Octavia E. Butler

If any of you subscribers get word -- email or letter -- about an actual release date for the forthcoming Octavia E. Butler LOA volume -- Kindred, Fledgling, and Complete Stories -- please DO share it with the rest of us LOA fans!

Here's a terrific "New Yorker" article about Butler that I overlooked a couple years back:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlers-prescient-vision-of-...

I actually picked up a copy of the Seven Stories boxed set publication of PARABLE OF THE SOWER, PARABLE OF THE TALENTS. It's quite beautiful, and -- from what (admittedly) little I know about the binding of books -- seems to be sewn, with nice sturdy boards and such.

Definitely looking forward to that LOA volume, too.

I would be super-excited if LOA could do an edition of Butler's Patternist stories that contains the suppressed third book, Survivor.

>1 Truett: The first volume in the LOA's Octavia E. Butler edition will be published in January 2021, although we expect to have copies available for subscribers and our Web Store customers by November.

--David

DCLOYCESMITH: _More_ than one volume?! Excellent! (I was almost moved to tell Stevil2001 that the Butler might just be a one-off -- delighted to be wrong). Thanks, as always, for the information. (Now, if you -- or someone else -- can convince the LOA board to publish at least one volume of Harlan Ellison fiction -- even though his nonfiction is just as brilliant -- I can die a happy man). :)

DCLOYCESMITH:
P.S. My sanguine attitude toward "walking the Green Mile" came about due to the news of the Barthelme volume, too.

When it’s an edition, that usually means the complete works or close to it. That would be amazing!

Information about LOA's Octavia Butler volume has been posted on Tor.com at https://www.tor.com/2020/03/12/octavia-butler-library-of-america-nisi-shawl-gerr...

The plan is to eventually release four volumes, containing Butler's complete works.

>7 GrayMatter:

Thanks for that TOR link, I'd have heard eventually from LOA directly but it's encouraging that other outlets have the interest to discuss and share enthusiasm.

Great news! Since the first volume is collecting stories and her two non-series novels Kindred and Fledgling, it's easy to guess the other three planned volumes will be for the three series of novels: the Parable series, the Patternist series, and the Xenogenesis series.

Yes, the complete works is confirmed: https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1678-forthcoming-spring-2021

Ordered!

Grrroovy.

And, Pablo...remember that definition of complete.
:)

Oops. The back cover of the volume reads "174 short stories". I will send LOA a message.

could someone tell me if the Butler volume includes the short story "A Necessary Being"? the table of contents page on the LOA website does not include that title, and only lists eight short stories, although when the press release first came out it said the volume would contain all nine of Butler's published stories.

I don't see the story A Necessary Being in this volume; maybe because it's a 50+ pg novella, really, so it's not included. Maybe it will be included in a different volume. It's available on the internet.

The volume, also, doesn't collect all of her essays; maybe they will be a part of another volume.

"A Necessary Being" was recently published in UNEXPECTED STORIES (along with "Childfinder") by the estimable Bill Schafer and Subterranean Press. Although wiki (the source too many people trust as the end-all, be-all) shows a 2014 publication date, the book came out in April 2020. It is _still_ available through Subterranean Press (or through the massive, online retailer, that shall remain unnamed, but they are charging more for their copies). That recent publication date _might_ , understandably, have something to do with why it wasn't included in this first LOA publication of Butlers "Collected Works".

As for whether or not it will be included in a future volume. Remember: LOA IS advertising the "collected works". NOT the COMPLETE works. And, as discussed elsewhere (ad nauseum), one person's complete is another person's "short-changed again, darnit".
* addendum: I saw an "Open Road Media" publication of UNEXPECTED STORIES, so, maybe it was published a while back by an e-book publisher. Either way, Sub Press has it in hardcover for a while. Also: regarding "length". I see it listed everywhere as a "novelette" (7,500 to 19k words). Several stories in the Butler collection are novelettes, so I don't think the length was prohibitive. A novella is generally 17,500 words all the way up to roughly 40 K -- since novels usually start at 60 K, I don't know WHAT they call the "no person's land" between novella and novel). If you look around the web, you'll see some of the ebooks advertising UNEXPECTED STORIES as "two novellas", which is likely the bone-headed typo of someone who doesn't know (because "Childfinder" is listed everywhere else as a short story -- 7,500 words down to one thousand, if you were wondering).

Hi Truett, I do recall our earlier conversation on the word "complete", but is LOA talking about the Butler edition as "collected works" anywhere? Because the blog post I linked to above states "complete works".

