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Octavia E. Butler

Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction author and a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

Born in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Butler found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. Butler attended community college during the Black Power movement. While participating in a local writer's workshop, she was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, then held in Pennsylvania, which focused on science fiction.

She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author to be able to write full-time. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public, and awards soon followed. She also taught writer's workshops, and spoke about her experiences as an African American, using such themes in science fiction. She eventually relocated to Washington. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Early life
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshiner. Butler's father died when she was seven. She was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment.

Growing up in Pasadena, Butler experienced limited cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of de facto racial segregation in the surrounding area. She accompanied her mother to her cleaning work where, as workers, the two entered white people's houses through back doors. Her mother was treated poorly by her employers.

From an early age, an almost paralyzing shyness made it difficult for Butler to socialize with other children. Her awkwardness, paired with a slight dyslexia that made schoolwork a torment, made Butler an easy target for bullies. She believed that she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless." As a result, she frequently spent her time reading at the Pasadena Central Library. She also wrote extensively in her "big pink notebook".

Hooked at first on fairy tales and horse stories, she quickly became interested in science fiction magazines, such as Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She began reading stories by John Brunner, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon.

At the age of 10, Butler begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter, on which she "pecked [her] stories two fingered." At 12, she watched the telefilm Devil Girl from Mars (1954) and concluded that she could write a better story. She drafted what would later become the basis for her Patternist novels. Until then happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of 13, when her well-intentioned Aunt Hazel said: "Honey ... Negroes can't be writers." But Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, and even asked her junior high school science teacher, William Pfaff, to type the first manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine.

After graduating from John Muir High School in 1965, Butler worked during the day and attended Pasadena City College (PCC) at night. As a freshman at PCC, she won a college-wide short-story contest, earning her first income ($15) as a writer. She also got the "germ of the idea" for what would become her novel Kindred. An African-American classmate involved in the Black Power movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. As Butler explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks were a catalyst that led her to respond with a story providing historical context for the subservience, showing that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival. In 1968, Butler graduated from PCC with an associate of arts degree with a focus in history.

Rise to success
Although Butler's mother wanted her to become a secretary in order to have a steady income, Butler continued to work at a series of temporary jobs. She preferred less demanding work that would allow her to get up at two or three in the morning to write. Success continued to elude her. She styled her stories after the white-and-male-dominated science fiction she had grown up reading. She enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, but switched to taking writing courses through UCLA Extension.

During the Open Door Workshop of the Writers Guild of America West, a program designed to mentor minority writers, her writing impressed one of the teachers, noted science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. There, Butler met the Black science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, who became a longtime friend. She also sold her first stories: "Childfinder" to Ellison, for his unpublished anthology The Last Dangerous Visions (eventually published in Unexpected Stories in 2014 ); and "Crossover" to Robin Scott Wilson, the director of the Clarion workshop, who published it in the 1971 Clarion anthology.

For the next five years, Butler worked on the novels that became known as the Patternist series: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), and Survivor (1978). In 1978, she was able to stop working at temporary jobs and live on her income from writing. She took a break from the Patternist series to research and write a stand-alone novel, Kindred (1979). She finished the Patternist series with Wild Seed (1980) and Clay's Ark (1984).

Butler's rise to prominence began in 1984 when "Speech Sounds" won the Hugo Award for Short Story and, a year later, "Bloodchild" won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. In the meantime, Butler traveled to the Amazon rainforest and the Andes to do research for what would become the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). These stories were republished in 2000 as the collection Lilith's Brood.

During the 1990s, Butler completed the novels that strengthened her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). In addition, in 1995, she became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, an award that came with a prize of $295,000.

In 1999, after her mother's death, Butler moved to Lake Forest Park, Washington. The Parable of the Talents had won the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Novel, and she had plans for four more Parable novels: Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. However, after several failed attempts to begin The Parable of the Trickster, she decided to stop work in the series.

In later interviews, Butler explained that the research and writing of the Parable novels had overwhelmed and depressed her, so she had shifted to composing something "lightweight" and "fun" instead. This became her last book, the science-fiction vampire novel Fledgling (2005).

Early stories, Patternist series, and Kindred: 1971–1984
Butler's first work published was "Crossover" in the 1971 Clarion Workshop anthology. She also sold the short story "Childfinder" to Harlan Ellison for the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. "I thought I was on my way as a writer", Butler recalled in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, which contains "Crossover." "In fact, I had five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me before I sold another word."

Starting in 1974, Butler worked on a series of novels that would later be collected as the Patternist series, which depicts the transformation of humanity into three genetic groups: the dominant Patternists, humans who have been bred with heightened telepathic powers and are bound to the Patternmaster via a psionic chain; their enemies the Clayarks, disease-mutated animal-like superhumans; and the Mutes, ordinary humans bonded to the Patternists.

The first novel, Patternmaster (1976), eventually became the last installment in the series' internal chronology. Set in the distant future, it tells of the coming-of-age of Teray, a young Patternist who fights for position within Patternist society and eventually for the role of Patternmaster.

Next came Mind of My Mind (1977), a prequel to Patternmaster set in the 20th century. The story follows the development of Mary, the creator of the psionic chain and the first Patternmaster to bind all Patternists, and her inevitable struggle for power with her father Doro, a parapsychological vampire who seeks to retain control over the psionic children he has bred over the centuries.

The third book of the series, Survivor, was published in 1978. The titular survivor is Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have traveled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark infection. Captured by a local tribe called the Tehkohn, Alanna learns their language and adopts their customs, knowledge which she then uses to help the Missionaries avoid bondage and assimilation into a rival tribe that opposes the Tehkohn. Butler would later call Survivor the least favorite of her books, and withdraw it from reprinting.

After Survivor, Butler took a break from the Patternist series to write what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979), as well as the short story "Near of Kin" (1979). In Kindred, Dana, an African-American woman, is repeatedly transported in time between 1976 Los Angeles and an early 19th-century plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. There she meets ancestors: Alice, a free black woman forced into slavery later in life, and Rufus, the white son of a planter who also becomes a slaveholder. In "Near of Kin", the protagonist discovers a taboo relationship in her family as she goes through her mother's things after her death.

In 1980, Butler published the fourth book of the Patternist series, Wild Seed, whose narrative became the series' origin story. Set in Africa and America during the 17th century, Wild Seed traces the struggle between the four-thousand-year-old parapsychological vampire Doro and his "wild" child and bride, the three-hundred-year-old shapeshifter and healer Anyanwu. Doro, who has bred psionic children for centuries, deceives Anyanwu into becoming one of his breeders, but she eventually escapes and uses her gifts to create communities that rival Doro's. When Doro finally tracks her down, Anyanwu, tired by decades of escaping or fighting Doro, decides to commit suicide, forcing him to admit his need for her.

In 1983, Butler published "Speech Sounds", a story set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where a pandemic has caused most humans to lose their ability to read, speak, or write. For many, this impairment is accompanied by uncontrollable feelings of jealousy, resentment, and rage. "Speech Sounds" received the 1984 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

In 1984, Butler released the last book of the Patternmaster series, Clay's Ark. Set in the Mojave Desert, it focuses on a colony of humans infected by an extraterrestrial microorganism brought to Earth by the one surviving astronaut of the spaceship Clay's Ark. As the microorganism compels its hosts to spread it, the infected humans kidnap others to infect them and, in the case of women, give birth to the mutant, sphinx-like children who will be the first members of the Clayark race.

Bloodchild and the Xenogenesis trilogy: 1984–1989
Butler followed Clay's Ark with the critically acclaimed short story "Bloodchild" (1984). Set on an alien planet, it depicts the complex relationship between human refugees and the insect-like aliens who keep them in a preserve to protect them, but also to use them as hosts for breeding their young. Sometimes called Butler's "pregnant man story," "Bloodchild" won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award.

