We just crossed the threshold into Octavia E. Butler’s future.
Time has caught up with her vision.
Published in 1993, and set in what was then the not-too-distant future of a chaotic Southern California of 2024, Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower was lauded for its gritty realism and urgency. As time moved forward, that “realism” came to feel more like uncanny prescience.
Butler bristled against the notion that she was clairvoyant. She held strongly to the belief that she was simply paying attention to the state of the world, what she could see at the edges of her vision. And, crucially, that we should too.
Shortly after the book was published, I attended a signing at the now-shuttered Eso Won Books, an independent Black-owned shop that felt like a second home to many Black Angelenos. That day, Butler spoke vividly about a world that didn’t feel too different from the one we moved through daily. Only recently had the city been turned inside out in 1992’s civil unrest, and little did we know that we were only a few months away from the devastating Northridge earthquake. In her deep, contoured voice, Butler told a portentous story about her fictional multiracial community, Robledo, California—a struggling walled suburb of Los Angeles besieged by severe drought; class wars; violent, fire-setting scavengers; and a long-embattled population seized by political apathy. In the unlikely role of leader, Butler had fashioned her 15-year-old protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, a girl who is impelled to chart a path out, not just to safety but, she hopes, to a better future “among the stars.”
Over time, Olamina develops a mindset for survival—a set of tenets she begins to understand as a religion, which she puts down in verse in a notebook. These writings form Earthseed: Book of the Living, whose central theme is the role of “change.”
That evening at Eso Won, I stood in a line to have my book signed. When I brought it home, I read the first crisp, quickly paced pages, and was so unmoored by them, I had to put the book on the shelf.
It took me years to finally read Parable of the Sower end to end. It put my teeth on edge. It entered my dreams.
To mark this Parable Year, I thought it might be a contemplative, if not revelatory, exercise to keep a 2024 journal, a daybook of entries detailing what crossed my path and what swirled around in the news. Since 2016, I’ve been researching several Butler-related projects in her archive, housed at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. As a Black woman writing science fiction, Butler, through her very presence in the genre, shifted possibilities and broadened its narrative scope. Those hours reading her notebooks and research and sampling her newspaper clippings allowed me to better understand her process. It made me wonder what Butler might do today—or rather, what she’d do with today. Where might she train her eyes?
“I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the snowballing effects of lack of foresight and short-term self-interest, a third-world country.” —Octavia E. Butler
January 1, 2024: Journal
New page. New year.
From my bedroom, I can hear the hum of low-flying helicopters; the sound rattles my windowpanes. On any other day, I might have cause for concern, but given the date, it’s most likely both television and law enforcement choppers circling above Pasadena as the Rose Parade is set to begin. The parade’s starting point is walking distance from my home, as well as several of Butler’s former addresses. Last night, in honor of the approaching new year, I fished out one of my copies of Parable of the Sower—the dog-eared and Post-it-filled one that is my workhorse copy. This morning, I flipped through to the first entry:
Then:
Stepping off into Butler’s past’s future—and into our evolving present…
January 5: Newslog
The Supreme Court of the United States will hear a historic case to determine whether former president Donald Trump can run for president. The 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution bans any individual who has engaged in insurrection or rebellion from holding federal office. However, Trump’s lawyers argue that the law does not apply to the president.
February 11: Newslog
“A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco’s Chinatown last night around 9PM PT, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire. The fire department arrived minutes later…but by then the flames had fully engulfed the car.”
February 12: Journal/Parable Pages
“I’ve heard there’s a new illegal drug that makes people want to set fires.”
“[The Paints] shave off all their hair.… They paint their skin green or blue or red or yellow.… They take that drug that makes them like to watch fires.”
February 21: Journal
Scanning the news: more rain. February 2024 is now the fourth-wettest February ever for Los Angeles. This latest storm has brought 1.99 inches of rain downtown so far, bringing this month’s total rainfall to 12.56 inches. We’ve swerved from what, for years, I used to half-jokingly call PermaSummer™ to this. Days and days of rain: “This is now the 4th wettest February in Downtown Los Angeles since records began in 1877,” the National Weather Service says.
