The Parable series: 1993–1998
In the mid-1990s, Butler published two novels later designated as the Parable (or Earthseed) series. The books depict the struggle of the Earthseed community to survive the socioeconomic and political collapse of twenty-first century America due to poor environmental stewardship, corporate greed, and the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. The books propose alternate philosophical views and religious interventions as solutions to such dilemmas.
The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower (1993), features a fifteen-year-old protagonist named Lauren Oya Olamina, and is set in a dystopian California in the 2020s. Lauren, who suffers from a syndrome causing her to literally feel any physical pain she witnesses, decides to escape the corruption and corporatization of her community of Robledo. She forms a new belief system, Earthseed, in order to prepare for the future of the human race on another planet. Recruiting members of varying social backgrounds, Lauren relocates her new group to Northern California, naming her new community “Earthseed”.
Her 1998 follow-up novel, Parable of the Talents, is set sometime after Lauren’s death and is told through the excerpts of Lauren’s journals as framed by the commentary of her estranged daughter, Larkin. It details the takeover of Earthseed by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Lauren’s attempts to survive their religious “re-education”, and the final triumph of Earthseed as a community and a doctrine.
In between her Earthseed novels, Butler published the collection Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995), which includes the short stories “Bloodchild”, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”, “Near of Kin”, “Speech Sounds”, and “Crossover”, as well as the non-fiction pieces “Positive Obsession” and “Furor Scribendi”.
Late stories and Fledgling: 2003–2005
After several years of suffering from writer’s block, Butler published the short stories “Amnesty” (2003) and “The Book of Martha” (2003), and her second standalone novel, Fledgling(2005). Both short stories focus on how impossible conditions force an ordinary woman to make a distressing choice. In “Amnesty”, an alien abductee recounts her painful abuse at the hand of the unwitting aliens, and upon her release, by humans, and explains why she chose to work as a translator for the aliens now that the Earth’s economy is in a deep depression. In “The Book of Martha”, God asks a middle-aged African-American novelist to make one important change to fix humanity’s destructive ways. Martha’s choice—to make humans have vivid and satisfying dreams—means that she will no longer be able to do what she loves, writing fiction. These two stories were added to the 2005 edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories.
Butler’s last publication during her lifetime was Fledgling, a novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in mutualistic symbiosis with humans. Set on the West Coast, it tells of the coming-of-age of a young female hybrid vampire whose species is called Ina. The only survivor of a vicious attack on her families that left her an amnesiac, she must seek justice for her dead, build a new family, and relearn how to be Ina.
Death
During her last years, Butler struggled with writer’s block and depression, partly caused by the side effects of medication for her high blood pressure. She continued writing and taught at Clarion’s Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop regularly. In 2005, she was inducted into Chicago State University‘s International Black Writers Hall of Fame.
Butler died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, aged 58.