Three years later, Butler published Dawn, the first installment of what would become known as the Xenogenesis trilogy. The series examines the theme of alienation by creating situations in which humans are forced to coexist with other species to survive and extends Butler's recurring exploration of genetically altered, hybrid individuals and communities. In Dawn, protagonist Lilith Iyapo finds herself in a spaceship after surviving a nuclear apocalypse that destroys Earth. Saved by the Oankali aliens, the human survivors must combine their DNA with an ooloi, the Oankali's third sex, in order to create a new race that eliminates a self-destructive flaw in humans: their aggressive hierarchical tendencies. Butler followed Dawn with "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (1987), a story about how certain females with "Duryea-Gode Disease", a genetic disorder which causes dissociative states, obsessive self-mutilation, and violent psychosis, are able to control others with the disease.

Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989), the second and the third books in the Xenogenesis trilogy, focus on the predatory and prideful tendencies that affect human evolution, as humans now revolt against Lilith's Oankali-engineered progeny. Set thirty years after humanity's return to Earth, Adulthood Rites centers on the kidnapping of Lilith's part-human, part alien child, Akin, by a human-only group who are against the Oankali. Akin learns about both aspects of his identity through his life with the humans as well as the Akjai. The Oankali-only group becomes their mediator, and ultimately creates a human-only colony on Mars. In Imago, the Oankali create a third species more powerful than themselves: the shape-shifting healer Jodahs, a human-Oankali ooloi who must find suitable human male and female mates to survive its metamorphosis and who finds them in the most unexpected of places, in a village of renegade humans.

The Parable series: 1993–1998
In the mid-1990s, Butler published two novels later designated as the Parable (or Earthseed) series. The books depict the struggle of the Earthseed community to survive the socioeconomic and political collapse of 21st-century America due to poor environmental stewardship, corporate greed, and the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. The books propose alternate philosophical views and religious interventions as solutions to such dilemmas.

The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower (1993), introduces the fifteen-year-old protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, and is set in a dystopian California in the 2020s. Lauren, who lives with a syndrome causing her to literally feel any physical pain she witnesses, struggles with the religious beliefs and physical isolation of her hometown Robledo. She forms a new belief system, Earthseed, which posits a future for the human race on other planets. When Robledo is destroyed and Lauren's family and neighbors killed, she and two other survivors flee north. Recruiting members of varying social backgrounds along the way, Lauren relocates her new group to Northern California, naming her new community Acorn.

Butler's 1998 follow-up novel, Parable of the Talents, is set some time after Lauren's death and is told through the excerpts of Lauren's journals, as framed by the commentary of her estranged daughter, Larkin. It details the invasion of Acorn by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Lauren's attempts to survive their religious "re-education," and the final triumph of Earthseed as a community and a doctrine.

In between her Earthseed novels, Butler published the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995), which includes the short stories "Bloodchild," "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," "Near of Kin," "Speech Sounds," and "Crossover," as well as the non-fiction pieces "Positive Obsession" and "Furor Scribendi".

Late stories and Fledgling: 2003–2005
After several years of writer's block, Butler published the short stories "Amnesty" (2003) and "The Book of Martha" (2003), and her second standalone novel, Fledgling (2005). Both short stories focus on how impossible conditions force an ordinary woman to make a distressing choice. In "Amnesty", an alien abductee recounts her painful abuse at the hand of the unwitting aliens and upon her release, by humans, and explains why she chose to work as a translator for the aliens now that the Earth's economy is in a deep depression. In "The Book of Martha", God asks a middle-aged African-American novelist to make one important change to fix humanity's destructive ways. Martha's choice—to make humans have vivid and satisfying dreams—means that she will no longer be able to do what she loves in writing fiction. These two stories were added to the 2005 edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Butler's last publication during her lifetime was Fledgling, a novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in symbiosis with humans. Set on the West Coast, it tells of the coming-of-age of a young female hybrid vampire named Shori, whose species is called Ina. The only survivor of a vicious attack on her families that left her an amnesiac, she must seek justice for her dead, build a new family, and relearn how to be an Ina. Scholars like Susana M. Morris read Fledgling as a powerful disruption of the vampire genre—a genre which tends to feature pale vampire heroes with paternalist tendencies that privilege whiteness. Butler disrupts this narrative by centering Shori, the protagonist of Fledgling, a petite Black female Ina.

Later years and death
During her last years, Butler struggled with writer's block and depression, partly caused by the side effects of medication for high blood pressure. She continued writing and taught at Clarion's Science Fiction Writers' Workshop regularly. In 2005, she was inducted into Chicago State University's International Black Writers Hall of Fame.

Butler died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, aged 58. Contemporary news accounts were inconsistent as to the cause of her death, with some reporting that she had a fatal stroke and others indicating that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her cobbled walkway. Another interpretation, backed by Locus magazine, is that a stroke caused the fall and the subsequent head injuries.

Butler maintained a longstanding relationship with the Huntington Library and bequeathed her papers, including manuscripts, correspondence, school papers, notebooks, and photographs, to the library in her will. The collection, comprising 9,062 pieces in 386 boxes, 1 volume, 2 binders and 18 broadsides, was made available to scholars and researchers in 2010.

Critique of present-day hierarchies
In multiple interviews and essays, Butler explained her view of humanity: inherently flawed by an innate tendency towards hierarchical thinking which leads to tribalism, caste, intolerance, violence and, if not checked, the ultimate destruction of our species.

"Simple peck-order bullying", she wrote in her essay "A World without Racism", "is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world." Her stories, then, often replay humanity's domination of the weak by the strong as a type of parasitism. These "others", whether aliens, vampires, superhuman, or slave masters, find themselves defied by a protagonist who embodies difference, diversity, and change, so that, as John R. Pfeiffer notes, "In one sense [Butler's] fables are trials of solutions to the self-destructive condition in which she finds mankind."

Remaking of the human
In his essay on the sociobiological backgrounds of Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, J. Adam Johns describes how Butler's narratives counteract the death drive behind the hierarchical impulse with an innate love of life (biophilia), particularly of different, strange life. Specifically, Butler's stories feature gene manipulation, interbreeding, interracial marriage and miscegenation, symbiosis, mutation, alien contact, rape, contamination, and other forms of hybridity as the means to correct the sociobiological causes of hierarchical violence. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, "in [Butler's] narratives the undoing of the human body is both literal and metaphorical, for it signifies the profound changes necessary to shape a world not organized by hierarchical violence." The evolutionary maturity achieved by the bioengineered hybrid protagonist at the end of the story, then, signals the possible evolution of the dominant community in terms of tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and a desire to wield power responsibly.

Survivor as hero
Butler's protagonists are disenfranchised individuals who endure, compromise, and embrace radical change in order to survive. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, her stories focus on minority characters whose historical background makes them already intimate with brutal violation and exploitation, and therefore the need to compromise to survive. Even when endowed with extra, paranormal abilities, these characters are forced to experience unprecedented physical, mental, and emotional distress and exclusion to ensure a minimal degree of agency and to prevent humanity from achieving self-destruction. In many of her stories, their acts of courage become acts of understanding, and in some cases, love, as they reach a crucial compromise with those in power. Ultimately, Butler's focus on disenfranchised characters serves to illustrate both the historical exploitation of minorities and how the resolve of one such exploited individual may bring on critical change.

Creation of alternative communities
Butler's stories feature mixed communities founded by African protagonists and populated by diverse, if similar-minded individuals. Members may be humans of African, European, or Asian descent, extraterrestrial (such as the N'Tlic in Bloodchild), from a different species (such as the vampiric Ina in Fledgling), and cross-species (such as the human-Oankali Akin and Jodahs in the Xenogenesis trilogy). In some stories, the community's hybridity results in a flexible view of sexuality and gender (for instance, the polyamorous extended families in Fledgling). Thus, Butler creates bonds between groups that are generally considered to be separate and unrelated, and suggests hybridity as "the potential root of good family and blessed community life".

Kindred is one of the only works of 20th century American literature to feature a married interracial couple. As Farah Peterson comments, in an American society gripped by racism, it took "a fantasy novelist... to imagine how one of these marriages would work in practice" and write the possibility of such a relationship into literary history.

Relationship to Afrofuturism
Author Octavia E. Butler is known for blending science fiction with African American spiritualism.

Butler's work has been associated with the genre of Afrofuturism, a term coined by Mark Dery to describe "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture". Some critics, however, have noted that while Butler's protagonists are of African descent, the communities they create are multi-ethnic and, sometimes, multi-species. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai explain in their 2010 memorial to Butler, while keeping "an afro-centric sensibility at the core of narratives", her "insistence on hybridity beyond the point of discomfort" and grim themes deny both the ethnocentric escapism of afrofuturism and the sanitized perspective of white-dominated liberal pluralism.