February 29: Newslog
The death toll in the ongoing war in Gaza surpasses 30,000 people, according to the health ministry there. “The death toll also does not make clear how many militants are among the dead. Israel says its forces have killed more than 10,000 fighters in Gaza, but has not provided evidence or detailed information to back up its estimate. Gaza’s health ministry says 70% of those killed in the territory are women and children. Its most recent breakdown of casualties recorded in hospitals shows women and children make up 58% of those deaths.”
March 3: Journal
Paging back through my early archive notes, I retrace Butler’s footsteps. Seldom are they evenly paced or straightforward: wrestling her way through a three-year writer’s block, she began her book, this version of it, in 1988, with, as she would later express, “nothing worthwhile til 1992.”
Her 2024 is a broken-down world. Hope doesn’t simply come; it must be “shaped.”
Butler clarifies and sharpens her storyline—not only in the writing process but for years after, as she speaks in public about the book and the series it would become: “This is a story of a child who is shaped by her time into a woman who is the shaper of her time.”
Our 2024: So many of us are still living in the echo of the coronavirus pandemic, not just the virus that continues to mutate but the financial fallout—inflation, job insecurity (or, as Butler called it, “throwaway labor”)—combined with building political anxiety, wars, and territorial conflicts.
Comparing text to news cycle, the resonances have been loud-clear, at times prompting a quick wave of gooseflesh, but not shocking. She’s given us 30 years. It’s past time to start to think about ways to tend to the planet, as well as body and spirit. Stop reacting. Act.
March 14: Journal
Wind event: 60-mile-per-hour whistling, whipping gusts travel across the San Gabriel Valley. Palm trees dancing, cracking. Major damage in the Altadena-Pasadena area, Butler’s old environs. The tail end of Santa Ana season has gone out in a wild finale. We will be picking up for weeks, maybe months. Magnolia, cypress, grand oaks upended, shallow root systems exposed. Sidewalks cracked through by 100-year-old oak tree roots. Rows and rows of overturned agave. TV crews have been capturing B-roll. I reported one of our 90-year-old cypress trees that took in so much water during the last deluge, it was leaning northward, exhausted, like something out of Dr. Seuss.
March 15: Journal
Butler’s Earthseed musings: “I wanted [Olamina] to be an intelligent, honorable person.… I put Earthseed together by asking myself questions and coming up with answers.” She was influenced by the Tao Te Ching—“a slender book, seemingly simple,” Butler said. She experimented with language and tone. Writing in verse freed her from her inner critic, her writer’s block. As she wrote,
March 18: Journal
SpaceX launch at Vandenberg Space Force Base leaves a cursive loop in the sky. Phone photos from across the L.A. Basin—above gyms, above supermarkets, laundromats, skyscrapers—fill my social media feeds.
March 22: Newslog
In one of my morning e-newsletters, an item pops up: State Farm Insurance is shedding 72,000 home insurance policies in California, citing rising costs, increasing catastrophe risk, and outdated regulations. The changes, slated to begin this summer, will, experts say, likely inflate housing costs in a state that regularly endures major destructive wildfires.
“You get rid of the worst risks,” says one analyst.
Nonrenewals will start rolling out in July.
Message received: You’re on your own.
March 23: Journal
Day began with spur-of-the-moment coffee with Nikki High, the owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena. We sat outside in a steady drizzle, at a quaint mom-and-pop café around the corner from her store. The shop, named in honor of Butler, opened in February 2023, to around-the-block lines. It has since become a hearth for Octavia fans and readers seeking BIPOC titles. High told me that Octavia interest only builds. She’s tracking that by sales: Parable of the Sower specifically has seen a brisk uptick: “When I first opened, I was selling about 2 to 3 copies a week. Now I sell about 15 to 17. People reading it for the first time or wanting to read it again.”
