Award winning Science Fiction writer with vision and drive
3 OCTAVIA E. BUTLER BOOKS TO REACH THE SCREEN IN 2022
Ground breaking SCIENCE FICTION WITH POWERFUL SOCIAL AND BEHAVIOURAL COMMENTARY
IN the beginning
During her lifetime, Octavia E. Butler created a body of work that won multiple awards and placed her at the very top of Sicence fiction writing – a journey she made very much with the odds stacked against her.
Born in Pasadena in 1947, her mother was a cleaner and her father a shoe-shiner in a society split be segregation. Octavia was chronically shy and intensely bookish. Her early fascination with fairy tales led on to what became a life-long interest in Science Fiction.
Despite strong reistance from her family, she was determined both to study and to write as a profession and her drive and persistence led her to the point of making her living from her passion.
A UNIQUE VOICE
Her storytelling is a unique combination of Sci-Fi fantasy and commentary on serious soical and humanitarian issues; abuse of power, violence, abuse, racism.
Octavia died in 2006, but her messages are seemingly more elevated, more powerful now than ever. These three adaptations are just the beginning, with more in the pipeline.
Who am I? I am a forty-seven-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. I am also comfortably asocial—a hermit. … A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
—Octavia E. Butler,
READ THE BOOK < WATCH THE SHOW
KINDRED
Channel| FX
Dana Johnson, a young Black woman and aspiring writer, has uprooted her life and relocated to Los Angeles. She’s ready to claim her own future away from her family ties, but finds herself violently pulled back and forth in time to a nineteenth-century plantation. She fiinds it has surprising and intimate links with her family. An interracial romance threads through her past and present, and the clock is ticking as she struggles to confront the secrets she never knew ran through her blood.
“Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has done a phenomenal job of adapting Kindred for FX and honoring the legacy and timeless value of Octavia Butler’s groundbreaking novel,” said Nick Grad, President, Original Programming FX.
DAWN: Lilith's Brood
CHANNEL| AMAZON PRIME
Ava DuVernay and Victoria Mahoney are teaming up to adapt DAWN, the first in the Xenogenesis/Lilith’s Brood trilogy from Butler.
The book’s themes include gender, identity, communication and powere imbalance:
As human civilization works on destroying itself in yet another world war, humans come into contact with the Oankali: grayish humanoid aliens with sensory tentacles growing from their bodies. The Oankali stop the conflict and save humans from the devastated ruins of Earth—but what do they want in exchange?
Fledgling
Channel | HBO
‘A master storyteller, Butler casts an unflinching eye on racism, sexism, poverty and ignorance and lets the reader see the terror and beauty of human nature’ The Washington Post
HBO have ordered a pilot script for the adaptation of Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last completed novel.
53-year-old Shori wakes up in the wilderness. She has no memoires and serious injuries. While she is recovering she realises she has very un-human needs and abilities and it gradually dawns on her that she is a vampire. To have a future, she must unravel her past … because the people that nearly killed her haven’t given up.