>16 Pablum:
>15 Truett:

The news post of Forthcoming: Spring 2021 posted on June 12, 2020, refers to this is the first volume of the "complete edition" of Butler's works, whereas the overview of the volume on LOA's website under the "Books" heading refers to this as the first volume of LOA's "collected edition" of Butler's works. So there is a discrepancy in LOA's own announcements and, for us, the jury is still out unless David or someone clarifies that authoritatively.

For the Butler edition, we are hedging our bets on Collected/Complete. We have an agreement in principle to include all her works in LOA volumes. One still-open question is whether we'll be able to include the long-out-of-print "Survivor" with the rest of the Patternist series.

As for "A Necessary Being": it is neither a story nor a novelette; instead, it is a deleted chapter from "Survivor." So we are holding it for the Patternist volume.

--David

>18 DCloyceSmith: Thanks for the update and the details regarding Survivor--that's really interesting to hear! I'm very excited about the continuation of this project.

DCLOYCE SMITH: just wanted to express my thanks, as well, for your info. Always great to have an authoritative voice chime in. Regarding LOA's reprinting SURVIVOR: it will be interesting to see how that plays out. On the one hand, a LOT of writers/creators don't necessarily have an objective view of their work (most, understandably, see about 90 percent of their output as dreck). And they usually have a tough time recognizing when a particular work isn't quite as awful as _they_ think it is. On the other hand, abiding by the wishes of the writer, _should_ be something that is sacrosanct. After all, if the writer/creator chooses not to publish -- or to withdraw, from publication, a particular work in their lifetime, shouldn't we honor those wishes? (Playing devil's advocate, here, because I understand the urge to see something long out of print, or, in the case of SURVIVOR, withdrawn from print).
https://www.tor.com/2009/02/05/qmy-star-trek-novelq-octavia-butlers-survivor/

Anybody else reading the first Octavia E. Butler LOA volume? I'd never read KINDRED. Finishing it now, and...it's undeniably brilliant. I'm surprised she wasn't given a MacArthur genius grant a lot sooner.

>21 Truett: I finished reading Kindred for the first time a couple of weeks ago and was blown away by it. I've been aware of it for many years, but Butler wasn't one of the diminishing number of SF&F authors I've been following. I'd only read a few of her short works in anthologies. I was also impressed by Fledgling.

>21 Truett: The timing is at least partially because she is a genre author - which for way too many people means that she must be writing pulp-quality literature.

>23 AnnieMod: That wasn't my situation. I've been an avid fan of SF & F since I read Heinlein's Red Planet when it first came out. It's just that after some years I realized that there was a lot of other great literature out there that I was missing out on. I had to cut back, be more selective, in order to have time to read other things. One way to be more selective was to stick with the best of the authors I was familiar with and not take up new ones except on very rare occasions. That is how I missed Butler.

>24 Podras.: I know it is not everyone. :) I've shared elsewhere that even if I knew about her and I read in the genre a lot, I had not read any of her stories until ~4 years ago and I read a novel from her for the first time this year. We cannot read everything as much as we all wish we could.

But a lot of people (and grants and non-genre awards...) missed her writing because of the genre she wrote in and how it was perceived for a very long time. Even today there are people that believe that the SF genres cannot produce "literature". I mostly ignore them - and I am very glad when I see LOA picking up the genre writers. :)

Podras: I think you guys got it straightened out, but AnnieMod was obviously referring to the reason for lateness of the Genius grant (not readers in general). Harlan Ellison (who actually DID do a lot to help Butler along, early on: the $ stake for her Clarion schooling; a scholarship; sending PATTERNMASTER to a Pat LoBrutto, a friend of his at Doubleday, which eventually published the book; etc.) was contacted by the folks who were supposed to select someone that year for the grant. They wanted to try and pick a "black writer". Ellison recommended Butler and wrote a letter on her behalf, helping call attention to her (doesn't mean he was solely responsible for the end result -- but he had a hand in it). He mentioned those things, and a few others, in an essay entitled, "She Was Estelle", 2006.

By the way: when _I_ started reading KINDRED, I was also just starting to experience vertigo -- still ongoing to a degree -- for the first time in my life. YOU will appreciate the timing of that and my starting to read the novel (when they read the book, others will too). Made for an immersive reading experience!

>27 strangenews: LOA announced some time ago that they plan to publish all of Butler's works, whatever "all" means. I think there are supposed to be four volumes. I don't recall that anything about a timeframe was mentioned. It is getting to be close to the time of year that LOA makes new volume announcements, so we may know something about this year soon.