Wild Seed, of the Patternist series, is considered to particularly fit ideas of Afrofuturist thematic concerns, as the narrative of two immortal Africans Doro and Anyanwu features science fiction technologies and an alternate anti-colonialist history of seventeenth-century America.

Critical reception
The New York Times regarded her novels as "evocative" and "often troubling" explorations of "far-reaching issues of race, sex, power". Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card called her examination of humanity "clear-headed and brutally unsentimental", and The Village Voice's Dorothy Allison described her as "writing the most detailed social criticism" where "the hard edge of cruelty, violence, and domination is described in stark detail". Locus regarded her as "one of those authors who pay serious attention to the way human beings actually work together and against each other, and she does so with extraordinary plausibility." The Houston Post ranked her "among the best SF writers, blessed with a mind capable of conceiving complicated futuristic situations that shed considerable light on our current affairs."

Some scholars have focused on Butler's choice to write from the point of view of marginal characters and communities and thus "expanded SF to reflect the experiences and expertise of the disenfranchised". While surveying Butler's novels, critic Burton Raffel noted how race and gender influence her writing: "I do not think any of these eight books could have been written by a man, as they most emphatically were not, nor, with the single exception of her first book, Pattern-Master (1976), are likely to have been written, as they most emphatically were, by anyone but an African American." Robert Crossley commended how Butler's "feminist aesthetic" works to expose sexual, racial, and cultural chauvinisms because it is "enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the depiction of enslavement both in the real past and in imaginary pasts and futures."

Butler's prose has been praised by critics including the Washington Post Book World, where her craftsmanship has been described as "superb", and by Burton Raffel, who regards Butler's prose as "carefully, expertly crafted" and "crystalline, at its best, sensuous, sensitive, exact, not in the least directed at calling attention to itself".

Influence
In interviews with Charles Rowell and Randall Kenan, Butler credited the struggles of her working-class mother as an important influence on her writing. Because Butler's mother received little formal education herself, she made sure that young Butler was given the opportunity to learn by bringing her reading materials that her white employers threw away, from magazines to advanced books. She also encouraged Butler to write. She bought her daughter her first typewriter when she was 10 years old, and, seeing her hard at work on a story casually remarked that maybe one day she could become a writer, causing Butler to realize that it was possible to make a living as an author. A decade later, Mrs. Butler would pay more than a month's rent to have an agent review her daughter's work. She also provided Butler with the money she had been saving for dental work to pay for Butler's scholarship so she could attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, where Butler sold her first two stories.

A second person to play an influential role in Butler's work was the American writer Harlan Ellison. As a teacher at the Open Door Workshop of the Screen Writers Guild of America, he gave Butler her first honest and constructive criticism on her writing after years of lukewarm responses from composition teachers and baffling rejections from publishers. Impressed by her work, Ellison suggested she attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop and even contributed $100 towards her application fee. As the years passed, Ellison's mentorship became a close friendship.

Butler herself has been highly influential in legacy of science fiction, particularly for people of color. In 2015, writers adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha co-edited Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press), a collection of 20 short stories and essays about social justice, inspired by Butler. In 2020, brown and Toshi Reagon, creator of an opera adaptation of Parable of the Sower, began collaborating on a podcast called Octavia's Parables.

Point of view
Butler began reading science fiction at a young age, but quickly became disenchanted by the genre's unimaginative portrayal of ethnicity and class as well as by its lack of noteworthy female protagonists. She determined to correct those gaps by, as De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai point out, "choosing to write self-consciously as an African-American woman marked by a particular history" —what Butler herself referred to as "writing myself in." Butler's stories, therefore, are usually written from the perspective of a marginalized black woman whose difference from the dominant agents increases her potential for reconfiguring the future of her society.

Audience
Publishers and critics have labelled Butler's work as science fiction. While Butler enjoyed the genre deeply, calling it "potentially the freest genre in existence," she resisted being branded a genre writer. Her narratives have drawn attention of people from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds. She claimed to have three loyal audiences: black readers, science-fiction fans, and feminists.

Adaptations
Parable of the Sower was adapted as Parable of the Sower: The Opera, written by American folk/blues musician Toshi Reagon in collaboration with her mother, singer and composer Bernice Johnson Reagon. The adaptation's libretto and musical score combine African-American spirituals, soul, rock and roll, and folk music into rounds to be performed by singers sitting in a circle. It was first performed as part of The Public Theater's 2015 Under the Radar Festival in New York City.

Kindred was adapted as a graphic novel by author Damien Duffy and artist John Jennings. The adaptation was published by Abrams ComicsArts on January 10, 2017. To visually differentiate the time periods in which Butler set the story, Jennings used muted colors for the present and vibrant ones for the past to demonstrate how the remnants and relevance of slavery are still with us. The graphic novel adaption debuted as number one New York Times hardcover graphic book bestseller on January 29, 2017. After the success of Kindred, Duffy and Jennings also adapted Parable of the Sower as a graphic novel. They also plan on releasing an adaptation of Parable of the Talents.

Dawn is currently being adapted for television by producers Ava DuVernay and Charles D. King's Macro Ventures, alongside writer Victoria Mahoney. There is no projected release date for the adaptation yet. A television series based on Wild Seed is also in the works for Amazon Prime Video with a screenplay co-written by Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu.

In 2021, FX ordered an eight-episode miniseries, Kindred, based on Butler's book of the same name. The show was developed by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and premiered on December 13, 2022.

Awards and honors

 * 1980: Creative Arts Award, L.A. YWCA
 * 1984: Hugo Award for Best Short Story – "Speech Sounds"
 * 1984: Nebula Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
 * 1985: Locus Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
 * 1985: Hugo Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
 * 1985: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette – "Bloodchild"
 * 1988: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette – "The Evening and the Morning and the Night"
 * 1995: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
 * 1995: Bloodchild, a New York Times Notable Book
 * 1997: Honorary Degree in Humane Letters, from Kenyon College
 * 1998: James Tiptree Jr. Award Honor List– Parable of the Talents
 * 1999: Los Angeles Times Bestseller – Parable of the Talents
 * 1999: Nebula Award for Best Novel – Parable of the Talents
 * 2001: Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist – Parable of the Talents
 * 2000: Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center
 * 2005: Langston Hughes Medal of The City College
 * 2010: Inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame
 * 2012: Solstice Award
 * 2018: The International Astronomical Union named a mountain on Charon (a moon of Pluto) Butler Mons to honor the author, after a public suggestion period and nomination by NASA.
 * 2018: Google featured her in a Google Doodle in the United States on June 22, 2018, which would have been Butler's 71st birthday.
 * 2019: Asteroid 7052 Octaviabutler, discovered by American astronomer Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1988, was named in her memory. The official was published by the Minor Planet Center on August 27, 2019 (M.P.C. 115893).
 * 2019: Los Angeles Public Library opened the Octavia Lab, a do-it-yourself maker space and audiovisual space named in Butler's honor.
 * 2021: Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
 * 2021: NASA named the Mars landing site of the Perseverance rover the "Octavia E. Butler Landing" in her honor.
 * 2022: The school Butler attended for middle school changed its name to Octavia E. Butler Magnet.
 * 2023: In February 2023, a bookstore named Octavia's Bookshelf opened in Pasadena, California.

Memorial scholarships
In 2006, the Carl Brandon Society established the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship in Butler's memory, to enable writers of color to attend the annual Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Writers' Workshop, descendants of the original Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where Butler got her start. The first scholarships were awarded in 2007.

In March 2019, Butler's alma mater, Pasadena City College, announced the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship for students enrolled in the Pathways program and committed to transfer to four-year institutions.

The memorial scholarships sponsored by the Carl Brandon Society and Pasadena City College help fulfill three of the life goals Butler had handwritten in a notebook from 1988: "I will send poor black youngsters to Clarion or other writer's workshops

"I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons

"I will help poor black youngsters go to college"

Works
A complete bibliography of Butler's work was compiled in 2008 by Calvin Ritch.

