BUTLER, OCTAVIA E.

born June 22, 1947, Pasadena, Calif., U.S. in full Octavia Estelle Butler African American author chiefly noted for her science-fiction novels about future societies and superhuman powers. Butler was educated at Pasadena City College (A.A., 1968), California State University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Encouraged by Harlan Ellison, she began her writing career in 1970. The first of her novels, Patternmaster (1976), was the beginning of her five-volume Patternist series about an elite group of mentally linked telepaths ruled by Doro, a 4,000-year-old immortal African. Other novels in the series are Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay's Ark (1984). In Kindred (1979) a contemporary black woman is sent back in time to a pre-Civil War plantation, becomes a slave, and rescues her white, slave-owning ancestor. Butler's short story Bloodchild (1984), about human male slaves who incubate their alien masters' eggs, won several awards. Her later novels include the Xenogenesis trilogyDawn: Xenogenesis (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)and The Parable of the Sower (1993). In 1995 Butler was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship for her unique synthesis of science fiction, mysticism, mythology, and African American spiritualism.