her first time-travel experience Dana is unwittingly transported in time and space to a plantation in nineteenth century Maryland, arriving just in time to save the life of Rufus, the son of the plantation owner. She is sent back there five more times when Rufus’s life is endangered. She returns to her own time and place when her life in the nineteenth century is threatened. During Dana’s journeys into the past, Rufus grows from a young child to adulthood; however, elapsed time in Dana’s twentieth century life ranges only from a few seconds to eight days.

Dana learns, through genealogical research, that Rufus is her ancestor, and unless she assures his survival to father the child who will be known as Hagar, Dana herself will never be born. The plot is driven by Dana’s urgent need to protect the life of Rufus, a self-indulgent, accident-prone child and eventually an impulsively cruel adult. Dana also hopes to influence his character and to mitigate the evils of slavery. The carefully researched details of plantation life in the slaveholding South are graphically portrayed. As Dana notes, while being forced to watch the master whipping a slave, the sensory details of this brutality come alive in ways that cannot be felt by television and film viewers in later centuries.

Dana’s predicament is complicated by the author’s insight into the psychological conflict among, and within, her characters. As a twentieth century feminist, Dana is at first critical of the slaves’ submission to their white master. For instance, Dana judges Sarah, the family cook, harshly as the stereotypical “Mammy” who appeases the master. However, Dana comes to understand that Sarah’s submissive behavior assures the survival of her family, several of whom have already been sold down river to certain death from overwork.

On one journey into the past, Dana’s white husband, Kevin, accompanies her. She must pretend to be his slave mistress in order to save her life; her attempts to act out this role are nearly her undoing. An unpleasant revelation is Kevin’s obvious pleasure in his role as a nineteenth century adventurer, free to travel as he pleases, while Dana is confined to her quarters on the plantation.

Finally Dana must arrange for the young slave Alice to agree to a sexual liaison with Rufus, the event that will lead to the birth of Hagar, Dana’s ancestor. This choice is abhorrent to Dana, a twentieth-century feminist. She acknowledges that she herself has become the hated “Mammy” figure, submitting to the master’s wishes in order to assure her own survival.

At the conclusion, Alice, the slave mother of Rufus’s children (including Hagar), hangs herself when Rufus tells her that he has sold her children. This is a cruel ruse, however, intended to demonstrate his power. He turns his attention to Dana, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Alice. During his attempted rape, Dana stabs Rufus to death. Having assured her own survival, Dana returns to the twentieth century but not unscathed. She bears the scars of two beatings and has lost part of her arm during her violent transport.

Kindred, written in the tradition of the slave narrative, is a study of power and its abuses. In the author’s hierarchical world, unusual strength of character is required to overcome the hatred that leads to violence, whether the person is the victim or the oppressor. Some feminists have criticized the author’s female characters who, like Dana, are “mothering” figures. However, a recurring motif in Butler’s fiction is the agonizing trade-off that circumstances force upon strong women in their quests for survival.

“Bloodchild”

First published: 1984 (collected in Bloodchild, and Other Stories, 1995)

Type of work: Short story

Gan, a human boy, agrees to be impregnated by the female alien T’Gatoi in order to save his family.

“Bloodchild,” which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Butler has said that she wanted to experiment with the idea of a man bearing children. The “children” in the story are worm-like creatures that will grow into adults resembling sea serpents with tentacles. The central event is the horrifying birth of the alien worms, which are torn from the body of the male host in a bloody operation.

Butler imagines an alien planet to which Terrans have escaped from the disasters of their native Earth. The alien Tlics cannot bear their own young and must use the male Terrans as hosts. The Tlics use a form of narcotic to seduce the Terrans and develop familial bonds with their hosts, a strange love-hate relationship which foregrounds the conflict.

Gan is a young man whose mother, in exchange for the right to bear her own human children, has agreed to sacrifice her son as a host for the alien embryos. The female Tlic T’Gatoi has an honored place in the home, but the original friendship between the mother, Lien, and T’Gatoi has turned into hostility. Gan, torn between his horror at witnessing an alien birth and his desire to secure his family’s well-being, agrees to be impregnated by T’Gatoi. This impregnation is grotesquely reminiscent of human sexuality but with the reversal of the male and female roles.

In this story Butler explores favorite themes: the reversal of gender roles and the inevitable power struggle between two species who must become interdependent if they are to survive. Butler called this a love story, but readers who find the explicit details repulsive might not agree.

Parable of the Sower

First published: 1993

Type of work: Novel

Lauren Oya Olamina, a survivor living in devastated Southern California in 2024, journeys north to found the community of Acorn in the hope of fulfilling her prophetic vision of Earthseed.

In Parable of the Sower, Southern California in 2024 is a landscape of devastation caused by environmental disasters and governmental corruption. Evil flourishes because of power conflicts between the rich and the poor, who are sharply divided in a segregated society. Lauren Oya Olamina (an African tribal name) is the daughter of a Baptist preacher and educator. Her mother has died of a drug overdose. The family lives in the walled town of Robledo, near Los Angeles. Lauren is a “sharer,” one who suffers from hyperempathy, the ability to feel the pain of others, a delusional condition which inhibits her ability to act in a crisis.

Environmental disasters have caused a scarcity of natural resources. There has been no rain for years; people will kill for water. Only the wealthy can afford to bathe and wash their clothing; the poor are identified by their filthiness. Police and firefighters are corrupt and must be paid for their services. Feral dogs rove the countryside, killing humans. Lauren, fifteen, admires her father but rejects his traditional Christianity. She has begun a notebook with a series of short poems which reflect her growing belief in her original philosophy, which she calls Earthseed. God, she believes, is Change, and there is no heaven to offer comfort. People must adapt and depend on one another and on their own natural abilities to live in an indifferent world.

