On my latest “Looking Back on Genre History” segment on the #StarShipSofa podcast (Episode 774), I discuss four recent works about #ScienceFiction that are perfect for your 2026 #TBR list.
#Biography #History #OctaviaButler #JulesVerne #VintageSF #StarTrek #Books #Bookstodon #OctaviaEButler #SFF

Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/starshipsofa-774-caren-gussoff-sumption/id166360307?i=1000746000785

My 2025 in Review (Best Science Fiction Novels and Short Fiction, Reading Initiatives, and Bonus Categories)

• Graphic created by my father

Here’s to happy reading in 2026! I hope you had a successful reading year. Whether you are a lurker, occasional visitor, a regular commenter, a follower on Bluesky or Mastodon, thank you for your continued support. As I say year after year, It’s hard to express how important (and encouraging) the discussions that occur in the comments, social media, and via email are to me. I’m so thankful for the lovely and supportive community of readers, writers, and discussion partners that stop by.

What were your favorite vintage SF reads–published pre-1985–of 2025? Let me know in the comments.

Throughout the later part of the year I’ve dropped hints about a research project. Perceptive readers might have parsed together the contours of the research: late 19th/early 20th century, utopian, African American, the American South, radical politics… It’s taking longer than expected. I’ve read a good ten monographs, five dissertations, countless articles. I’ve written twenty pages. I hoped to have it posted by early in this year. Alas. It’s coming together–slowly. Stay tuned.

Without further ado, here are my favorite novels (I only read a few) and short stories (I read a ton of those) I read in 2025 with bonus categories. I made sure to link my longer reviews where applicable if you want a deeper dive.

Check out my 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021 rundowns if you haven’t already. I have archived all my annual rundowns on my article index page if you wanted to peruse earlier years.

My Top 5 Science Fiction Novels of 2025

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

1. Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984). It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read. It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

• Mark Weber’s cover for the 1st edition

2. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge (1984), 4.5/5 (Very Good). Full review.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Icehenge, a fix-up from two previously published stories “To Leave a Mark” (1982) and “On the North Pole of Pluto” (1980), tells three interconnected tales that all connect to a mysterious monolith left on Pluto (the titular Icehenge). By design Icehenge instead follows the action after the action: men and women attempting to figure out their own place in a world characterizes by lifespans that stretch hundreds and hundreds of years. And its this brilliant interconnection between self-conception and the operations of history that Robinson succeeds and casts his spell. The story is well-told, polished, and filled with fascinating details (technological and sociological).

• Peter Jones’ cover for the 1978 UK edition

3. Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered (1977), 4/5 (Good). Full review.

The vast Confederación is comprised of radically distinct worlds ruled by the entire spectrum of political systems with both alien and non-alien inhabitants. There are few rules: don’t take advantage of indigenous populations and don’t wage wars on neighboring planets. At 22, the naive Otto McGavin, an Anglo-Buddhist, joins the Confederación as an agent to protect the rights of humans and non-humans. But there’s a twist. Under deep hypnosis a construct of Otto McGavin will be created for each mission. He’ll take on the identity–under a sheath of plasticine flesh–of whatever person he needs to be depending on the task.  The story follows Otto on three missions over many years.  The interlocking segments convey the deep trauma Otto must confront before he’s immersed in another persona and sent on another mission. His idealism clashes with the violence he must perpetuate. His sense of self conflicts with the violent actions of his “constructs.” The looming sense of dread and despair must finally have its reckoning.

• Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition

4. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), 3.75/5 (Good). Full review.

Zoë Fairbairns charts the struggles of the British women’s liberation movement in a dystopic near future. An anti-feminist fringe political party called FAMILY comes to power, simultaneously proclaiming family values while systematically dismantling the welfare state. Benefits effectively eviscerates governmental doublespeak and champions the need to organize and educate in order to fight against patriarchal forces and messianic movements that promise to solve all our ills.

