![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() More crucially, unlike Orwell and Atwood, Butler was intimately attuned to this country’s racial fault lines. The recent Butler renaissance has been somewhat different-partly because her profile was more obscure (though she was the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur grant). In the early days of the Trump presidency, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale surged in popularity, as though dystopian science fiction could decode our new collective dread. (As of December, Butler’s books occupied the top seven spots on Amazon’s Black and African-American Science Fiction list, with a garish new graphical adaptation of Parable at No. 12.) Butler, who died in 2006 at the age of fifty-eight, would have savored this: as late as 2004, she told an interviewer how much she longed for such validation. Set in the 2020s, as society collapses under a blowhard president named Donner, the novel entered the New York Times paperback list fourteen years after Butler’s death. Last September, as the country grappled with a new kind of mass death and seethed after a summer of police brutality and protest, the novel Parable of the Sower (1993) became Octavia E. Butler’s first bestseller. $35.Ī Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories, by Octavia E. Butler. ![]()
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