Novels
Patternist series (in chronological order):
 * 1) Wild Seed (Doubleday, 1980)
 * 2) Mind of My Mind (Doubleday, 1977)
 * 3) Clay's Ark (St. Martin's Press, 1984)
 * 4) Survivor (Doubleday, 1978)
 * 5) Patternmaster (Doubleday, 1976)
 * Omnibus edition (excluding Survivor): Seed to Harvest (Grand Central Publishing, 2007)

Xenogenesis, or Lilith's Brood series:
 * 1) Dawn (Warner, 1987)
 * 2) Adulthood Rites (Warner, 1988)
 * 3) Imago (Warner, 1989)
 * Omnibus editions:
 * Xenogenesis (Guild America Books, 1989)
 * Lilith's Brood (Warner, 2000)

Parable, or Earthseed series:
 * 1) Parable of the Sower (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1993)
 * 2) Parable of the Talents (Seven Stories Press, 1998)

Stand-alones:
 * Kindred (Doubleday, 1979)
 * Fledgling (Seven Stories Press, 2005)

Short stories
Collections:
 * Bloodchild and Other Stories (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1995; Seven Stories Press, 2005), collection of 4 short stories (1 added in 2005), 3 novelettes (1 added in 2005) and 2 essays:
 * "Bloodchild" (novelette), "The evening and the morning and the night" (novelette), "Near of kin", "Speech sounds", "Crossover", "Positive obsession" (essay), "Furor scribendi" (essay), "Amnesty" (novelette, added in 2005), "The Book of Martha" (added in 2005)
 * Unexpected Stories (2014), collection of 1 short story and 1 novelette:
 * "Childfinder", "A Necessary Being" (novelette)

Non-fiction

 * Essays and speeches:
 * "Lost Races of Science Fiction", Transmission (Summer 1980): pp. 16–18
 * "Birth of a Writer", Essence 20 (May 1989): 74+. Reprinted as "Positive Obsession" in Bloodchild and Other Stories
 * "Free Libraries: Are They Becoming Extinct?", Omni 15.10 (August 1993): 4
 * "Journeys", Journeys 30 (Oct 1995). Part of an edition from PEN/Faulkner Foundation, a talk given by Butler at the PEN/Faulkner Awards for Fiction in Rockville, MD at Quill & Brush. Reprinted as "The Monophobic Response" (the title that Butler preferred), in Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, ed. Sheree R Thomas (New York: Aspect/Warner Books, 2000), pp. 415–416.
 * "Devil Girl from Mars: Why I Write Science Fiction", Media in Transition (MIT), February 19, 1998; Transcript October 4, 1998)
 * "Brave New Worlds: A Few Rules for Predicting the Future", Essence 31.1 (May 2000): 164+
 * "A World without Racism": "NPR Essay - UN Racism Conference", NPR Weekend Edition Saturday (September 1, 2001)
 * "Octavia Butler's Aha! Moment", O, The Oprah Magazine 3.5 (May 2002): 79–80

Incomplete novels and projects
Several of Octavia's works were not completed:
 * "I Should Have Said..." (memoir, 1998)
 * "Paraclete" (novel, 2001)
 * "Spiritus" (novel, 2001)
 * "Parable of the Trickster" (novel, 1990s-2000s)

Unpublished/not-in-print stories and novels

 * "To the Victor" (Story, 1965, under penname Karen Adams, winning submission for a competition at Pasadena City College)
 * "Loss" (Story, 1967, 5th place in national Writer's Digest short story contest)
 * Blindsight (Novel: 1978, started; 1981, first draft; 1984, second draft)

Biographies

 * Becker, Jennifer. "Octavia Estelle Butler", Lauren Curtright (ed.), Voices From the Gaps, University of Minnesota, August 21, 2004.
 * "Butler, Octavia 1947–2006", in Jelena O. Krstovic (ed.), Black Literature Criticism: Classic and Emerging Authors since 1950, 2nd edn. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2008. 244–258.
 * Gates, Henry Louis Jr (ed.), "Octavia Butler". The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 2004: 2515.
 * Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy. "Octavia Butler". Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998: 554–555.
 * Pfeiffer, John R. "Butler, Octavia Estelle (b. 1947)", in Richard Bleiler (ed.), Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. 2nd edn. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999. 147–158.
 * Smalls, F. Romall, and Arnold Markoe (eds). "Octavia Estelle Butler". The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Volume 8. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons/Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010: 65–66.

Scholarship

 * Baccolini, Raffaella. "Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler", in Marleen S. Barr (ed.), Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000: 13–34.
 * Bollinger, Laurel. "Placental Economy: Octavia Butler, Luce Irigaray, And Speculative Subjectivity". Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 18.4 (2007): 325–352..
 * Canavan, Gerry. Octavia E. Butler. University of Illinois Press, 2016.
 * Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" and "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse". Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991: 149–181, 203–230.
 * Holden, Rebecca J., "The High Costs of Cyborg Survival: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy".  The International Review of Science Fiction 72 (1998): 49–56.
 * Holden, Rebecca J., and Nisi Shawl (eds). Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia Butler. Seattle: Aqueduct, 2013. ISBN 978-1-61976-037-0
 * Lennard, John. Octavia Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith's Brood. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-036-3
 * Lennard, John. "Of Organelles: The Strange Determination of Octavia Butler". Of Modern Dragons and Other Essays on Genre Fiction. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007: 163–190. ISBN 978-1-84760-038-7.
 * Levecq, Christine, "Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) History in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred". Contemporary Literature 41.3 (2000 Spring): 525–553. ..
 * Luckhurst, Roger, Horror and Beauty in Rare Combination': The Miscegenate Fictions of Octavia Butler". Women: A Cultural Review 7.1 (1996): 28–38..
 * Melzer, Patricia, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). ISBN 978-0-292-71307-9.
 * Omry, Keren, "A Cyborg Performance: Gender and Genre in Octavia Butler". Phoebe: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques. 17.2 (2005 Fall): 45–60.
 * Ramirez, Catherine S. "Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler and Gloria Anzaldua", in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002: 374–402.
 * Ryan, Tim A. "You Shall See How a Slave Was Made a Woman: The Development of the Contemporary Novel of Slavery, 1976–1987". Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008: 114–148.
 * Schwab, Gabriele. "Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency and Power in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis", in William Maurer and Gabriele Schwab (eds), Accelerating Possession, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006: 204–228.
 * Shaw, Heather. "Strange Bedfellows: Eugenics, Attraction, and Aversion in the Works of Octavia E. Butler ". Strange Horizons. December 18, 2000.
 * Scott, Jonathan. "Octavia Butler and the Base for American Socialism". Socialism and Democracy 20.3 November 2006, 105–126..
 * Seewood, Andre. "Freeing (Black)Science Fiction From The Chains of Race". "Shadow and Act: On Cinema Of The African Diaspora", August 1, 2012. Indiewire.com.
 * Slonczewski, Joan, "Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist's Response".
 * Zaki, Hoda M. "Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler". Science-Fiction Studies 17.2 (1990): 239–251..

1970s–1980s

 * Veronica Mixon, "Futurist Woman: Octavia Butler." Essence, April 9, 1979, pp. 12, 15.
 * Jeffrey Elliot, "Interview with Octavia Butler", Thrust 12. Summer 1979, pp. 19–22.
 * "Future Forum", Future Life 17. 1980, p. 60.
 * Rosalie G. Harrison, "Sci-Fi Visions: An Interview with Octavia Butler", Equal Opportunity Forum Magazine, February 8, 1980, pp. 30–34.
 * Wayne Warga, "Corn Chips Yield Grist for Her Mill", Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1981. Sec. 5: 15.
 * Chico Norwood, "Science Fiction Writer Comes of Age", Los Angeles Sentinel, April 16, 1981. A5, Al5.
 * Carolyn S. Davidson, "The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler", SagaU 2.1. 1981, p. 35.
 * Bever-leigh Banfield, "Octavia Butler: A Wild Seed", Hip 5.9. 1981, pp. 48 and following.
 * "Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler: Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre." By Frances M. Beal. Black Scholar. 17.2. March–April 1986, pp. 14–18..
 * Charles Brown, "Octavia E. Butler", Locus 21.10. October 1988.
 * S. McHenry, "Otherworldly Vision", Essence 29.10. February 1989. p. 80.
 * Claudia Peck, "Interview: Octavia Butler", Skewed: The Magazine of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror 1. pp. 18–27.