• Colin Hay’s cover for the 1976 edition

5. Edgar Pangborn’s The Company of Glory (1975), 3.5/5 (Good). Full review.

Edgar Pangborn is an unsung SF hero in my book. At his best, he’s a deeply humanistic writer interested in moments of effective metafictional play on the nature of narrative. The Company of Glory (serialized 1974, 1975) is the third novel in the Tales of Darkening World sequence. It forms a prequel to Pangborn’s masterpiece Davy (1964). As with Davy, The Company of Glory attempts to create multiple interlocking layers of narrative, stories within the stories, quotations from various diaries, and the interjections of the overarching narrator of the entire collection of texts who remains anonymous until the final pages. Unfortunately, The Company of Glory is a deeply flawed novel. Recommended only for Pangborn’s fans. Read Davy first if you’re new to his work.

My Top 20 Science Fiction Short Stories Reads of 2025 (click titles for my full review)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Foster, You’re Dead” (1955), 5/5 (Masterpiece): I featured on a podcast about this story. When the episode is posted, I’ll make sure to link it. Mike Foster spends his school days practicing survival skills–digging, making knives, weaving baskets–in case of a nuclear attack. The kids snicker at him as he walks past. They don’t own a fallout shelter at home. His father refuses to pay into the NATS (National Security fund). If a bomb hit, Mike wouldn’t even be granted access to the school shelter. He’s possessed by a deep, perpetual, encompassing trauma.

2. Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), 5/5 (Masterpiece): A rare reread! Leiber imagines an America transformed after a limited nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The physical landscape mirrors the psychological scars of New York’s inhabitants. Perverse new forms of TV entertainment, in particular male wrestlers pitted against masked women, transfix all audiences.

3. Jack Dann’s “A Quiet Revolution for Death” (1978), 5/5 (Masterpiece): Roger and his family head out of the city for a picnic in a vast cemetery. Roger dreams that he is an angel of God guiding mankind through the realm. Visiting the cemetery is an act of devotion. While other kids plug themselves into feelies, Bennie is a fanatic disciple of his father’s pseudo-philosophy of embracing the macabre. Sandra, Roger’s wife, plays along. The kids see through her dislike of the cemetery and the burial rituals happening around them.

4. Izumi Suzuki’s“Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021), 4.5/5 (Very Good): A nameless young female main character recounts her interactions her one-time boyfriend. HE wants to reconnect with his mother, who abandoned his family. HE joins a staged show called The Psychoanalysis Room in an attempt to convince his mother to take “pity and come and find” him. She also has a dysfunctional family. Her mother, a TV executive, struggles/refuses to connect to her daughter. Like some manifestation of the modern hikikomori, they often refuse to communicate with others, eat as a group or eat at all for days on end, or leave their dwellings for the sun and vista of the aboveground. Both find solace and escape in the vacuities and artifice of television.

5. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Six astronauts return to earth from a voyage to Mars. But they are not treated as heroes. Instead people flee. I found “Explorers We” a well-crafted existential terror. The story plays with narrative expectation and hints at a cosmic enormity that will, at least in this iteration, remain unknown.

6. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An explorer who feels no pain is hurled mercilessly from planet to plant where is he tortured, experimented upon, and broken again, and again, and again. His sense of time dissipates. Space becomes a hellscape that he cannot escape. And each time he’s lifted back to his scout ship where a mechanical boditech stitches him back together.

7. Jack Dann’s “The Dybbuk Dolls” (1975), 4.5/5 (Very Good): Chaim Lewis works at a sex shop down below in the Undercity, one of many identical spheres, one mile in diameter, buried one thousand feet below the ground.  As Chaim finishes up his shift in the dingy shop, a group of visitors ask about his hook-ins and 21st century pornos. Eventually one of them asks him about his alien sex doll collection. And when he returns to the room with the dolls, he discovers they’ve all been unpacked and they imprint themselves on his mind! Cue a descent into the bizarre…

8.  Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody” (1955), 4.5/5 (Very Good): An artificially created Guinevere stands “chained” in a “vending machine” tempting sleepy passengers in an airport with her plaintive calls. I did not know Williamson had this type of vision in him! The surprise of the year!

