Books by Octavia Butler
“Shori is a vampire. She’s not human. She’s a vampire who has been genetically modified to have additional melanin, which was taken from people of Black heritage. This allows her to withstand daylight. And that is a big thing for vampires. It gets rid of one really crucial weakness.” Read more...
The Best Books for an Introduction to Octavia Butler
Nisi Shawl, Novelist
“The Parable of the Sower is the origin story of Lauren Oya Olamina, who has this disability of feeling other people’s feelings. Her boundaries are really gone. She’s suffering from this disease and living in a gated community, as the world around the gated community slowly crumbles away. I think that one of the things that makes it so compelling is not just that there are these horrible things happening, but that they are horrible things that are not that far removed from what’s going on now.” Read more...
The Best Books for an Introduction to Octavia Butler
Nisi Shawl, Novelist
” Bloodchild is a novella. It imagines a future in which humanity is traveling through the stars and has ended up on a planet where other aliens are living. Part of the trade to live peacefully with them is that humans let the aliens implant their eggs in our bodies. It’s sensitively written and incredibly thoughtful about what that might mean and whether we’d be capable of doing that.” Read more...
“The Patternist series goes from the intentional breeding programs that are covered in Wild Seed through interstellar empires of telepaths. The books were achronological, or published out of order. The people that I know that have read Wild Seed first came across it as if it was a sudden secret revealed to them on the racks of the store, in the book section. And it works as an introduction. Not just because, although it’s the fourth book published in the series, it’s earliest in the timeline. It works because people I think, really identify with Anyanwu.” Read more...
The Best Books for an Introduction to Octavia Butler
Nisi Shawl, Novelist
“I selected Kindred because it is one of two portals to her work that most people come across, and she wrote it to reach a certain audience. Kindred is the story of Dana, a 1970s African-American woman—‘black’ as she calls herself at the time—who is drawn back through time to preserve the life of one of her ancestors who is white and a slave owner in the South. And over a number of confrontations with him, he grows, he becomes increasingly dangerous to her and she eventually comes out of this situation physically maimed and intellectually changed.” Read more...
The Best Books for an Introduction to Octavia Butler
Nisi Shawl, Novelist
Interviews where books by Octavia Butler were recommended
The Best Books for an Introduction to Octavia Butler, selected by Nisi Shawl
In 1995, Octavia Butler became the first science fiction and fantasy author to be awarded a Macarthur ‘genius’ grant. Her writing often dealt with the moral complexities of survival, and foregrounded African American characters at a time where Black protagonists were few. Nisi Shawl, a personal friend and editor of Butler’s collected works, selects five of the best books to read for an introduction to Octavia Butler’s writing.
The Best Time Travel Books, recommended by Annalee Newitz
If you could go back, or forward, in time — would you? Science journalist and sci-fi novelist Annalee Newitz recommends some of the best time travel books and talks us through the dangers and delights of the genre, which take us from the Ordovician period through to the present day.
The Best Sci-Fi Horror Books, recommended by Aliya Whiteley
Some books frighten and thrill us in equal measure. If that sounds good to you, you will love novelist Aliya Whiteley’s recommendations: five outstanding sci-fi horror books that, like the original Frankenstein, use dread and disgust to raise fascinating questions about science and what it means to be human.
