How Octavia E. Butler Reimagines Sex and Survival

Butler is the sixth science-fiction writer to be featured in the landmark series, and the first Black science-fiction writer. Yet although Butler had “never read a printed word that I knew to have been written by a Black person,” she was undeterred. “Parable of the Sower” won critical acclaim, and in 1995 Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur grant. The honor coincided with a growing interest in how Black writers, artists, and musicians drew on the dislocation of the past in critically reflecting on the future. To insure my family’s survival, my own birth.” The double bind deepens when Dana learns that this survival depends on Rufus’s enslavement and rape of a free Black woman named Alice.