March 25: Newslog/Journal
“A man was arrested March 22 for removing evidence from the scene of a deadly train accident in Kern County after he took a severed leg from the victim and was shown eating it in a video shared on social media.… Emergency staff responded to reports of a pedestrian who had been struck by a train in the Amtrak station near the 700 block of G and 7th Streets in Wasco, a city 24 miles northwest of Bakersfield.”
This news item shook me. It is right out of Sower: “We rounded a bend in a dry stream bed, and there these kids were roasting a severed human leg.”
Butler saw the unstitching, the potential chaos that would come with desperation.
March 27: Journal/Newslog (Developing)
I hear the first of this disaster on the radio.
BALTIMORE—Two of the six repair-crew workers’ bodies found in the water beneath the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. Of those six, all immigrants from Mexico and Central America who had been part of a construction/repair team working overnight.
The bridge disaster itself is an infrastructure catastrophe, an interruption of port business, food chain, commerce, but the deaths of these men tell an altogether different tragic story. These immigrants working to repair the bridge overnight fit the description of the “throwaway labor” Butler researched, after learning of the maquiladoras, factories built by U.S. companies just over the border in Mexico. “This was true throw-away labor—people treated as though they were Kleenex,” Butler wrote. “In the Parables I spread such practices north into the US as the US economy deteriorates and as Americans become more and more desperate.”
April 5: Journal
Curious shimmery lights in the sky earlier this week. Chinese rocket reentry debris.
April 7: Journal
Today’s outline. My heading: “Watching OEB turning up the heat…”
“No smooth paths, as characters…seek to fulfill wants, throw timely and ecologically correct problems at them, hitting, missing, skinning, affecting, even when characters feel safe,” Butler noted in November 1990.
April 8: Journal
Midday, I stood on my front lawn gazing skyward, to witness the last total eclipse visible in the contiguous United States until 2044. From here in Southern California, all told, it was a bit lackluster. My neighbor took one look through my eclipse glasses, shrugged, and went back to weeding his yard.
At the apex of the event, the world had a desaturated, almost green cast. We didn’t have full darkness. Most compelling, though, were the unexpected visitors who came calling: a clutch of missionaries in Sunday suits and dresses made their way slowly, northward up my quiet street. Just as we’d approached totality, they’d begun knocking on doors, checking clipboards, making notes. I began to muse, Were they working on some sort of off-world manifest? I suppose they were making last-minute visitations to those who hadn’t made plans for their souls in case these were indeed end times.
Butler would have had something cheeky to say about the eclipse and doomsday in a tense election year. If only her narrative started sooner.
April 12: Journal
Back in the reading room after a long stretch away. The pages I’ve landed on, by chance, feel like a greeting, as if she is encouraging me as she encourages herself: “Good to type again. Good just to feel myself typing. It’s as though I were doing something…” But not too far away, she makes note of the size, scale, and challenge of the work ahead, implying “Where is the fun and/or ease of the effort, of being one with it?”
It never goes in a straight line. Life or narratives. “Why don’t [I] toss this tangle of ideas and forms away and find something that I can actually do?” she chides herself. “But after two and a half years, what would that be.”
April 13: Journal
I startle awake to three red-headed woodpeckers at steady work on my roof. Surrounding trees are full of mockingbirds. I downloaded a birdcall app to my phone to identify more birdsongs: common raven, house finch, black phoebe, red-whiskered bulbul. I’ve noted so much more birdsong since the COVID shutdown. Once we “opened back up,” I wondered if we’d lose that unexpected beauty that came out of so much pain, but that hasn’t happened. I have three birds’ nests in the eaves. The mourning doves have returned even after their nest was blown away by the Santa Anas. I spent much of the morning watching them build a new nest together, reclaiming the very same spot as before. I think of Butler’s nature notes.
April 16: Journal
Archive day. First thing, I land here: “We expect what has been to continue,” she writes, “[but] even desirable change unsettles us.” Resistance. Always resistance.
Climate and climate change had been on Butler’s mind since the 1980s. The archive bears this out: She’d located and read early books, filed news articles. She studied the many ways in which people in power would ignore, deny, or minimize—kick the problem down the road—until these “possibilities” became crises.
