File 770Īs you can imagine, it’s a great deal of collected material-so much, that when I began my fellowship, I was told by the curator who processed the collection that I wouldn’t be able to see everything. Butler’s short story ‘Bloodchild’ appeared in a 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. It’s housed in 386 boxes, one volume, two binders and 18 broadside folders. Butler collection consists of manuscripts, correspondence, photos, research materials and ephemera. Can you give us an idea of the scope of this collection, in terms of its volume and value, and how much of it you were able to read during your fellowship?

After reading that story, I was pretty much hooked. I managed to get my hands on “ Bloodchild,” an award-winning short story that came out in 1984 about aliens and male pregnancy. But I wanted to know if she had anything weirder on her backlist. I was really intrigued by the prescient nature of the novel. We read “ Parable of the Sower,” an apocalyptic novel published in 1993 but set in 21st-century America. I first read Butler’s work in a graduate course on feminist literature and theory. How did you become interested in Octavia E.

In an interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Collins explains how Butler’s boundless curiosity inspired the author’s work, and how Butler’s experiences as a Black woman drew her to “humans who must deal with the edges or ends of humanity.”īutler, who died in 2006, would have turned 75 years old on June 22, 2022. A pioneering writer in a genre long dominated by white men, her work explored power structures, shifting definitions of humanity and alternative societies. Butler Fellowship from The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.īutler, whose papers are held at the Huntington, was the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. In 2021, Alyssa Collins was awarded a yearlong Octavia E.

Octavia e. butler book on aliens