Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bloodchild and Other Stories | 1995 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
| 2 | Unexpected Stories | 2014 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
Butler published two short story collections in her lifetime and posthumously. Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995) gathers seven pieces, including her most celebrated short works. The centerpiece is “Bloodchild,” the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning story about the relationship between human colonists and the alien species whose planet they inhabit. The collection also includes “Speech Sounds,” which won the Hugo the year before, as well as two essays about Butler’s experience as a writer — one about how she came to write “Bloodchild” and one about persistence in the face of rejection early in a writing career.
A second edition of the collection was published in 2005 with two additional stories, including “Amnesty” and “The Book of Martha,” both of which engage directly with questions Butler returned to repeatedly: what does a person owe a more powerful entity that has done them harm, and what does it mean to make a life under conditions you did not choose and cannot fully control?
Unexpected Stories (2014) appeared eight years after Butler’s death as an e-book. It contains two pieces that had not been commercially available: an early story she wrote in the 1970s that was accepted but never published, and a story set in the Patternist universe. For readers who have already worked through her novels and the Bloodchild collection, Unexpected Stories offers a look at where her characteristic concerns appeared even in her earliest work.