Now, 18 years after Butler’s death, climate change isn’t just coming; it’s here. “In both ‘Parable of the Sower’ and ‘Parable of the Talents,’ global warming,” Butler asserts, “is almost a character.”
For decades, she teased it out; lived within that “what if?” Imagine: to be mired in the murk, gloom, and fear, day in, day out. I know. I’m living in her predictions.
Conversely, I must mention: While I was scribbling away today, a news alert flashed on my phone—“Are flying cars finally here? The New Yorker takes a ride in a new class of aircraft.” Immersed in Butler’s desaturated grimness, I couldn’t help thinking, “Ah! The shiny future we hoped for versus the future we got. Not wrapped in a bow, but left crushed on the doorstep.”
April 19: Newslog
A man set himself on fire in protest outside the Trump trial in New York City. The man, Maxwell Azzarello, was badly burned and taken to a hospital in critical condition, officials said. He later died from his injuries.
April 30/May 1: Newslog
“Police arrested pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses across the country overnight, notably at the University of California, Los Angeles, where chaotic scenes played out early Thursday as officers in riot gear surged against a crowd of demonstrators and made arrests.
“Police removed barricades and began dismantling demonstrators’ fortified encampment at UCLA after hundreds of protesters defied orders to leave, some of them forming human chains as police fired flash-bangs to break up the crowds.”
May 2: Journal
Writer Tananarive Due posts the following on X: “OMG AVA’S BOOK CLUB IS DISCUSSING @OctaviaE.Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER on @ABBOTTELEMENTARY— THIS IS NOT A DRILL… And I needed to feel a smile on my face today.” Butler shining in the pop culture zeitgeist.
May 5: Journal
My early plan had been to read a few pages of Parable of the Sower nightly. I haven’t been able to muster it. It’s less trepidation than lethargy. The twists and tragedies endured to get to 2024 have taken their toll—COVID’s global effects, the death toll, wildfire skies, deserted streets, protracted isolation. Apocalypse everyday. Coupled with wars raging, political skulduggery, and ongoing humanitarian crises, it feels like there’s no dividing line between our calendar days and Octavia’s future. But we must look.
Where do we find succor? Strength?
Olamina is seeking too. While her father, a professor and Baptist minister, finds creative ways to tend to his dwindling flock, his God is not hers, she’s come to understand. The horror of the world and the stresses of her present day push her toward a different system of beliefs. Necessary measures.
Parable of the Sower is Butler’s way of shocking us awake. “I wanted to write a story in which, in spite of all the trouble, someone tries to push the human species into focusing its great energies on positive and potentially useful goals.”
May 11: Newslog/Parable Pages
“An unusually strong solar storm hitting Earth produced stunning displays of color in the skies across the Northern Hemisphere early Saturday, with no immediate reports of disruptions to power and communications.” Auroras could be seen from the northern half of the country, as far south as Alabama, and as far southwest as Texas and Southern California.
From Parable: “‘Kids today have no idea what a blaze of light cities used to be—and not that long ago.’ ‘I’d rather have the stars,’ I say.”
May 15: Journal
Took a writing pause to listen to Butler scholar Ayana Jamieson on The Amendment, a podcast hosted by reporter Errin Haines at the 19th. I met Jamieson in 2016, when I started my research at the Huntington.
Jamieson, the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a global community committed to highlighting Butler’s work, had already familiarized herself with the nooks and crannies of the holdings, and she became a guide and trusted sounding board. In the segment, “Octavia Butler’s Vision of 2024,” Haines queries Jamieson about Butler’s ability to see, synthesize, and accurately project. “Many of the problems she was speculating about 30 years ago, we reached them maybe 20 years ago,” explains Jamieson. “We’re not going back to the good old days.”
“We need to prepare for if we are on the outside of the wall,” she says.