9. George H. Smith’s “The Last Days of L. A.” (1959), 4/5 (Good): A nameless character (“you”) wakes from a recurring dream: “the dream that has haunted the whole world since that day in 1945.” A dream of apocalyptic annihilation, in infinite variations. A narrative repetition takes form: Nuclear nightmare. The waking moment. The aimless quest for understanding. Communing with other lost souls. The retreat to the bottle. Fragments of the news suggest a world unraveling.

10. Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Stars Are the Styx” (1950), 4/5 (Good): The premise: Humans created Curbstone, an artificial satellite around Earth, to facilitate the ultimate scientific achievement–near instantaneous transportation across the galaxy. How? Individual spaceships, with a solitary crew person or couple, will be hurled out from Curbstone at various points across the space time continuum. The story revolves around the aging (and rotund) Senior Release Officer on Curbstone, who certifies, counsels, and guides the strange collection of humans who gather at the station willing to take such a risk.

11. Richard Matheson’s “Dance of the Dead” (1955), 4/5 (Good): In a drug and alcohol drenched near-future, a group of young adults take a break-neck road drip and stray from the path set out by parents and small town community. Manifesting the SPEED of the car, Matheson’s prose resonates with pulse and hum, snippets of song and signage, slang and youthful lust. It’s frantic. It’s zappy. It’s vibrant. Recommended for fans of the more linguistically experimental (and bleak) of 50s visions.

12. Jack Dann’s “Rags” (1973), 4/5 (Good): Joanna wanders the streets without seeing a single person. Everything she sees—from garbage cans to parked cars–seem in be various states of decay (“dented, rusted, and discolored”). She teaches herself a new way to walk to avoid the “invisible beings” that flit around her (6). She remembers a past sickness. Deaths in the family. She makes new rules of movement and perception as an act of preservation.  And suddenly she sees The Purple Cat.

13. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973), 4/5 (Good): he elderly dwell underground in large domed cities. It’s a commercial and media-inundated world — tiny machines grant “feeling” as you watch commercials. Professor Fleitman, who “could not rationalize having an orgasm over a cigarette advertisement,” presents a new idea to galvanize the elderly to Entertainment Committee. Rather than a feelie or a movie he wants to put on a circus.

14. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966), 4/5 (Good): Stanisław Ivanovich spends his days submerged in lakes and rivers tagging septopods, a new octopus-like species discovered on Earth. His daughter, Marsha, assists from above. When he emerges from a lake, Marsha is deep in conversation with Leonid Andreevich Gorbovsky, an astroarchaeologist implied to be on leave from an expedition. The two scientists–IIvanovich, with his eyes on earthly mystery, and Gorbovsky, untangling the traces of potential intelligences across the cosmos–and Marsha engage in a series of discussions about the nature of the universe.

15. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): Somewhere on the Venusian surface the Valley of Dur, with its amalgamation of gasses, traps unsuspecting denizens who wander into its depths. In the city of Takon, Venusians, six-limbed creatures with silvery hair, ogle the strange beasts extricated and caged and exhibited from the Valley. The child, transfixed by the man’s noises and scrawls, pushes his stylus and pad under the bars. And Morgan Gratz, stranded astronaut and self-confessed murderer, draws for the child the respective locations of their planets.

16. Katherine MacLean’s “Contagion” (1950), 3.5/5 (Good) is a contact with an alien planet tale that’s legitimately odd. A hunting party looking for specimens of alien life in order to dissect, sets off from the spaceship Explorer across an alien planet called Minos. Reasonably, the crew is obsessed with a minute medical analysis of flora and fauna. The hunting party encounters a majestically shaped human who spins a crazy tale of adaptation and disease. 

17. Cherry Wilder’s “The Ark of James Carlyle” (1974), 3.5/5 (Good): Carlyle spends his tour of duty in a hut with a wood platform on small landmass surrounded by an “oily purple sea” on an alien planet. A crisis hits — and he suddenly learns the reason for the singular trees that grow in the center of each island.