1990s

 * Larry McCaffery and Jim McMenamin, "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler", in Larry McCaffery (ed.), Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, 1990. ISBN 978-0-252-06140-0, pp. 54–70.
 * Randall Kenan, "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler", Callaloo 14.2. 1991, pp. 495–505. ..
 * Lisa See, "PW Interviews", Publishers Weekly 240. December 13, 1993, pp. 50–51.
 * H. Jerome Jackson, "Sci-Fi Tales from Octavia E. Butler", Crisis 101.3. April 1994, p. 4.
 * Jelani Cobb, "Interview with Octavia Butler", jelanicobb.com, 1994. Reprinted in Conseula Francis (ed.), Conversations with Octavia Butler (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 49–64.
 * Stephen W. Potts, We Keep on Playing the Same Record': A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler", Science Fiction Studies 23.3. November 1996, pp. 331–338..
 * Tasha Kelly and Jan Berrien Berends, "Octavia E. Butler Mouths Off!" Terra Incognita, Winter 1996.
 * Charles H. Rowell, "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler", Callaloo 20.1. 1997, pp. 47–66..
 * Steven Piziks, "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler", Marion Zimmer Bradley Fantasy Magazine, Fall 1997.
 * Joan Fry, Congratulations! You've Just Won $290,000': An Interview with Octavia E. Butler", Poets & Writers 25.2. March 1, 1997, p. 58.
 * Mike McGonigal, "Octavia Butler", Index Magazine. 1998.

2000s

 * Charlie Rose, "A Conversation with Octavia Butler", Charlie Rose. 2000. [Two videos on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2.]
 * "Interview with Octavia Butler", Locus 44. June 2000, p. 6.
 * Stephen Barnes, "Interview", American Visions 15.5. October–November 2000, pp. 24–28.
 * Robyn McGee, "Octavia Butler: Soul Sister of Science Fiction", Fireweed 73. Fall 2001, pp. 60 and following.
 * Marilyn Mehafly and AnaLouise Keating, Radio Imagination': Octavia Butler on the Politics of Narrative Embodiment", MELUS 26.1. 2001, pp. 45–76. ..
 * Scott Simon, "Essay on Racism: A Science-Fiction Writer Shares Her View of Intolerance", Weekend Edition Saturday. September 1, 2001 [Audio].
 * "A Conversation with Octavia Butler", Writers & Books. 2003.
 * Darrell Schweitzer, "Watching the Story Happen", Interzone 186 (February 2003): 21. Reprinted as "Octavia Butler" in Speaking of the Fantastic II: Interviews with the Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2004. ISBN 978-1-4344-4229-1, pp. 21–36.
 * Joshunda Sanders, "Interview with Octavia Butler", in Motion Magazine, 2004.
 * Earni Young, "Return of Kindred Spirits: An Anniversary for Octavia E. Butler Is a Time for Reflection and Rejoicing for Fans of Speculative Fiction", Black Issues Book Review 6.1. January–February 2004, pp. 30–33.
 * Allison Keyes, "Octavia Butler's Kindred Turns 25", NPR: The Tavis Smiley Show. March 4, 2004.
 * John C. Snider, "Interview: Octavia Butler", SciFiDimensions. June 2004.
 * Ira Flatow, "The Interplay of Science and Science Fiction", NPR: Talk of the Nation, June 18, 2004. [Panel discussion; audio].
 * Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, "Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler on Race, Global Warming, and Religion", Democracy Now! November 11, 2005.
 * "Interview with Octavia Butler". The Independent, January 2006.
 * "Interview with Octavia Butler". Addicted to Race, February 6, 2006.

title: Octavia E. Butler


text:
Talk:Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Untitled
Is this NPOV: She was the product of forward looking and powerful parents, that helped develop her writing and technical talents.?

I also think there is too much about Charles in here. -- Zoe

Certainly it's possible for parents to be powerful, isn't it? Same with forward looking, as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't mean they were better than their contemporaries, it just means that they were looking forward, e.g. ahead of their time (which is an easy determination to make unless the subject is living in the present, in which case their forward-lookingness can only be determined later). Articles written about people are often written by those who have some kind of opinion about the person -- you can't know a great deal about the subject and not have an opinion (and if you don't, then the article will probably suck). Chadloder 03:25 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Too Respectful
The article seems too respectful. It doesn't address the tensions in between her and her husband or her affair. The feminist reevaluation of their relationship by authors such as Hertog is unacknowledged. Unmentioned is her lifelong battle to protect and even to carve his image and why she felt there was a need for so much effort.

AML was a great woman but it would be nice if she was dealt with a tad more realistically. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.89.192.125 (talk) 07:37, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

 * It would also be interesting to look at a fuller scope of her writing...which of her books was it (it's not often reprinted or mentioned) that she wrote after Hitler have her husband a medal in Germany? It takes a very...iffy stance on the growing fascism of the 1930's. EDIT: Here's mention from PDS site: "Her most controversial published work was her 1940 book "The Wave of the Future," in which she appeared to share her husband's favorable opinions regarding Nazi Germany." SEE: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/lindbergh/sfeature/anne.html Codenamemary (talk) 18:42, 23 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Here's a little more discussion (from NYTIMES article: "In less than 100 pages of murky and illogical prose she tells the world that we must let Fascism take its course and learn to live with it, if necessary. In other words, do what she did. Submit. The book's negative reception pained and humiliated her. She was considered as bad as her husband -- anti-Semitic, egomaniacal, a tool of the Nazis." SEE: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/magazine/the-lives-they-lived-anne-morrow-lindbergh-b-1906-the-heroine.html Codenamemary (talk) 19:03, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

 * Except for the Jews, most Americans were favorable towards the Hitler regime until 1939. What would be unusual, and therefore reportable, is if she thought poorly of it, unlike most Americans. This is unlikely, however.
 * If she wrote this after 1939, that would be another matter, since common Western thinking opposed the Nazis after the war started.Student7 (talk) 19:27, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

 * Please cite verifiable external sources that support the proposition that "Except for the Jews, most Americans were favorable towards the Hitler regime until 1939." — Preceding unsigned comment added by J52Jarhead (talk • contribs) 04:58, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

 * Well, here's just one: http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/cou/us/pr/pr30.html See neutrality act which was not just anti-Italian, but appears to be anti-French and anti-English as well. Congress. I assume you don't need one to support the idea that Jews (and Roosevelt BTW) did not care for Hitler during this entire time.
 * Much documentation has gone into describing how Roosevelt wanted to "stop Hitler" but had to look for a politically opportune time to try since he realized that ambition had wide opposition.
 * This supports the "1939" part which you probably weren't questioning. http://www.danyankelovich.com/germanbehavior.html.
 * This one explores the attitude on American campuses towards Jews (and therefore toward Nazism) in the 1930s. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25589
 * While the article German American Bund seems to focus on post-1939, it was clearly allowed to operate openly and enjoyed a certain amount of success prior to 1939.
 * But if you have time, scan Life magazine during that period.. or other periodicals. That will give you a feel for the period. Many people thought the fascists had something that would relieve the depression and that was a good thing...at least for Europe if not here. Student7 (talk) 18:14, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

I have not read the book The Wave of the Future, myself...but my impressions from the Linbergh bio and other discussions is not that Anne posed that a fascist rule such as Hitler's was "unfortunate", as the artical now states. (I mean, it was during this period she wrote in a letter that she was beginning to feel Hitler was "a very great man, like an inspired religious leader -- and as such rather fanatical -- but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power.") The book seems to have put a blot on her history. If the book had been critical of those politics, the book would have been heralded throughout her lifetime, not buried. I guess I'll have to find a copy of it. (I just checked: it's $5 at amazon) Codenamemary (talk) 19:16, 16 July 2012 (UTC) Her postwar statements essentially renounced the The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith, and the ideas behind it, stating she was "naive". FWiW Bzuk (talk) 20:20, 16 July 2012 (UTC).
 * Yes, she eventually renounced her book, AFTER others renounced it. I have been meaning to read that book for a while. Apparently it's philosophy is kind of skattered. Codenamemary (talk) 23:13, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

