Kindred, the namesake and source text of a new FX drama now streaming on Hulu, is a logical entry point to Butler’s oeuvre for readers and Hollywood alike. The latter aims to introduce her ideas to a new generation of fans-and prove their enduring relevance. The former milestone cements Butler as part of a shared cultural canon. (The first volume is available now, with three more forthcoming.) And starting this week, her stories will make the long-overdue transition from the page to the screen. That began to change last year, when Butler notched yet another first: She is now the sole Black science fiction writer to be collected and republished by the Library of America.

There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. Butler herself, however, remained just out of the limelight. To the trained eye, traces of her work are everywhere, from the films of Jordan Peele to the career of author N. Yet, until recently, Butler’s body of work had been left untouched by this rising tide.

The past few years have seen a boom in adaptations of genre fiction once deemed “unfilmable” for its dense lore and epic scope: Frank Herbert’s Dune, itself a favorite of Butler’s Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, soon to be a series on Netflix from the creators of Game of Thrones. And when critic Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” in 1994, Butler was one of the first examples he cited of Black artists transposing their own history and aesthetic onto an imagined future.īut after her death in 2006-from a fall outside her home near Seattle, at just 58-Butler’s massive influence fell out of step with her latter-day footprint. She was the first science fiction author of any gender or race to win a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Butler was the first Black woman to win a Hugo or a Nebula, two of her field’s highest honors.

The science fiction writer Octavia Butler was a pioneer in her time.

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