This was quite difficult, for a number of reasons, and, in fairness, I should note at the start that the placement of Fledgling, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents is a bit more speculative, because it’s been so long since I read them — Fledgling and Parable of the Sower in 2014 and Parable of the Talents in 2016.
Mainly, however, it was difficult because I have come to the conclusion that despite how gripping I find her writing — it has rarely taken me more than a day or two to finish one of her books — I do not actually particularly enjoy Butler’s work. I offer this as another caveat: if you are fully a Butler fan, you probably will not like my ranking of her novels!
The main thing I have trouble with is that so much of Butler’s work seems to begin from the premise that humans are inherently, irredeemably bad, such that the only way to escape this badness is by ceasing to be human at all.[*] I just can’t accept this premise! I am willing to entertain an allegorical reading of this premise as a critique of what Sylvia Wynter has called the overrepresentation of “Man” at the expense of the human, such that (in Butler’s work) it is Man that’s bad and Man that must be abandoned in order to become human, something that for the past several centuries has hardly been possible. I do, however, think her emphasis on biological determinism — particularly in terms of gender/sex dimorphism and concomitant heterosexuality — and eugenics rather belies this approach.
To be clear: I think Butler is a very good writer (though I don’t find her style as aesthetically pleasing in and of itself as, say, Delany or Le Guin) and worth reading. She is asking complex and valuable questions about agency and what kinds of actions we can or should take when every choice is ethically compromised in some way. I am, however, often as troubled by the answers she offers as I am by the questions themselves, and the extent to which the critical conversation around her work sometimes seems to gloss over these aspects of it worries me. (I was particularly alarmed by the critical essay included with the Grand Central edition of Wild Seed, which bizarrely concludes that Doro’s eugenic project is actually good, because he accepts anyone with valuable talent regardless of race or gender. What!? Even with my reservations about the novel this seems to me to be a dramatic misapprehension of Butler’s point.)
With all of that said, here is my (mostly) definitive Octavia E. Butler novel ranking.
I put off reading Kindred for some time — having recognized that I didn’t exactly enjoy reading Butler’s work — because I’d heard so much about it and was, essentially, worried it wouldn’t live up to the hype. Fortunately, it absolutely does live up to the hype: it really is that good.
Kindred also, crucially, avoids many of what to me are pitfalls in the rest of Butler’s work by grounding its questions about agency and complicity not in a science-fictional situation that simply resembles chattel slavery in one way or another (but with racial difference as a) species difference and b) productive of an objective and absolute power differential such that slavery is inevitable and perhaps preferable to the alternative), but rather in literal, actual chattel slavery. It’s an incredibly powerful meditation on complicity, resistance, and violence.
(I told you people wouldn’t like this ranking!) Clay’s Ark is I think the best of the Patternist novels and the second-best of Butler’s novels because unlike most of the other species transformation novels, it is clearly and openly a horror story, with no hesitations. even Keira’s choice to embrace the microorganism is, I think, meant to read as horrifying. It’s a really effective narrative, gripping and dark — and still very much interested in Butler’s key questions about agency and the nature of the human, but haunted, now, by the prospect of the inevitable destruction of the human.
I’ve got to be honest. First of all, in no way, shape, or form is this a “Star Trek novel.” Second of all, it is honestly kind of unhinged that she disowned this novel for having one sexual relationship between a human and an alien and yet went on to write Xenogenesis and especially Imago, which is entirely about aliens trying to find humans they can fuck. Hello?
In any case: while this does have some of the uncomfortable power dynamics so common to her work — in particular the biologically instantiated (though culturally reinforced) alien caste system — I nonetheless found it actively enjoyable to read (rather than simply intellectually interesting) in a way that few others of her books have been for me. I enjoyed the world-building, especially the alien language, and I appreciated its reimagining of — essentially — a settler colonialism where the settlers are in a position of profound weakness, caught between rival Indigenous polities that each want to use them for their own advantage. it’s fun!
I have significant reservations about Dawn, and Adulthood Rites addresses many of them. The entire Xenogenesis trilogy is premised on sexual violence that it seems to expect us to overlook — or at least move past — but Adulthood Rites at least challenges Dawn’s commitment to presenting humans as innately and inevitably self-destructive, opening the possibility that humans could be different. This kind of moment is vanishingly rare in Butler’s work, so I was grateful to find it here. It does, however, suffer from the relentless heteronormativity — one is left to wonder whether the Oankali just quietly conversion therapied any gay people they found.