 * Prior to Japan bombing Pearl Harbor and Hitler (stupidly) honoring his Axis obligation and declaring war on America, there appeared no way for America to enter the war with the support of most Americans! Both Roosevelt and Churchill kept looking for a way, but weren't finding anything sufficiently substantial. Her book is not particularly "visionary" as she may have wished/thought, but what must have entered everyone's head that was watching the situation. If the US had NOT entered the war, Britain would have been, at best, sidelined, at worst, been subjected to a fascist government. This was true right up until December 8, 1941, when we "lucked out," though it hardly seemed like a good deal to most Americans at the time, being reluctantly dragged once more into a "foreign" war. Student7 (talk) 19:38, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Layout
The layout of the article is somewhat non-standard. When I tried to standardize it, it was reverted. For example, for no obvious reason, there are mixed "notes" in differing formats; one is "assigned" the other float, like most articles. There is confusion about the use of "bibliography" which the standard suggests avoiding for that reason. Therefore Anne's name is needlessly assigned to one subsection, though the standard says not to use the article name in subsections. And here, it is easy to avoid. WP:OWNERSHIP seems to be at stake here. Student7 (talk) 01:02, 25 November 2011 (UTC)
 * It's an unusual article as the subject is a well known author whose work encompasses a lengthy bibliography of her own works. The use of bibliographical notation is commonplace as wiki authors establish notes to readers typically with citations, that are markedly different from the traditional "footnote" or "endnote". The reworking of the reference section was based on the Modern Language Association Style Guide and Harvard citation styles, a decision made when the original citations were not following any consistent format. There is a very obvious, oblique "note to the reader" established by previous editors, and there was no way to incorporate the note as a direct reference as it was more about the publisher's motivation for writing an article, and not as much about the subject of the article. When reviewing other long-standing work, as much care as possible should be directed to keeping the original "voice" and intent of the article. The confusion over which Lindbergh is being indicated, led the submitters (note plural) to state whether it is Anne or Charles that is being noted, and in the first instance as she is Anne Morrow, it was likely the use of her first name was to differentiate from other Morrows. This article was only recently (re-)discovered. Check the edit log as to submissions, and if you feel that your work is being deprecated for no reason, more discussion needs to take place. FWiW, since the use of similar terminology occurs, a more effusive note is being added to the section on referencing sources, but perhaps your "external bibliography" can work although there may be some reluctance to use a term that is in use in "External links", a "pointer" usually to an electronic or digital source. At least one item in the list of sources has not been used, but will likely be cited in due course. Bzuk (talk) 08:26, 25 November 2011 (UTC).

"Aviator" and "spouse"
We're afraid of plain English here? Varlaam (talk) 15:14, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Middle name confusion
What proof do we have that she kept the middle name Spencer after marriage? Books say AML so maybe she substituted her maiden name as her new middle name. Or was her common name a pen name and not her legal one which no longer had Morrow in it? --Ranze (talk) 04:02, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121602000000/http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/docs/index.php/anne-morrow-lindbergh to http://www.lindberghfoundation.org/docs/index.php/anne-morrow-lindbergh

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suspect allegations
In the sections "return to U.S." and "Later Years and death" are two allegations of affairs which she allegedly had, but cannot be proven. Wikipedia seems to suffer from anonymous authors who want to tear down famous people with accusations like this, based on what "someone" said. They should both be removedBrowntable (talk) 20:32, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

The claim that Anne had an affair with St. Exupery is ridiculous. Anne, Charles and St. Exupery were together for a single weekend at the Lindbergh home in 1939, on Long Island as I remember, and there was absolutely no opportunity for any form of sex during that time, unless they had a threesome (which no one has claimed). She was indeed enamored of the Frenchman and would have been the first to admit it, but she barely touched him during the weekend, and never saw him again thereafter.173.50.167.230 (talk) 15:49, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Names within the article
What is the Wikipedia convention regarding names within an article about a married woman?

Several passages in this article are confusing because of the way names are used. For example, consider the following sentence:

"Lindbergh's speeches and writings reflected the influence of Nazi views on race and religion."

Since the subject of the article is Anne Morrow Lindbergh, I expected that any sentence that uses the name Lindbergh by itself must concern Anne. (For example, in the article John Quincy Adams, whenever "Adams" is used by itself it refers to JQA, not his father John Adams.) But the entire paragraph is as follows:

"Lindbergh elucidated his beliefs about race in a Reader's Digest article in 1939, stating: 'We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.' Lindbergh's speeches and writings reflected the influence of Nazi views on race and religion. He wrote in his memoirs that all of the Germans he met thought the country would be better off without its Jews."

Nowhere in this paragraph is any first name given. But the masculine pronouns make it clear that Charles, not Anne, is the subject.

Is this according to Wikipedia style? I found it confusing. — Lawrence King ( talk ) 02:29, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Main pic
Why does the main picture show her as a 12-year old? There must be plenty of shots from her adult life. Valetude (talk) 20:37, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * It is a poor choice for a subject not known for childhood accomplishments. I have changed it to a more representative image of Lindbergh as a young woman. --Animalparty! (talk) 07:24, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

Reconciliation?
A family reconciliation with the German family members later took place with Reeve Lindbergh being actively involved.
 * Does this mean that Anne was also involved? Needs re-phrasing. Valetude (talk) 12:08, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Since Anne was ill and died in 2001 and the DNA testing and revealing the adult children's paternity didn't happen until 2 years later, at least, no, Anne was not involved. The article stated earlier that, at least according to one person, Anne didn't know about Charles' double life. Personally, I hope she never found out. What a terrible thing, to find out your husband was lying to you and having multiple affairs for years and years. 2600:1700:BC01:9B0:544F:E012:2320:EFE4 (talk) 18:42, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Anne Morrow Lindbergh


text:
Battle of Helm's Deep

The Battle of Helm's Deep, also called the Battle of the Hornburg, is a fictional battle in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that saw the total destruction of the forces of the Wizard Saruman by the army of Rohan, assisted by a forest of tree-like Huorns.

Helm's Deep was a valley in the north-western White Mountains of Middle-earth. Helm's Deep, with its fortress the Hornburg, becomes the refuge of some of the army of Rohan, the Rohirrim, under King Théoden, from assault by the forces of Saruman. Although Théoden says that "the Hornburg has never fallen to assault," in the battle a massive army of Uruk-hai and Dunlendings sent by Saruman almost overwhelms the defences. Saruman's Orcs breach the fortress wall that blocks the valley by setting off an explosion in a culvert; Aragorn names it "Saruman's devilry" and "the fire of Orthanc"; the critic Tom Shippey calls it "a kind of gunpowder". The defenders hold out in the fortress until dawn, when Théoden and Aragorn lead a cavalry charge that drives the Orcs from the fortress. They are surprised to see the valley to the enemy's rear blocked by a forest of tree-like Huorns that have walked from Fangorn in the night. On the side of the valley are relieving forces assembled by Gandalf and Erkenbrand, a Rohirrim leader. These attack, driving the Orcs into the angry Huorn forest, from which the Orcs never emerge; the Huorns bury the Orcs' bodies in an earthen mound known as "Death's Down".

Tolkien based Helm's Deep on England's Cheddar Gorge, and the Glittering Caves of Aglarond on the cave complex that he had visited there. The army of Rohan was according to Tolkien armed and equipped much like that of the armies depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. He noted further that his walking forest was partly a response to Shakespeare's Macbeth, which tells of the coming of "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill". Scholars have likened the way Aragorn, Éomer, and Gimli heroically hold off the army of Orcs to Horatius Cocles's heroic defence of a bridge of ancient Rome.

Peter Jackson's 2002 film The Two Towers makes the battle dramatic, following Tolkien's account quite closely, but with changes to the forces involved: the defenders include a group of Elf-warriors sent by Elrond; the attackers include neither men nor wargs (battle-wolves). Huorns appear only in additional scenes in the Extended Edition, later released on DVD.

