling” (2005). Butler died in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on 24 February 2006, aged 58, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.
A graphic novel of “Kindred” by Damian Duffy and John Jennings was published in 2017, and a television series based on the novel premiered on FX in December 2022.
Photo: Nikolas Coukouma, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).