Butler’s description of life under these conditions is unsparing. Drug-addicted gangs of pyromaniacs kill for pleasure and burn their victims alive. Robledo is an armed camp, walled in against the outside world. Corporations exploit their indentured workers in a revived form of wage slavery. Women and children are frequent victims of rape. Lauren believes that her father’s traditional religion is useless in this state of anarchy.

The mutilation and murder of Lauren’s fourteen-year-old brother, Keith, by a crazed gang of drug addicts signals the community’s coming destruction. Her father goes missing and is presumed dead. When arsonists set fire to the town, Lauren escapes with her emergency backpack, along with several surviving friends. Lauren, who is unusually tall, dresses as a man for her own protection and begins her journey north among the countless refugees walking on the California freeways.

Lauren’s first-person narration is a detailed account of her hellish odyssey, with numerous deaths and narrow escapes. Finally the group that she has gathered, which has survived by killing in self-defense, arrives at a coastal California town. Here Lauren, eighteen, marries an older man, Taylor Bankole, who protects and loves her. Although Bankole is a physician without religious convictions, he supports Lauren’s missionary commitment to Earthseed and the community she founds.

Lauren’s journey chronicles her growing leadership qualities and is an incisive psychological profile of the challenges a prophetic leader faces in forging a community from a diverse collection of survivors. Both Lauren and the community grow successfully because they respect racial diversity and gender and age differences. They also tolerate discussion and dissent.

The narrative portrays keen psychological insight, perceptive character development, and a clear call for tolerance for human difference as the key to survival. The story concludes with a passage from the Gospel of Saint Luke, the parable of the sower whose seed falls on good ground and bears fruit. Earthseed, the ideal self-contained community with its humane principles of inclusion and hard work, offers some hope that it will bear fruit in a hostile world.

Parable of the Talents

First published: 1998

Type of work Novel

The story of Lauren Oya Olamina, begun in Parable of the Sower, continues with her daughter Larkin’s commentary on her mother’s journals.

Parable of the Talents introduces Larkin, commenting on the journals left by her mother, Lauren Olamina. Early in the twenty-first century, Olamina founded Acorn, a community of believers in Earthseed, a collection of philosophical statements based on the belief that God is Change. In the prologue Larkin reflects on her mother’s death. She believes that Olamina was a misguided prophet who neglected her family in order to promulgate her beliefs. The novel is both an account of Olamina’s life after the events of Parable of the Sower and the psychological journey of Larkin as she comes to terms with her own beliefs.

In Parable of the Sower, the United States in the early twenty-first century was a nation in chaos. The natural environment was devastated, and most people lived in poverty and degradation. Marauding gangs of drug addicts roamed Southern California, raping and burning and destroying the small, walled communities. Acorn, the working community founded by Olamina to live by the principles of Earthseed, was just barely surviving within its walls. The new president of the United States, Andrew Steele Jarret, imposed his fanatical religion, Christian America, on the nation.

Olamina’s journals reveal an obsessive missionary zeal to spread the philosophy of Earthseed; its central belief is that God is Change and that hope lies only in the willingness of human beings to control their own destinies. Larkin learns that her father, Taylor Bankole, a physician, had urged the family to join a safer community, but her mother refused. Acorn is raided by Jarret’s Crusaders, a fanatical sect of Christian America. Larkin’s father, along with other members of the community, is killed. The remaining inhabitants are enslaved and forced to wear electronic collars which deliver excruciating pain at the flick of a switch.

The Crusaders run slave labor camps and force their slaves to watch public electronic lashings. They routinely rape women as a form of control. The Crusaders force their victims to memorize and recite Bible verses and punish homosexuality with death. The infant Larkin, along with the other children of Acorn, is taken away to be raised by a Christian family and renamed Asha Vere, after the character in a form of popular electronic entertainment called Dreamask.

Olamina’s harrowing escape from her slavery and her journey with her growing band of followers northward into Oregon is the principal narrative strain. Larkin’s parallel story reveals her connection with her uncle Marc (Marcus), Olamina’s brother from whom she was estranged because of their conflict between his traditional Christianity and Earthseed.

The followers of Earthseed, under Olamina’s leadership, become a wealthy sect after Jarret and his followers are defeated. The adult Larkin finally meets with her mother in a bittersweet reunion. Larkin learns that her uncle Marc, whom she reveres, has lied about her mother’s death. Olamina is devastated by her brother’s betrayal. Larkin believes that her mother had abandoned her, choosing instead to follow her beliefs, which Larkin regards as a fanatical cult. She calls herself Asha Vere, rejecting both her mother and her birth name.

At the conclusion, the followers of Earthseed, despairing of reforming the United States, are transporting themselves through suspended animation to their destiny among the stars. Olamina dies at the age of eighty-one. Her ashes will travel into space to fertilize the fruits of the new colonies of Earthseed—her chosen immortality.

Although classified as science fiction, this portrait of a devastated America is recognizable as an extreme extension of the evils of the late twentieth century: useless warfare, fanatical religion, gang violence, environmental despoliation, and sharp divisions between social classes.

Butler said that the philosophy of Earthseed mirrored her own beliefs. She extended the motif of Parable of the Sower, offering the scant hope that human beings can succeed only through a new beginning in space. The story concludes with a passage from the Gospel of Saint Matthew in which the servant who increases the value of his money (talents) is rewarded by his master. If Olamina represents the faithful servant who has used her talents wisely, it is ironic that her eulogy is framed in the parable of the Christian Bible that she has rejected.