Near of kin by octavia e. butler11/7/2023 ![]() I’ve found that the content in these notebooks has been an invaluable window into Butler’s scientific thinking. I’ve spent most of my time working through Butler’s research materials, her correspondence with authors and her drafting materials, including her notecards and notebooks. File 770Īs you can imagine, it’s a great deal of collected material – so much, that when I began my fellowship, I was told by the curator who processed the collection that I wouldn’t be able to see everything. Butler’s short story ‘Bloodchild’ appeared in a 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. It’s housed in 386 boxes, one volume, two binders and 18 broadside folders. ![]() Butler collection consists of manuscripts, correspondence, photos, research materials and ephemera. After reading that story, I was pretty much hooked.Ĭan you give us an idea of the scope of this collection, in terms of its volume and value, and how much of it you were able to read during your fellowship? I managed to get my hands on “ Bloodchild,” an award-winning short story that came out in 1984 about aliens and male pregnancy. But I wanted to know if she had anything weirder on her backlist. I was really intrigued by the prescient nature of the novel. We read “ Parable of the Sower,” an apocalyptic novel published in 1993 but set in 21st-century America. ![]() I first read Butler’s work in a graduate course on feminist literature and theory. How did you become interested in Octavia E. In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Collins explains how Butler’s boundless curiosity inspired the author’s work, and how Butler’s experiences as a Black woman drew her to “humans who must deal with the edges or ends of humanity.”īutler, who died in 2006, would have turned 75 years old on June 22, 2022. A pioneering writer in a genre long dominated by white men, her work explored power structures, shifting definitions of humanity and alternative societies. University of South Carolinaīutler, whose papers are held at the Huntington, was the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. Butler's friend, the writer and editor Nisi Shawl, provides an introduction.Alyssa Collins. Rounding out the volume are eight short stories and five essays-including two never before collected, plus a newly researched explanatory notes prepared by scholar Gerry Canavan. In Fledgling, an amnesiac discovers that she is a vampire, with a difference: she is a new, experimental birth with brown skin, giving her fearful ability to go out in sunlight. Its heroine, Dana, a Black woman, is pulled back and forth between the present and the pre-Civil War past, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save to preserve her own. Butler's collected works opens with her masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century. This first volume in the Library of America edition of Octavia E. Lost Races of Science Fiction Positive Obsession Furor Scribendi The Monophobic Response Preface to Bloodchild and Other Stories. Introduction / by Nisi Shawl - Kindred - Fledgling - Collected stories: Childfinder Crossover Near of Kin Speech Sounds Bloodchild The Evening and the Morning and the Night Amnesty The Book of Martha - Essays. Butler : Kindred, Fledgling, collected stories / Gerry Canavan & Nisi Shawl, editors.
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