A perfect introduction for new readers and a must-have for avid fans, this New York Times Notable Book includes "Bloodchild," winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and "Speech Sounds," winner of the Hugo Award. Appearing in print for the first time, "Amnesty" is a story of a woman named Noah who works to negotiate the tense and co-dependent relationship between humans and a species of invaders. Also new to this collection is "The Book of Martha" which asks: What would you do if God granted you the ability—and responsibility—to save humanity from itself?
Like all of Octavia Butler’s best writing, these works of the imagination are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant in her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature’s strongest voices.

In a violent near-future, Asa Elias Doyle and her companions encounter an alien life form so heinous and destructive, they exile themselves in the desert so as not to contaminate other humans. To resist the compulsion to infect others is mental agony, but to succumb is to relinquish humanity and free will. Desperate, they kidnap a doctor and his two daughters as they cross the wasteland--and endanger the world.

In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.

Asha was born into a broken world. There are many things she needs to know: how her country could embrace a violent, far-right President promising to make America great again, why they turned a blind eye to the suffering - and the truth about her mother.
In her journals, Lauren Olamina tells of a great love divided between her young daughter, her community and the revelation that led her to found a new faith that teaches 'God Is Change'.

Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex -- or design. He fears no one -- until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss...and savage anyone who threatens those she loves. She fears no one -- until she meets Doro. From African jungles to the colonies of America, Doro and Anyanwu weave together a pattern of destiny that not even immortals can imagine.

The acclaimed trilogy that comprises LILITH'S BROOD is multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winner Octavia E. Butler at her best. Presented for the first time in one volume, with an introduction by Joan Slonczewski, Ph.D., LILITH'S BROOD is a profoundly evocative, sensual -- and disturbing -- epic of human transformation.
Lilith Iyapo is in the Andes, mourning the death of her family, when war destroys Earth. Centuries later, she is resurrected -- by miraculously powerful unearthly beings, the Oankali. Driven by an irresistible need to heal others, the Oankali are rescuing our dying planet by merging genetically with mankind. But Lilith and all humanity must now share the world with uncanny, unimaginably alien creatures: their own children. This is their story...

Parable of the Sower is the Butlerian odyssey of one woman who is twice as feeling in a world that has become doubly dehumanized. The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of "hyperempathy"—which causes her to feel others’ pain as her own—sets off on foot along the dangerous coastal highways, moving north into the unknown.

Time travel, fantasy and alternate history are themes that capture and hold some very loyal readers. Older fans may need or just prefer Large Print; younger fans are often encouraged to read by Large Print.This series offers selections from current and bestselling authors as well as perennial favorites and true classics of the genre.Octavia Butler's eerie novella Bloodchild, which she once described as her pregnant man story, explores the paradoxes of power and inequality -- starkly portraying a class of people who, like women throughout history, are valued chiefly for their reproductive capacities. Like all of Butler's best writing, Bloodchild and the six other works included here are parables of the contemporary world. She proves constant to her vigil, an unblinking pessimist hoping to be proven wrong, and one of contemporary literature's strongest voices.

Lilith lyapo awoke from a centuries-long sleep to find herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. Creatures covered in writhing tentacles, the Oankali had saved every surviving human from a dying, ruined Earth. They healed the planet, cured cancer, increased strength, and were now ready to help Lilith lead her people back to Earth--but for a price.

The complete series about an alien species that could save humanity after nuclear apocalypse—or destroy it—from “one of science fiction’s finest writers” (The New York Times).

The newest stage in human evolution begins in outer space. Survivors of a cataclysmic nuclear war awake to find themselves being studied by the Oankali, tentacle-covered galactic travelers whose benevolent appearance hides their surprising plan for the future of mankind. The Oankali arrive not just to save humanity, but to bond with it—crossbreeding to form a hybrid species that can survive in the place of its human forebears, who were so intent on self-destruction. Some people resist, forming pocket communities of purebred rebellion, but many realize they have no choice. The human species inevitably expands into something stranger, stronger, and undeniably alien. From Hugo and Nebula award–winning author Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood is both a thrilling, epic adventure of man’s struggle to survive after Earth’s destruction, and a provocative meditation on what it means to be human.
 This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.

For 4,000 years, an immortal has spread the seeds of a master race, using the downtrodden as his private breeding stock. But now a young ghetto telepath has found a way to awaken--and rule--her superhuman kind, igniting a psychic battle as she challenges her creator for her right to free her people.

This acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from an award-winning author "pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale" and includes a foreword by N. K. Jemisin (John Green, New York Times).

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

2024. Le nouveau président des États-Unis provoque une crise sans précédent. Dérèglement social et climatique, épidémies, pauvreté, violences… Dans ce décor post-apocalyptique, la barbarie règne, les murs s’élèvent. La fille d’un pasteur noir atteinte d’hyper-empathie entame la rédaction d’une Bible d’espoir et d’humanité, Le Livre des Vivants.