18. E. C. Tubb’s“Without Bugles” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): A naive journalist struggles to confront her heroic idealism, regurgitated through the media, in her attempt to save the Mars colony afflicted with a futuristic case of the black lung.

19.  Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934), 3.5/5 (Good): President Herbert Hoover infamously proclaimed on the eve of the Great Depression that “given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” “Famine on Mars,” published five years into the Great Depression, evokes similar paradigmatic shifts between propagandistic proclamation and harsh reality. Kelly spins a nightmare account of a famine on Mars and a plan to save the starving legions.

20. Gerald Kersh’s “Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?” (1953), 3.5/5 (Good): Kersh imagines a literary version of himself returning to New York City from WWII interacting with a fantastical manifestation of a Wound Man on board the Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary. Corporal Cuckoo, the “Wound Man” in question, regals the narrator (Kersh) with the history of his scarred and mutilated form that mysteriously heals from every injury.

Reading Initiatives

I have continued, resurrected, and created new science fiction short story reading series over the course of the year. Most of the stories I’ve picked for the series are available in some fashion online via links to Internet Archive in each review. I’ve included installments from 2024 in each series below. Feel free to read along with me! And thanks for all the great conversation.

Galaxy Science Fiction Read-through (started 2025)

1. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (October 1950)
2. Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (November 1950) 

Organized Labor and Unions in Science Fiction (started in 2024)

1. Mack Reynolds’ The Earth War (1964)
2. Zoë Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979)

The First Three Published Short Fictions by Female Authors (continued from 2021)

1. Cherry Wilder (1930-2002)

Translated Short Stories in Translation (with Rachel S. Cordasco) (started in 2024)

1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)
2.  Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984, trans. by Daniel Joseph 2021)

The Media Landscape of the Future (started in 2022)

1. George H. Smith’s “In the Imagicon” (1966)
2. Izumi Suzuki’s “Terminal Boredom” (1984)
3. Jack Dann’s “Fragmentary Blue” (variant title: “There are no Bannisters”) (1973)

The Search for the Depressed Astronaut  (continued from 2020)

1. Philip K. Dick’s “Explorers We” (1959) 
2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Painwise” (1972)
3. E. C. Tubb’s “Without Bugles” (1952)
4. E. C. Tubb’s “Home is the Hero” (1952)
5. E. C. Tubb’s “Pistol Point” (1953)
6. John Wyndham’s “The Man From Beyond” (variant title: “The Man from Earth”) (1934)

Generation Ship Short Stories (continued from 2019)

1. George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

Exploration Logs (continued from 2022)

1. Exploration Log 7: Interview with Jordan S. Carroll, author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2024)
2. Exploration Log 8: Pat M. Kuras and Rob Schmieder’s “When It Changed: Lesbians, Gay Men, and Science Fiction Fandom” (1980)
3. Exploration Log 9: Three More Interviews with Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988)
4. Exploration Log 10: Interview with Jaroslav Olša, Jr., author of Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction (2025)
5. Exploration Log 11: Interview with Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke, author of Nigerian Speculative Fiction: The Evolution (2025)

My Top 4 History Reads of 2025

A large portion of my history reading this year pushed my general interest in labor history and leftist politics backwards into the 19th century. Unusual for me I know! Often I write about what I can write about not what I plan on writing about. A brief caveat worth repeating: I’m a PhD-wielding historian and have a high tolerance for academic texts. That said, I’d classify everything in my list as on the approachable side of things if you know the broad strokes of American history.

1. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp’s Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010): This filled a complete hole in my knowledge. While I had encountered history-centric militant abolitionist texts written by black authors, I did not know how they fitted into the larger historiographic project of the era. As my PhD looked at universal histories in the medieval period, I’m a sucker for all kinds of histories of historiography! This is a good one.

