Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Conversations with Octavia Butler | 2009 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009) is part of the University Press of Mississippi’s Literary Conversations series, which publishes interview collections with significant American writers. Edited by Conseula Francis, the book brings together interviews conducted over more than two decades, from shortly after Butler’s first novels appeared through the mid-2000s, shortly before her death.
The interviews show Butler as a careful, precise thinker about her own work. She talks about where ideas came from — “Bloodchild,” for instance, grew partly from a conversation about a botfly parasite she found disturbing but also, in some way, worth examining seriously. She discusses the difficulty of writing the Parable novels, which required her to think concretely about how social collapse actually works rather than simply imagining a ruined landscape. She also speaks directly about being a Black woman in science fiction during decades when that combination was genuinely unusual.
For readers who want to understand how Butler thought about the questions her fiction raises — power, biology, what it means to be human, the possibility or impossibility of change — the interviews are direct and candid. She does not offer comfort where the questions are hard. The book is a useful companion to her fiction and a straightforward record of a writer who knew exactly what she was doing and why.