UNE ANTICIPATION VISIONNAIRE

« Une grande dame de la SF, auteure américaine majeure ayant écrit sur la question noire et dont l’œuvre foisonnante déconstruit les mythes de la technologie, de la conquête et du pouvoir. »

Léa Mormin-Chauvac – Libération

Afro-américaine petite-fille d’esclaves, OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, deux fois lauréate du Prix Hugo de la nouvelle et du prix Nebula, est le premier écrivain de science-fiction honoré en 1995 du prix Génie de la Fondation Mac Arthur Grant pour son chef-d’œuvre des Paraboles du semeur et des talents. Elle est prématurément décédée en 2006 à Seattle, à 59 ans.

This volume introduces black science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction writers to the generations of readers who have not had the chance to explore the scope and diversity among African-American writers.


Fiction.
Sister Lilith - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The Comet - W.E.B. Du Bois
Chicage 1927 - Jewelle Gomez
Black No More (novel excerpt) - George S. Schuyler
separation anxiety - Evie Shockley
Tasting Songs - Leone Ross
Can You Wear My Eyes - Kalamu ya Salaam
Like Daughter - Tananarive Due
Greedy Choke Puppy - Nalo Hopkinson
Rhythm Travel - Amiri Baraka
Buddy Bolden - Kalamu ya Salaam
Aye, and Gomorrah... - Samuel R. Delany
Ganger (Ball Lightning) - Nalo Hopkinson
The Becoming - Akua Lezli Hope
The Goophered Grapevine - Charles W. Chestnutt
The Evening and the Morning and the Night - Octavia E. Butler
Twice, at Once, Separated - Linda Addison
Gimmile's Songs - Charles R. Saunders
At the Huts of Ajala - Nisi Shawl
The Woman in the Wall - Steven Barnes
Ark of Bones - Henry Dumas
Butta's Backyard Barbecue - Tony Medina
Future Christmas (novel excerpt) - Ishmael Reed
At Life's Limits - Kiini Ibura Salaam
The African Origins of UFOs (novel excerpt) - Anthony Joseph
The Astral Visitor Delta Blues - Robert Fleming
The Space Traders - Derrick Bell
The Pretended - Darryl A. Smith
Hussy Strutt - Ama Patterson

Essays.
Racism and Science Fiction - Samuel R. Delany
Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction - Charles R. Saunders
Black to the Future - Walter Mosley
Yet Do I Wonder - Paul D. Miller
The Monophobic Response - Octavia E. Butler

In her classic Patternist series, multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner Octavia E. Butler established themes of identity and transformation that echo throughout her distinguished career. Now collected for the first time in one volume, these four novels take readers on a wondrous odyssey from a mythic, primordial past to a fantastic far future.

In ancient Africa, a female demigod of nurture and fertility mates with a powerful, destructive male entity. Together they birth a race of madmen, visionaries, and psychics who cling to civilization's margins and back alleys for millennia, coming together in a telepathic Pattern just as Earth is consumed by a cosmic invasion. Now these new beings -- no longer merely human -- will battle to rule the transfigured world.

Contents (including original publication dates):
Wild Seed (1980)
Mind of My Mind (1977)
Clay's Ark (1984)
Patternmaster (1976)

[Not included: Survivor (1978)]

Quando uma crise ambiental e econômica leva ao caos social, nem mesmo as cidades muradas estão seguras. Em uma noite de fogo e morte, Lauren Olamina, a jovem filha de um pastor, perde sua família, seu lar e se aventura pelas terras americanas desprotegidas. Mas o que começa como uma fuga pela sobrevivência acaba levando a algo muito maior: uma visão estonteante do destino humano.

E ao nascimento de uma nova fé.

A FICÇÃO DE OCTAVIA BUTLER É MAIS REAL DO QUE GOSTARÍAMOS

Lauren Olamina está casada e acaba de ter uma filha em Bolota, a comunidade que construiu com outras pessoas que haviam perdido tudo. Nos últimos cinco anos, Semente da Terra, a religião criada por Olamina cresce e se desenvolve junto com a comunidade. O país, porém, começa a passar por uma preocupante mudança.

O candidato à presidência Andrew Steele Jarret está ganhando popularidade com a promessa de “tornar a América grande novamente” em um retorno aos valores tradicionais e cristãos. Para seus fanáticos seguidores, isso exige o fim da tolerância religiosa e de qualquer igualdade racial e de gênero – e estão dispostos a impor sua doutrina com violência.

A segurança da pequena comunidade e da família nascente de Olamina nunca foi garantida. “Deus é mudança”, mas eles sobreviverão a mais uma?

Lauren Olamina's love is divided among her young daughter, her community, and the revelation that led Lauren to found a new faith that teaches "God Is Change". But in the wake of environmental and economic chaos, the U.S. government turns a blind eye to violent bigots who consider the mere existence of a black female leader a threat. And soon Lauren must either sacrifice her child and her followers -- or forsake the religion that can transform human destiny.

We are coming apart. We’re a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.

America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to feel the pain of others as her own, records everything she sees of this broken world in her journal.

Then, one terrible night, everything alters beyond recognition, and Lauren must make her voice heard for the sake of those she loves.

Soon, her vision becomes reality and her dreams of a better way to live gain the power to change humanity forever.

All that you touch,
You Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.