Fictional geography

Helm's Deep is based on the Cheddar Gorge, a limestone gorge 400 ft deep in the Mendip Hills, with a large cave complex that Tolkien visited on his honeymoon in 1916 and revisited in 1940, and which he acknowledged as the origin of the Glittering Caves of Aglarond at the head of Helm's Deep, behind the fortress.

Helm's Deep is properly the narrow gorge or ravine at the head of a larger valley (the Deeping-coomb), but the name is also used for the fortifications at the mouth of the gorge and the larger valley below. The gorge, which wound deep into the White Mountains at the feet of the Thrihyrne mountain, led into the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, an extensive series of spectacular speleothems. In The Lord of the Rings, the Dwarf Gimli, who like all dwarves is well versed in geology, horrified that the caves are used only as a refuge, describes them lyrically as:

"immeasurable halls, filled with everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zâram in the starlight. […] when torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then […] gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose […] fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, or into the dark recesses where no light can come."

The mouth of the gorge, Helm's Gate, was closed by the battlemented Deeping Wall, 20 ft tall, and wide enough for four men to stand abreast, with a culvert for the Deeping-stream which flowed down the valley. At one end of the wall the Hornburg castle stood on a spur of the mountain; a long stair led to its rear gate, and a long causeway led down forwards from its main gate. About two furlongs (400 metres) down from the gate was an outer trench and rampart, Helm's Dike, built right across the Deeping-coomb. Tolkien drew detailed sketches of the fortifications.

The valley was named after King Helm Hammerhand of Rohan, when he and his people sought refuge from the invading Dunlendings under Wulf during the winter of.

Background
Théoden had been released by the Wizard Gandalf from the influence of Gríma Wormtongue, his malevolent adviser and Saruman's spy. He then set out to the Fords of Isen, where his marshal Erkenbrand was fighting Saruman's forces. However, Théoden found out that his forces had been scattered. Gandalf advised him to take refuge in the Hornburg fortress of Helm's Deep. Gandalf then left on an unexplained errand. Théoden's army went to the area, where local people were commanded by a captain called Gamling the Old. Many of the men there were very old or young. The women and children of Théoden's capital Edoras were safe in Dunharrow, led by the King's niece Éowyn.

The garrison of Helm's Deep consisted of some 1,000 men, but around 1,000 more defenders had arrived from across Rohan by the time of the battle. The enemy, Saruman's army, consisted of at least 10,000 Orcs and men, most marching from Isengard to Helm's Deep, and others heading to the Fords of Isen. An additional force of Men of Dunland joined the enemy.

The battle

The forces of Saruman, common Orcs, large Uruk-hai, "half-orcs and goblin-men", and Dunlendings (Men of Dunland), arrived at Helm's Deep on a stormy night. They stormed the first defence, Helm's Dike, forcing the defenders to fall back to the fortress. They attempted to break down the gate with a battering ram, but a sortie led by Aragorn and Éomer briefly scattered the attackers.

The Orcs and Dunlendings raised ladders to scale the wall, but were held back by the Men of Rohan atop the wall. Orcs crept into the culvert and made a breach in the wall using a "blasting-fire" from Orthanc, perhaps "a kind of gunpowder"; Saruman's army rushed in. Some defenders retreated to the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, while others retreated to the Hornburg.

Saruman's forces broke through the Hornburg gate just before dawn. At this moment, Helm's horn was sounded, and Théoden and Aragorn rode out, followed by all the Rohirrim left inside. They cut their way through the Orcs and drove them back from the fortress walls to Helm's Dike.

As day dawned, both armies saw that a forest of angry, tree-like Huorns now filled the valley, trapping Saruman's army. Above them, Gandalf appeared on Shadowfax, with Erkenbrand and a thousand footsoldiers who had escaped from the Fords of Isen. They charged into the fray. The Dunlendings dropped their weapons, while the Orcs fled into the Huorn forest and were destroyed.

Aftermath
After the battle, the Dunlendings were given amnesty by Erkenbrand and allowed to return home (much to their surprise, since Saruman had told them that the men of Rohan would burn all survivors alive). The Rohirrim required that all hostilities cease, and that the Dunlendings retreat behind the River Isen again and never recross while bearing arms. Before they were freed, though, the Dunlending captives were put to work in repairing the fortress.

The bodies of the Orcs that had entered the forest of Huorns were never seen again; the Huorns had buried them in an earthen mound known as "Death's Down".

Among the Rohirrim dead was Háma, captain of Théoden's personal guard and doorward of his hall; the Orcs had hewn his corpse, an atrocity that Théoden recalled during his later parley with Saruman. Gimli had been wounded, but had killed 42 Orcs to Legolas's 41.

Literary history
In Book III, ch. 5 of The Two Towers, Helm is described only as a "hero of old wars"; Tolkien did not envision him as a king when he wrote that chapter.

Tolkien had not yet envisioned Helm's Deep in his first sketch for the decisive battle between Rohan and the forces of Saruman. In an outline published in The Treason of Isengard as “The Story Foreseen from Fangorn," the Rohirrim rode west at Gandalf's urging, as in the published text, but met the army of Saruman on the open plain. An indecisive battle ensued, after which the Rohirrim camped for the night, and woke to see the enemy surrounded and destroyed by a wood that had appeared overnight.

Later writings
After the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote about the history of Rohan, in writings now collected by his son Christopher in Unfinished Tales. These state that the fortresses of Aglarond and Angrenost (renamed Isengard by the Rohirrim) were built by Gondor to guard the shoulders of the Gap of Rohan. Like Angrenost to the north, it was initially well guarded, but as the population of Calenardhon dwindled it was not maintained and was left to a hereditary small guard who intermarried with Dunlendings. When Cirion, Steward of Gondor, gave Calenardhon to the Éothéod, Aglarond was transferred into the care of the Rohirrim, who named it Súthburg ("South-fortress" in Old English). The Gondorian guard was merged with that of Isengard. Guard duty of the Fords was initially shared between Gondor and Rohan, but later maintained only by the Rohirrim.

Bayeux Tapestry style
In a 1958 letter to Rhona Beare, one of a group of enthusiasts, Tolkien stated that the Rohirrim "were not 'Mediaeval' in our sense" (as the Third Age was meant to be thousands of years earlier) but that all the same "the styles of the Bayeux Tapestry (made in England) fit them well enough", explaining that the soldiers in the tapestry are wearing chain-mail.

Shakespeare rewritten
Tolkien noted in a letter that he had created walking tree-creatures partly in response to his "bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare's Macbeth of the coming of 'Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill': I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war". The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey calls it a "shock" that the battle is decided by having a forest of Huorns destroy Saruman's army of Orcs.

Classical influence
Charles Oughton likens the Battle of Helm's Deep to Livy's account of Horatius Cocles's heroic defence of Rome's Pons Sublicius bridge. The heroes Aragorn, Éomer, and Gimli hold off the army of Orcs; Horatius holds off the army of Etruscans at the bridge. Oughton finds multiple matches between the two accounts. Several of these are not present in Thomas Babington Macaulay's poem "Horatius" which retells Livy's tale, though Oughton suggests that Tolkien did make additional use of Macaulay for some details.

Peter Jackson's film

In Peter Jackson's 2002 film The Two Towers the keep was built into the mountainside and resembles a World War I bunker, in keeping with Tolkien's history as a soldier in that war. The entrance to the Glittering Caves of Aglarond is within the Hornburg itself, rather than at the top of the deep behind the Deeping Wall as in the book. Further, the Uruk-hai assault the main gateway in a testudo, or locked-shields style formation, and the 'blasting fire' is depicted as gunpowder. The battle was filmed mainly at night, in frequent heavy natural rain or when necessary with artificial rain on the actors, for more than three months.