2. Deborah Beckel’s Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North Carolina (2011): I read this one for my research project on a black utopian author. Beckel’s brilliant monograph looks at the race and politics in North Carolina after the end of Reconstruction–a “fusion” government of Republicans and Populists managed to take power (temporarily) from the white supremacist Democratic status quo in the 1890s. Depressing. Fascinating. I’m waiting for an alt-history that uses the 1898 election in North Carolina as a jonbar hinge — hah!

3. Edward K. Spann’s Brotherly Tomorrows: Movements for A Cooperative Society in America (1989): While an older monograph, Spann’s work is a fantastic survey of the fascinating range of radical social idealism-inspired communities that proliferated across America. I’m obsessed by left-wing ideologies that permeate the rural world and movements for working-class utopianism. Spann will inspire you to track down newer monographs on the social movements he surveys.

4. Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025): Rightly won the Hugo! I interviewed Carroll in January. In the book, he examines the ways the alt-right uses classic science fiction imagery and authors to mainstream fascism and advocate for the overthrow of the state. This is a short monograph designed to encourage thought. Highly recommended.

Goals for 2026

1. Keep reading and writing.

2. Read more reviews by other bloggers.

3. Cover more SF in translation.

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

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This quote points to a difficult reality of collapse and care.

When people are overwhelmed or afraid, resistance isn’t always rejection — it’s often the body protecting itself. Help offered without trust or consent can land as danger.

As we move toward fair share ethics, this matters deeply. Care has to be relational, paced, and responsive — or it risks doing harm even with good intentions.

#OctaviaEButler #FairShareEthics #RelationalCare #SystemsChange #Farmastery

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Book Review: Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984)

• Alan Gutierrez’s cover for the 1985 edition

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984) is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984).1 It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read.2 It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.

Note: This novel is not for readers seeking happy adventure or diverting escapism. It is an absolute bludgeon of the novel with a litany of unsettling themes, power dynamics, and disturbing scenes (rape, incest, a beheading, etc.). I apologize for the short review. Despite my appreciation of Clay’s Ark in particular, I struggle to write about Butler’s work.3

As always, there are spoilers below.

The Geography of the Wreckage

California, 2021 A.D. Across an almost “primordial” desert a few scattered “communities were dead or dying” (18). A few foolish, and well-armed, souls brave the distances between urban “enclaves” in armored vehicles. In the cities, the enclaves are “islands” surrounded by “vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness” (32).

Blake Jason Maslin, a doctor of internal medicine, travels across the expanse with his twin sixteen-year-old daughters (Keira and Rane), both “naive, and sheltered” (32), on a final trip to see a relative. Keira suffers from an untreatable leukemia. She confides that she sees “herself fading away” (6). On the way they’re abducted by Eli, Meda, and their strange, unusually thin, ill-looking, followers. They take Blake and his daughters to an isolated homestead with gardens, solar panels, and strange children that seem to run on all four limbs. “Everybody here looks like me, sooner or later” Meda confesses (23). Under duress, Blake is paired off with Meda, who scratches his face. Rane with Eli. And Keira with Stephen Kaneshiro. The ritualized infection commences.

A few years earlier, an injured Eli, possessed by an extra-human will to survive, happened across the homestead and its original inhabitants, followers of an “angry God” (56). Despite comments about his race, they took him in and cared for him. We soon learn Eli, a geologist, was the sole survivor of a sabotaged spaceship, the titular Clay’s Ark. On their voyage, the crew encountered an alien pathogen that develops a parasitical relationship with those that survive the infection. In return for heightened senses, the infected must infect and impregnate others or bear offspring of the infected. After impregnating the three surviving women of the homestead, Eli plans his first abduction (101). He promises, as if to convince himself that he’s still a human with a moral code, to only spread the disease as much as necessary to satiate the new biological urge. He’ll gather his new “family” at the homestead. They’ll develop a strategy to convince the infected to stay. If someone escapes, the world will be transformed. But everyone knows that isolation will only last so long. Someone will escape.

Both the narrative of Blake and his family and Eli’s simultaneously map the new nature of the wreckage and presage the future apocalyptic transformation that looms.