Reading the signs—the news, the climate, the erratic political pulse—“can better prepare us for the changes that will inevitably arise in the future,” says Jamieson. “Because change, it’s not like a thing that happens. It’s an archetype that exists as a constant. It’s a state of being, a pattern.”
Change, as Butler’s Olamina expresses it, is unavoidable. “You cannot pray for change or against it,” says Jamieson. “It will come.”
May 17: Journal/Parable Pages
August 3, 2024: “Christopher Morpeth Donner, one of the men running for President this year, has promised to abolish [the Astronautics Department] if he’s elected. My father agrees with Donner. ‘Space could be our future,’ I say.… [My dad] is going to vote for Donner. He’s the only person I know who is going to vote at all. Most people have given up on politicians.… Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.”
May 19: Newslog
The print edition of the Sunday New York Times on my doorstep, above the fold: “For Millions in Mexico City, Water Is Disappearing.”
May 26: Journal
Time travel, a different sort: Spent Sunday afternoon with the Books & Gardens Club at the Stoneview Nature Center in Culver City. Coincidentally, this was the site of my old elementary school decades ago.
I can still visualize the old footprint, the asphalt tetherball and handball courts, the row of brick midcentury buildings. The concrete breezeways. They’ve been transformed into lush garden spaces, fragrant walking paths, a labyrinth. L.A. County invited several design teams to turn the five acres of brownfield into an “urban sanctuary,” perched above La Cienega’s freeway-speed rush. A lush example of shaping change.
The group is discussing Butler, her inspirations. This park, with its focus on native plants, edible gardens, and airy gathering and educational spaces, would be a boon to Butler’s soul. It was good to be in community.
May 29: Newslog/Journal
New York jury convicts former president Donald Trump on all 34 counts in hush money trial.
“Our country’s gone to hell,” Trump says at a press conference.
What would Butler make of Trump? We have more than a clue: in the 1998 follow-up to Sower, Parable of the Talents, presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarret’s slogan is “Make America Great Again.”
May 30: Journal
A friend forwards me a social media post from earlier this month. It’s right on time: “A publishing executive asks: ‘What if we don’t have a 2028 election?’”
June 2: Journal
My marginalia. Remember: Butler’s own work ethic—the persistence, the focus, the ability to not let uncertainty capsize her and her vision. She’s telling us, too, keep going, trust what we see: “I’m not in the business of saving people, I’m in the business of helping people save themselves.”
June 5: Newslog/Journal
Boeing’s Starliner capsule launched for the first time, with two astronauts on board, in flight to the International Space Station. “If…successful…it could pave the way for Boeing to join SpaceX’s ranks, giving NASA a second option for routine flights to and from the space station.” One of the astronauts, a woman, Sunita Williams, an American of South Asian descent, has already completed two other space missions. On prior flights, Williams carried with her sacred texts including Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
Following this story, it’s impossible not to think of Butler’s fictional astronaut, Alicia Catalina Godinez Leal, a lodestar for Olamina, who is meditating on life beyond the ruin of Earth: “I intend to remember her. I think she can be a kind of model for me. She spent her life heading for Mars—preparing herself…beginning to create sheltered places where people can live and work now.”
June 12: Journal
Overdue catch-up with James Fugate of Eso Won. Though we’ve spoken on the phone and have texted, I haven’t seen him in person since he and co-proprietor Tom Hamilton officially closed their doors two years ago.
Over lunch, I tell him I’ve been back in the archive scanning Butler’s source material. Along the way, I’ve noted the many mentions of the store in her datebooks or on a to-do list. It’s clear that they were a home base, a support, and community.
“She was a special friend of the store’s,” Fugate confirms. “When Octavia won the MacArthur, I went to a party for her out in Pomona,” he continues. “You know, people were talking about her books, and one brother was saying how beautiful Parable of the Sower was, ‘beautiful!’…and I was sitting there, looking. And he went on. I blurted out, ‘It’s the most depressing book I’ve ever read!’ Then Octavia turned to me. ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Oh, it was meant to be.’”