The Helm's Deep set used some computer-generated imagery; some parts were constructed as full size sets; some shots used a 1/4 scale physical model, while more distant shots used a 1/85 scale model. In the final battle scene, Weta's "Massive" crowd simulation software and "Grunt" rendering software were used, with thousands of Uruk-hai modelled using Alias/Wavefront's "Maya" software. It has been described as one of the greatest battle scenes in film, combining "technical mastery, sweeping spectacle and tonal balance". In the film, 10,000 of Saruman's Uruk-hai (with no Orcs of other races, Dunlendings or wargs to accompany them) lay siege to the fortress, defended by around 300 Rohirrim. Soon after, however, a large group of the Elves of Lothlórien join the defences, sent by Elrond, at Galadriel's prompting. The defenders suffer heavy losses, but hold out until dawn, when Gandalf arrives with 2,000 riders led by Éomer, who turn the tide of the battle and rout Saruman's forces. In the original script of the film, Elrond and Arwen had gone to see Galadriel in person, and it was Arwen who led the Elves to fight alongside the Rohan defenders. Jackson rejected Arwen's involvement, revising her character from a "warrior princess" to a role closer to that of the book, but kept the Elves in the battle. Huorns appear only in additional scenes in the Extended Edition, later released on DVD.

Other
The 2013 expansion to The Lord of the Rings Online entitled Helm's Deep depicts the fortress of Helm's Deep as well as the surrounding area of Western Rohan, the Battle of Helm's Deep featuring prominently.

title: Battle of Helm's Deep


text:
Sweet Honey in the Rock

Sweet Honey in the Rock is an all-woman, African-American a cappella ensemble. They are a three-time Grammy Award–nominated troupe who express their history as black women through song, dance, and sign language. Originally a four-person ensemble, the group has expanded to five-part harmonies, with a sixth member acting as a sign-language interpreter. Although the members have changed over five decades, the group continues to sing and perform worldwide.

Musical career
Sweet Honey in the Rock was founded in 1973 by Bernice Johnson Reagon, who was teaching a vocal workshop with the Washington, D.C. Black Repertory Company. Reagon retired from the group in 2004. The name of the group was derived from a song, based on Psalm 81:16, which tells of a land so rich that when rocks were cracked open, honey flowed from them. Johnson has said that this first song in which four women blended their voices was so powerful, that there was no question what the name of the group should be. The ensemble's most powerful messages are proclaimed through an enormous catalog of songs addressing the world's woes. They are currently occupied with immigration injustices, congressional greed and lack of compassion for citizens, the environmental imbalance, racial issues and women's issues.

Sweet Honey in the Rock has received several Grammy Award nominations, including one for their children's album, Still the Same Me which received the Silver Award from the National Association of Parenting Publications. They contributed their version of Lead Belly's "Grey Goose" from the compilation album Folkways: A Vision Shared which won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album.

Their vocals appeared in a number of animated counting cartoons on the PBS series Sesame Street, and the group was the subject of the 2005 documentary Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice.

The group has ventured through 20 vocalists since its creation. Embarking on a new chapter in their musical journey, Sweet Honey In The Rock now includes four core vocalists—Louise Robinson, Carol Maillard (both founding members), Nitanju Bolade Casel, and Aisha Kahlil. Shirley Childress, an American Sign Language Interpreter, performed live with the group from 1981 until her passing in 2017.

Influences
Sweet Honey in the Rock has been making music since the mid-1970s. Although the members of the group have changed over time, their music has consistently combined contemporary rhythms and narratives with a musical style rooted in the Gospel music, spirituals and hymns of the African-American Church. The ensemble composes much of their own music. They have addressed topics including motherhood, spirituality, freedom, civil rights, domestic violence, immigration issues, and racism. In their latest album, "#LoveinEvolution," they address the additional topics of police shootings, specifically the Charleston church shooting, and the environment.

Members
Over the decades, more than 20 individuals have lent their voices to Sweet Honey in the Rock. Beginning as a quartet, the group is now composed of six African-American women (including a professional American Sign Language interpreter who accompanies the group on concert tours).

Current members

 * Nitanju Bolade Casel
 * Aisha Kahlil
 * Louise Robinson (an original ensemble member)
 * Carol Lynn Maillard (an original ensemble member)
 * Barbara Hunt (sign language interpreter)
 * Rochelle Rice
 * Christie Dashiell
 * Romeir Mendez (bassist)

Former members

 * Ysaye Maria Barnwell
 * Bernice Johnson Reagon (founder)
 * Shirley Childress Saxton (sign language interpreter) (1947–2017)
 * Arnae Batson
 * Mie
 * Dianaruthe Wharton
 * Evelyn Maria Harris
 * Rosie Lee Hooks
 * Ayodele Harrington
 * Ingrid Ellis
 * Tia Juana Starks
 * Patricia Johnson
 * Yasmeen Williams
 * Laura Sharp
 * Tulani Jordan Kinard
 * Helena Coleman
 * Geraldine Hardin
 * Akua Opokuwaa
 * Navasha Daya (special guest for "40 and Fierce Tour")

"Are We a Nation?"
On June 22, 2010, the group released the song "Are We a Nation?", their response to Arizona's controversial immigration law, SB-1070. An official music video of the song was released online on July 2, 2010. Directed by James Lester, the video was shot in New York City at Tainted Blue Recording Studio during a live recording session of the song. Amanda Navarro researched and provided the video's archival images and Russel Soder was the cinematographer. Ramon Hervey II served as the project's executive producer. The band donated a portion of the proceeds from the sales of "Are We a Nation?" to the Center for Community Change, an organization founded in 1968 to honor the life of Robert F. Kennedy. Sweet Honey in the Rock also joined The Sound Strike, boycotting performances within Arizona in protest of the law.

Discography

 * Sweet Honey in the Rock (1976)
 * B'lieve I'll Run On... See What the End's Gonna Be (1978)
 * Good News (1981)
 * We All... Every One of Us (1983)
 * The Other Side (1985)
 * Feel Something Drawing Me On (1985)
 * Breaths... The Best Of (1988)
 * Live at Carnegie Hall (1988)
 * All for Freedom (1989)
 * In This Land (1992)
 * Still on the Journey: The 20th Anniversary Album (1993)
 * I Got Shoes (1994)
 * Sacred Ground (1995)
 * Selections 1976–1988 (1997)
 * ...Twenty Five... (1998)
 * Still the Same Me (2000)
 * Freedom Song (2000)
 * The Women Gather (2003)
 * Alive in Australia (2003)
 * Endings & Beginnings (2004)
 * Raise Your Voice (2005) [soundtrack]
 * Experience...101 (2007)
 * Go in Grace (2008)
 * "Are We a Nation?" (2010)
 * A Tribute — Live! Jazz at Lincoln Center (2013)
 * "Silent Night" (2014)
 * #LoveInEvolution (2016)

Nominations

 * Grammy Awards – 2008 – Best Musical Album For Children – Experience... 101
 * Grammy Awards – 2000 – Best Musical Album For Children – Still the Same Me

title: Sweet Honey in the Rock


text:
GNU Chess

GNU Chess is a free software chess engine and command-line interface chessboard. The goal of GNU Chess is to serve as a basis for research, and as such it has been used in numerous contexts.

GNU Chess is free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version, and is maintained by collaborating developers. As one of the earliest computer chess programs with full source code available, it is one of the oldest for Unix-based systems and has since been ported to many other platforms.

Features
GNU Chess 6.2.5 is rated at 2661 Elo points on CCRL's 40-moves-in-2-minutes list. For comparison, the strongest human player, Magnus Carlsen, has achieved an Elo rating of 2882. On the same list, Fritz 8 was rated at 2665 Elo, and that program in the 2004 Man vs Machine World Team Championship beat grandmasters Sergey Karjakin, Veselin Topalov and reached a draw with Ruslan Ponomariov.

It is often used in conjunction with a GUI program such as XBoard or GNOME Chess, where it is included as the default engine. Initial versions of XBoard's Chess Engine Communication Protocol were based on GNU Chess's command-line interface. Version 6 also supports the Universal Chess Interface (UCI). Since version 6.1 GNU chess supports a graphical mode for terminal emulators.

History
The first version of GNU Chess was written by Stuart Cracraft. Having started in 1984 in collaboration with Richard Stallman prior to his founding of the GNU Project, GNU Chess became one of the first parts of GNU.

GNU Chess has been enhanced and expanded since. Versions from 2 to 4 were written by John Stanback. Version 5 of GNU Chess was based on the Cobalt chess engine written by Chua Kong-Sian.

In 2011, GNU Chess transitioned to version 6, which is based on Fabien Letouzey's Fruit 2.1 chess engine. According to CEGT version 5.60 of this code base is stronger than Fruit 2.3, the latest version of that chess engine.

title: GNU Chess