Wild Seed is the second most gripping of the Patternist books and probably the third most of any of Butler’s books, and I think Anyanwu is probably Butler’s most distinctive female protagonist — where the others often feel a bit the same to me (which, to be clear, hasn’t really detracted from my enjoyment of the books!), Anyanwu has a markedly different voice and personality. The problem for me here is the eugenics: obviously the novel is critical of Doro’s breeding program and the systems of biopolitical (and necropolitical) management of (in reality Black) bodies that it represents. Unfortunately, Anyanwu still “believes in” the end goal of the project — to create a new kind of superhuman being — and so even if her methods (bringing talented people together and letting them choose their own partners) are different the end result is still, fundamentally, a eugenics program.
However: I am tantalized by the possibility suggested at the end of the novel, a reimagination of the purpose of the project — not to create a new kind of superhuman being as a goal in itself, but specifically to create someone who will be able to kill Doro. This is a really compelling angle; unfortunately, it’s introduced about four pages before the end of the book and there’s no time to explore it, and if Mary is that end goal, then I would honestly say the project was a failure even if it succeeded in killing Doro.
Reading this in 2016 was rather surreal; the Earthseed duology has been rightly held up as an example of science fiction’s ability to speak to contemporary politics. I think Parable of the Sower has perhaps a more engaging plot, but I appreciate Parable of the Talents for its willingness to question Lauren and its refusal to give up on Earth. Like Adulthood Rites, Earthseed raises the possibility that humans could be different while still being human.
Honestly this is just a really solid far-future sci-fi novel. This was the first of Butler’s books that I actively enjoyed, rather than finding intellectually stimulating. The characters are engaging, the plot is compelling, and the pacing is solid. It does suffer from being very heterosexual, but that’s true of all of her work, and I appreciate it in retrospect for casting Mind of My Mind, Wild Seed, and Clay’s Ark in even darker lights — reading the Patternist books in publication order (which I would highly recommend) is grim: you know what’s coming, and however idealistic Mary or Anyanwu or Eli may sometimes be, the end result is a world that would be a nightmare to live in.
I remember being very impressed with this when I read it in 2014, and it’s unsettlingly as politically relevant today as it was in 1993 (if not perhaps moreso, as the tendencies Butler observed in connection with the Christian right of the turn of the ’90s have advanced significantly). Having said that, I don’t love Butler’s interest in large age gap relationships (though at least here Lauren is an adult), and the difficulty with Earthseed itself — as Butler herself recognized in Parable of the Talents — is that it evades responsibility for what’s happening on Earth, and the kind of colonial ideology we’ve seen in recent space colonization discourse. The affirmation that “God is Change” rules, though.
I was blown away by this conceptually when I first read it in 2014. On rereading, however, I couldn’t quite get past the sexual violence, which Lilith is not only complicit in but apparently unbothered by. It also sets the tone for aspects of the rest of the trilogy that I disliked, not least the insistence that the human men who resist the Oankali are doing so because they feel the ooloi threaten their masculine prerogative as The Penetrator, rather than because they are (accurately) experiencing sex with/through the ooloi as rape. Between this, the gender determinism, and the biological determinism re the fate of the human species, I can’t rate Dawn as highly as I would have ten years ago.
I’ll be honest, I gave this 4 stars when I read it in 2014, but I don’t really remember it that well. In retrospect, it seems like a kind of mix and match of stuff from her other books which I think the other books largely do better (except perhaps offering agency to the victim of a eugenics program without simply having her recreate a large-scale system of oppression the way Mary does in Mind of My Mind). Also, the weird pseudo-pedophilia thing is…too much for me.
The problem I have with Mind of My Mind is that I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to believe that Mary is better than Doro. In some ways, she probably is. However, she also very much does replace his eugenics program and the elaborate systems of control that he built up over millennia with the basis of a new system of mass enslavement (this time of non-telepaths by patternists), and that’s very bad, actually!
I had such high hopes for Imago after the improvements Adulthood Rites made over Dawn, but unfortunately we’re back to sexual coercion under the guise of symbiosis. As I observed above, the entire plot is about aliens trying to find some humans to fuck (indeed, to coerce into fucking them), and it doubles down again on the biological determinism, which didn’t feel great after the lengths Adulthood Rites went to to suggest another way forward.
[*] I said once that I think the most important difference between Butler’s work and the work of Samuel R. Delany is that the latter believes in the possibility of a revolution and the former does not. I think this is, in part, another way of articulating this premise, which Delany — for all that he shows us visions of a humanity radically transformed by encounters with other kinds of life — certainly does not take up.
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