New Families in the Wasteland

As academic study of Butler’s science fiction abounds, I will only briefly discuss an element that I personally found fascinating–in this instance the unnerving new sense of family and connection Eli and his followers create.4 Butler explains that the works in the Patternist sequence sought to write a good story about a “strange community of people.”5 Butler’s careful world building creates a pervasive sense of social and moral disconnect. The wealthy and privileged, like Blake and his children, rarely travel outside of their urban oasis. The world outside can barely be described as human: “what the rat packs did to each other and to unprotected city-dwellers was not something [Blake] wanted to expose his daughters to” (137). Thus, inside the oases they attempt to “recreate the safe world of […] sixty years past for [their] children” (32). Blake’s trip is an attempt to reaffirm the ties that bind: Keira’s illness, and the fear of imminent death, made her want to visit her grandparents “one last time” (4).

Eli’s arrival in the past at the homestead and his abduction of Blake and his children reveal the strange new family in the wasteland. These are connections formed by “guilt and grief” (87). These are connections compelled through violence and an alien biology. While the children of the infected appear inhuman, they are still children. These are connections welded by the desire to make some semblance of normality in the abnormality of it all. Even Gabriel Boyd, the patriarch of the religious community that took Eli in, must push away the knowledge that Eli caused the devastation, and begs him to take care of Meda, his daughter (85). Rane must confront her desire for Eli. Keira must confront her feelings for Stephen: “You’ve sacrificed my family to spare yours” (93), yet when he puts her arm around her, “she was surprised that the gesture did not offend her” (91). Both girls are underage. How much is the alien microbe responsible for their actions? Blake must juggle his parental responsibility to protect his children with the need to alert the world to the illness. And Keira, in the final calculus of it all, attempts to forge a connection. The effective rendering of the moral landscape, and its networks of power, of the new age is the novel’s most unsettling, and brilliant, element.

Final Thoughts

As with Mind of My Mind (1977), I found Butler’s brutal view of power–and its interplay with relationships, gender, and race–a heady mixture. Perhaps due to the vividly realized dystopian backdrop of the community surrounded by the dry desert air and looming hyper-violent doom, I struggled less with Butler’s deliberately stark, clipped, and direct prose than in the past. I even found a metaphor tucked in here and there that accentuated the horror of it all. Simultaneously, Butler’s use of the two parallel narratives creates a simple but effective way to reveal backstory and the horrifying dichotomy of Eli’s position as bringer of the plague and community builder.

Clay’s Ark (1984) supplants Mind of My Mind (1977) as my favorite in the Patternist sequence. I am including both Wild Seed (1980) and Patternmaster (1976) despite abandoning both (I’ll try one of them again next year). I even think Clay’s Ark challenges Kindred (1979), which I never managed to review, as my favorite Butler novel so far.6

If my earlier caveat did not scare you off, go find a copy.

• Danny Flynn’s cover for the 1991 edition

• Geoff Taylor’s cover for the 1985 edition

Notes

1. A short story “A Necessary Being” was posthumously published in 2014. It takes place after Clay’s Ark (1984) but before her disowned Survivor (1978). I highly recommend Gerry Canavan’s monograph Octavia E. Butler (2016). As I’ve mentioned on the site before, Canavan explores Butler’s frequent rewrites, reconceptualization(s) of earlier material, and abandoned projects via her surviving papers. ↩︎
2. P. C. Jersilds’ After the Flood (1982, trans. 1986) and The Genocides, Thomas M. Disch (1965) might give Butler a run for her money. That said, I found both Disch and Jersild’s novels more grotesques in a Boschian sort of way than an relentlessly bleak moral conundrum. Russ’ We Who Are About To… (1976) also came to mind — but I found humor in her way of telling, not so much with Butler. ↩︎
3. Probably due to the spectacular range of scholarship written about her work. ↩︎
4. A brief search reveals a lot of academic scholarship on the nature of “family” in the novel. I have not read it before writing the review for fear of being dissuaded from writing anything. ↩︎
5. Referenced nabbed from Wikipedia. The article on the sequence cites “An interview with Octavia E. Butler” from 1997 in Callaloo, 20 (1), 47–66. ↩︎
6. I’ve also read and wrote a short review for Dawn (1987). ↩︎

