Book #16 of 2024: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler This collection of short stories (originally published in 1995, then revised in 2005 with two additional entries) was the last work of author Octavia E. Butler’s fiction that I hadn’t yet read, so it’s been a bittersweet experience for me this week to …
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Book #4 of 2024: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams This 2008 anthology collects 22 short stories about life after various apocalyptic scenarios, all but one of which had been previously published elsewhere (although Stephen King’s plague journal “The End of the Whole Mess” was the only entry I’d read before). …
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Book #273 of 2021: Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #5) Author Octavia E. Butler’s debut novel was later followed by a number of loose prequels, detailing how the world arrived at the future civilization depicted here, with humanity divided into three warring tribes: ‘Clayark’ mutants infected with an alien pathogen, regular people, and psychics …
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Book #203 of 2021: Survivor by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #4) Author Octavia E. Butler famously came to hate this volume in her Patternist series, letting it fall out of publication in 1981 (a sentiment still honored four decades on by whoever now holds the copyright). It’s never been officially released as an ebook or …
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Book #132 of 2021: Unexpected Stories by Octavia E. Butler This posthumous collection by renowned African American science-fiction icon Octavia E. Butler is regrettably slim, but it lives up to its title, presenting two of her early works that had been previously unpublished. The novella A Necessary Being does not appear to have ever been …
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Book #233 of 2020: Clay’s Ark by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #3) The Patternist books were written all out of chronological order (5-2-4-1-3), and I’m finding that reading them as they take place is an odd experience, since the texts don’t really form any coherent narrative arc so far. My working assumption for now is …
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Book #36 of 2018: Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #2) Octavia Butler wrote the Patternist books all out of chronological order (5-2-4-1-3), but I’m reading them as they take place. This book, the second by either measure, shows the creation of the Patternist network of telepaths that gives the series its …
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Book #179 of 2017: Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #1) Anyanwu is an African shapeshifter who has survived for centuries by healing all physical damage and keeping her body young. She thinks there’s no other person remotely like herself until she meets Doro, a man millennia past his own natural lifespan but whose …
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Book #33 of 2016: Imago by Octavia E. Butler (Xenogenesis #3) This is the final book in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (also called Lilith’s Brood, which is such a worse and more misleading title). Then again, calling these books a trilogy is misleading in its own way: they do build on one another as the …
Book #25 of 2016: Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler (Xenogenesis #2) I feel like I still don’t really get this series, which is somewhat less than ideal given that I’m now two-thirds of the way through it. Butler does a good job of making her aliens, well, alien, but more often than not that …
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