Octavia E. Butler books

Anthologies

Damian Duffy Graphic Novels Reading Order

Earthseed Reading Order

Graphic Novels

L. Ron Hubbard Presents: Writers of the Future Reading Order

Nnedi Okorafor Graphic Novels Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Patternmaster Reading Order

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Xenogenesis Reading Order

Octavia E. Butler was an American science fiction writer born in Pasadena, California in 1947. She began writing as a child, producing stories that combined her love of science fiction with her own experiences as a Black woman in America. Her first novel, Patternmaster, was published in 1976, making her one of the few Black women working in science fiction at the time.

Butler’s work consistently concerns itself with power — who has it, how it is used, and what it costs the people subject to it. Her Patternist series follows an immortal man who selectively breeds humans for psychic ability across thousands of years, raising uncomfortable questions about eugenics, consent, and what constitutes progress. The Xenogenesis trilogy, published as Lilith’s Brood, examines humanity’s survival after nuclear war by asking whether human beings can change the self-destructive traits that brought them to the brink in the first place. Her Parable novels, set in a near-future America collapsing under climate change and economic breakdown, follow a young woman who builds a new religion around the principle that change is the only constant — and that human survival depends on learning to shape it rather than resist it.

She died in February 2006 at the age of 58. Her novels remain widely read and widely assigned in schools and universities. Kindred, her 1979 novel about a Black woman transported back to an antebellum Maryland plantation, has never gone out of print and has since been adapted into a graphic novel and a television series.