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

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Watch here: https://peertube.anon-kenkai.com/videos/watch/119924

#LetsTry #Silksong #OctaviaEButler #YAFantasy #peertube #livestream #stream #twitch

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
-- Octavia E. Butler

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #OctaviaEButler #Cowardice #Fools #Government #Leadership #Lies #Politics #Wisdom

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Driftwood #Florida

„Doro ist ein Unsterblicher. Er tötet ohne Reue, wenn er von Körper zu Körper springt, um sich selbst am Leben zu erhalten. [...]“ (Umschlagtext)

Nach „Xenogenesis“ brauche ich auf jedem Fall mehr Stoff von Octavia E. Butler. Gesagt, getan. 😉 […]

Mehr: https://tinyurl.com/54sd7hmj

(Übersetzung: Will Platten)

#lesefrühling #roman #octaviaebutler #heyne #diezukunft #scifi #unsterbliche #gestaltwandler #menschheit #menschenzucht #lesen #leselust #leseratte #bücher #literatur

I started to research but found it hard to decide.
What do you recommend is the best book to start with when I want to read #OctaviaEButler.
I usually lean towards Sci-Fi but I know she wrote great non-SF stuff as well. #books

Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.

— Octavia E. Butler

#OctaviaEButler #OctaviaButler #Earthseed

"All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you." #OctaviaEButler

„Am Leben!
Noch immer am Leben.
Wieder am Leben.“ (Seite 7)

Man könnte ja meinen, wenn man ein paar Jahrzehnte viel und regelmäßig liest, hätte man irgendwann alles gesehen. […]

Mehr: https://tinyurl.com/fzkmnh3w

Kurz und gut: Ähem, kein Gerede – einfach lesen. Los!

(Übersetzung: Barbara Heidkamp)

#lesewinter #roman #octaviaebutler #heyne #scifi #menschheit #aliens #zukunft #gene #gender #gewalt #kinder #ausbeutung #lesen #leselust #lesenswert #leseratte #bücher #literatur

Horsey heroines and strange new worlds… #octaviaebutler #myreading #readindies @OxUniPress

Books about books or favourite authors always make pleasurable reading, and I've covered on the blog a few titles released by Oxford University Press in their 'My Reading' series. The latter is an interesting idea where an author or book is discussed by another writer, and I've very much enjoyed their looks at Dickens, Proust and Colette. However, a new title, released tomorrow,…

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/02/12/horsey-heroines-and-strange-new-worlds-octaviaebutler-myreading-readindies-oxunipress/

Yet another prediction from #OctaviaEButler in the 90’s that came true: lethal #Measles epidemics.

Measles for heavens’ sake!! Fucking idiots antivaxxers!!!

From: @arstechnica
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/113964819462034605

Das zweite Buch, dass ich euch ans Herz legen möchte ist das Buch
Kindred von Octavia E. Butler

Im Buch geht es um eine junge Afro-Amerikanerin, die unfreiwillig mehrmalig in die Vergangenheit katapultiert wird und sich dort mit der Sklaverei konfrontiert wird.
"Ein packender Roman über das rassistische System der Sklaverei, familiäre Verstrickungen und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung." – Verlag w_orten&meer

#BlackHistoryMonth #OctaviaEButler #OctaviaButler

My gods, this book!

"Embrace diversity.
Unite--
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed."

Chapter preface, Chapter 17
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler

#ParableOfTheSower
#OctaviaEButler
#OctaviaButler
#IAmReading
#Booksadon

"I've noticed that people who have a little bit of power tend to use it."

The Parable of the Sower, pg 122.
Octavia Butler

#BlackHistoryMonth
#IAmLearning
#OctaviaEButler
#OctaviaButler
#ParableOfTheSower
#IAmReading