Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Speech Sounds | 1983 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
| 2 | Bloodchild | 1984 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
| 3 | The Evening and the Morning and the Night | 1987 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
| 4 | A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: An Essay | 2024 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
Butler’s short fiction covers some of the same ground as her novels — alien contact, the biology of power, the costs of survival — but the compressed form sometimes lets her push further in a single direction. “Speech Sounds” (1983) imagines a plague that has destroyed most people’s ability to read, write, or speak coherently, and follows a woman trying to maintain her own sense of purpose and connection in a world where language has largely broken down. It won the Hugo Award in 1984.
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987) concerns a genetic disease called Duryea-Gode Disease, which causes those who carry two copies of the gene to eventually enter a state of violent self-destruction. Butler uses the disease to examine how people with chronic illness build community and identity, and what obligations families and institutions have to them. The story is discomfiting partly because it treats the disease with the same neutrality Butler brings to everything — here is a biological reality, here are its consequences, here are people living inside it.
“A Few Rules for Predicting the Future” was originally published as an essay in Essence magazine in 2000 and collected posthumously. It outlines Butler’s thinking about how science fiction works as a predictive form — not as prophecy but as a way of reasoning through possible consequences of present conditions. The piece has been widely shared in the years since, particularly given how closely some of the trends she wrote about in her Parable novels have developed.