The scary thing is - the 2026 Butler imagined twenty years ago could easily happen within ten years. Lauren has an idea for a new kind of society - a new religion that will teach self-sufficiency and a new understanding of what God is - but to realize her dream, she first has to stay alive and learn who she can trust. When her neighborhood is finally breached and she is forced out into the harsh new world, this empathy is only one of her great challenges. Lauren is born with a dangerous condition, hyper-empathy, which means she feels whatever pain she witnesses inflicted on others. The new president promises to “Make America Great Again,” - sound familiar? - but does so by eliminating the space program and loosening all labor protections, which only gives large corporations a freer hand in cutting up the carcass of the United States. Most people are slipping into de facto slavery as servants to the wealthy or employees in company-run towns. Police and fire fighters only come to help if you have the money to pay them, and even then they are more likely to arrest you than assist you. People are desperate and bereft of any hope. No one can leave the compound without risking their lives. 18-year-old Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a walled-off middle class neighborhood outside LA, but she knows that their little island of relative safety will not last. American society is rapidly breaking down thanks to global warning, economic stagnation and wealth disparity. This novel set in the near future is so frighteningly prescient it is difficult to read. I’m happy I finally corrected this glaring oversight. I am embarrassed to say I had never read Octavia Butler before. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58.

She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' Grant.Īfter her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field.

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