From The Root: Octavia Butler Made the New York Times Best Sellers’ List…. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!
“I write bestselling novels,” Octavia Butler wrote on the inside cover of a notebook in 1988. 32 years later, that affirmation has come to pass. As reported by LitHub, on Wednesday, Butler’s agent, Merrilee Heifetz, tweeted that the author’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, had made it onto the New York Times Best Sellers’ List; widely considered the pinnacle of commercial success for an author.
To call Butler prophetic would be an understatement. Aside from predicting her arrival at bestseller status, the science fiction writing pioneer, who was first published almost a half-century ago in the early 1970s and tragically died after a fall in 2006, has long been considered one of the best to ever do it. But despite being the first sci-fi author to receive a MacArthur Genius Grant, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award by the PEN American Center and posthumous induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, as a Black female writer, Butler was still a relative anomaly in the genre at the time of her untimely death at age 58. In the years since, an exciting cadre of Black female sci-fi and fantasy writers has followed in her stead, including N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor and Tomi Adeyemi.
As for Parable of the Sower, which was initially intended as the first book in a trilogy (Parable of the Talents would follow in 1998) that comprised her Earthseed series, renewed interest in its dystopian narrative is no doubt due to how closely its projection of American life in 2024 eerily echoes our current trajectory. The parallels have not gone unnoticed by singer-songwriter Toshi Reagon, who, along with her mother, academic and Sweet Honey in the Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagon, adapted and developed Parable of the Sower into a blues, folks and rock opera that had been touring the world to increasing acclaim prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
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