Long Out of Print, The Novel Octavia Butler Disowned Is Returning To Shelves
The late sci-fi author has never been more popular — so much so that a book she disowned is being reprinted.
If you want to talk about sci-fi novels that foresaw our current predicament decades before it happened, you have to acknowledge Octavia E. Butler and Parable of the Sower. Butler’s most famous work hit the New York Times bestseller list in 2020, 14 years after her death. The novel’s popularity — and seeming prescience — has brought a new wave of interest to the late sci-fi author, so much so that a book she personally disliked is coming back into print.
Butler was relatively prolific during her lifetime, publishing 12 novels and two short-story collections between 1977 and her death in 2006. Of that group, 1978’s Survivor was by far her personal least favorite of her works, and after its initial printing, the author used her influence to keep it from ever coming back into print. As a result, first-edition copies of the book can now go for thousands of dollars through rare-book dealers.
Survivor is part of Butler’s “Patternist” series, a loosely connected collection of books that all feature psychically powered humans with connections to extraterrestrial worlds. Survivor revolves around Alanna, a biracial human woman who’s the daughter of the leader of a group of human colonists known as “Missionaries” who travel to a planet where, as Polygon’s Tasha Robinson writes, “the local humanoids, the furry, color-shifting Kohn, are divided into two factions. Navigating the Kohns' internal politics is physically and emotionally complicated both for Alanna and the missionaries ... Alanna's link to the Kohns comes with burdens she doesn't want, and has to accept to survive.”
A mural of the author in 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya.
According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, Butler thought the book was underdeveloped, dismissively referring to it as her “Star Trek novel” for its simplistic, human-centric view of the universe. (Don’t shoot the messenger, Star Trek fans.) She also thought of it as a poorly written rush job, written primarily to fund the research for her masterful time-travel novel Kindred. That said, the Patternist series always contains the author’s 1984 book, Clay’s Ark, which is also a bit Star Trek-ish and excellent.
In any case, Survivor has become both a taboo and a source of fascination for Butler’s fans, which is why Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central Publishing division is bringing the novel back into print. Speaking to The LA Times, Balance publisher Nana K. Twumasi said that the reprint is “about wanting to have a piece of this person that we all respect and want to get her due,” adding that “I don’t know that we would have pursued this if there were very clear notes that said, ‘Do not ever release this book’ ... as opposed to, ‘I could have made this better, and I didn’t get the opportunity to do it.’”
Similarly, the manager of Butler’s estate says in a press release that “to deprive readers of the ability to read any of Butler’s works would simply be unjust and unfair,” echoing Twumasi’s statement that Survivor simply “[wasn’t] good enough to meet [Butler’s] own high standards.” She may have been dissatisfied with it, but Octavia E. Butler’s worst is still better than many writers’ best, and readers can decide for themselves when Survivor relaunches in September 2026.