June 21: Newslog
“The City of Pasadena has proclaimed June 22 Octavia E. Butler Day in honor of Pasadena native and noted American science fiction author, Octavia Estelle Butler.”
June 22: Journal
Today would have been Octavia’s 77th birthday. Earlier this week, the City of Pasadena issued a proclamation that June 22, 2024, was officially Octavia E. Butler Day. My Saturday kicked off early, taking a seat onstage for a 10 a.m. panel, “Harvesting Hope: A Panel Discussion,” at L.A.’s Central Library—a place that Butler considered a sanctuary. We discussed the Parables’ (and Butler’s) imprint on our own lives. Three hundred attendees—children, teens, adults—convened for a full morning of Butler-related workshops, book club discussions, role-playing games, and book giveaways.
Afterward, I hopped on the Arroyo Seco Parkway and drifted over to a low-key outdoor celebration held amid fragrant native flora at the Arlington Garden, in Butler’s hometown, Pasadena. Organized by Schessa Garbutt and their design studio, Firebrand Creative House, the event, “Octavia’s Solstice”—reverent and contemplative—evoked the mood and texture of Olamina’s dreams for Earthseed as community.
I traced a path through the grounds, pausing to sample the offerings: art making, writing at typewriter stations, reading, rest, and space for thought. As the sun dipped low, casting everything in a honey glow, I stood under a spreading shade tree listening to words inspired by Butler’s own. The gathering was a peek at possibility—at what a peaceful, collaborative community might look like. The word of the day: “intentionality.”
June 23: Journal
I cross off days on my calendar, each X carrying us closer to July. At times, it feels as if we are nearing a “game over” alarm. When that occurs, my mind circles around these words of Butler’s: “Our only way of cleaning up, adapting and compensating for all this…is to use our brains and our hands—the same tools we used to get ourselves in so much trouble.”
People often ask me, What would she say now? That’s not the right question. What’s for us to do? I think about Jamieson’s words: “Use her methods to read the world. We can still do better. Be better. Supporting causes you believe in, reading newspapers, [supporting] people you believe in. Not giving up. Making the best choices you can.”
Butler was a serious-minded seeker and dreamer, a loner. While “Afro-futurist” is a term that was coined and grew into fashion after her death, Jamieson prefers the designation that Butler applied to herself: she was a histo-futurist. “Butler’s conception was clean. She was like, What was the history of the future? How do we want to map that out? And how will we be agents in mapping [a] future that does the least amount of harm?”
June 24: Journal
On June 24, 1991, Butler, two days after her 44th birthday, observed the world around her:
July 1: Newslog
“Hurricane Beryl upgraded to a ‘potentially catastrophic’ Category 5 storm late Monday night, the National Hurricane Center said, as it crossed islands in the southeastern Caribbean.…
“Climate change—and specifically, an established trend of warmer ocean and air temperatures—has led to more intense hurricanes and other storms. And this year, that dynamic is already rewriting the record books.”
Since forming in late June, Beryl is now the earliest Category 4 Atlantic storm; it was also “the farthest east that a hurricane has formed in the tropical Atlantic (<=23.5°N) in June on record, breaking the old record set in 1933,” as Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach said on X.
“Near-record warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic were cited as one reason National Weather Service forecasters have predicted an unusually active Atlantic hurricane season, with up to 25 named storms.”
July 11: Newslog
“Boeing’s Starliner Return to Earth Delayed Indefinitely, No Date Set” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“On Wednesday, the two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, gave an update for the International Space Station in addition to NASA and Boeing crews on Earth.
“Wilmore and Williams expressed their confidence in Boeing’s ability to get them home despite being in space longer than scheduled.…
“A big topic of discussion on Wednesday was about the batteries aboard the Starliner. Ahead of the launch, Boeing said they were good for 45 days but has since indicated they would perform well past that deadline.”
Note to self: This is utterly chilling…
July 13: Journal
Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump is the target of what is being characterized, in breaking news reports, as an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
July 20, 2024
Lauren Oya Olamina’s 15th birthday. Her story is now beginning.
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
