African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) published twelve novels and a collection of short stories. In Butler’s most well-known novel, Kindred (1979), African American Dana, who is its first-person narrator and protagonist, is repeatedly thrown back in time in order to save her white ancestor’s life in Maryland in the early 1800s. More specifically, she is thrown back from her house in Altadena, California, where, in 1976, she has just moved in with her white husband Kevin. In the process, she has to adapt to a time and place where she is regarded and treated as a slave.  

Academic work on Butler’s speculative fiction has increased exponentially since the 1990s, and today Butler is a towering presence in, among other fields, the multidisciplinary field termed Afrofuturism. Since 2013 onwards, her archive at the Huntington Library in California has provided new exciting insights into her works and her own research processes as well as new tools for theorizing her and other writers’ fiction. Her archive is also an inspiration to creative writers, artists, and others. A relatively new development regarding Butler’s oeuvre is the interest in adapting her novels to different media. The Seeing Ear Theater’s online audio theater adaptation of Kindred aired in February 2001. Since then, there have been two graphic novel adaptations: Kindred (2017) and Parable of the Sower (2021), a TV series based on Kindred premiered on Hulu in December 2022, and some of her other novels are considered for film and television adaptations.

Adaptations exhibit the transforming passions of adapters and often trigger passionate responses from readers, viewers, or listeners. In this paper, I will examine the reception of the TV series adaptation in reviews and online comments in order to pinpoint the passions elicited by this adaptation.

African American science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s fiction often focuses on more-than-human relationships in ways that critiques and undermines human exceptionalism. Her fiction also challenges ‘theoretical exceptionalism’ in that it seriously addresses epistemological and ethical issues in the intimate as well as hostile encounters between humans and different species throughout her oeuvre, from the Clayarks (a quadruped human-alien species) in her first published novel Patternmaster (1974) to the Ina (or vampires) in her last novel, Fledgling (2005). Through these always cultural and often biological exchanges, Butler’s fiction explores the problems and possibilities of more-than-human relations in ways that match and, I would argue, sometimes surpass theoretical formulations; or at least one could say that her fiction works – to borrow Donna Haraway’s expression – as a “companion species” to theory. 

In this talk, I will outline some previous work on Butler that has dealt with the relation between her fiction and theoretical interventions, which I hope will inspire further thoughts on the conceptual and theoretical power of speculative fiction in more-than-human studies. 

Academic work on Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction has increased exponentially since the 1990s, and Butler is a towering presence in the multidisciplinary field termed Afrofuturism. A fairly new development regarding Butler’s oeuvre – her first novel Patternmaster was published in 1976, her last, Fledgling, in 2005 – is the interest in adapting her novels to different media. In the past five years, there have been two graphic novel adaptations: Kindred (2017) and Parable of the Sower (2021); and Parable of the Talents will allegedly also soon be published in the form of a graphic novel. A TV series based on Butler’s neoslave narrative Kindred (1979) premiered on Hulu in December, and some of her other novels are considered for film and television adaptations. These adaptations were, however, preceded by The Seeing Ear Theater’s radio or audio theater adaptation of Kindred, which aired in February 2001. 

In this paper, I will draw on Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006; 2nd ed. 2013) in order to begin to discuss the three twenty-first century adaptations of Kindred: the radio play at the very beginning of the century, the graphic novel in the age of BLM and Trump, and the very recently produced TV series. As Hutcheon points out, “An adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture …” (142). In addition to addressing some contextual aspects, I will examine the adaptations in terms of narrative and aesthetic strategies. 

African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns.

After almost two years with SARS-CoV-2, causing COVID-19, we all have experience of living with a virus on a global scale. It has meant changes in how we conduct our everyday lives, at least temporarily. Although this virus can infect all human beings, this pandemic has made glaringly obvious differences concerning age, health, gender, social status, ethnic backgrounds, professions, access to technology, etc. and has reinforced local, national, and global inequalities and injustices based on lack of means, solidarity, and democracy. 

In this paper, I will examine how two women science-fiction writers envision humans living with an extraterrestrial virus in novels written in the 1980s and 1990s: African American Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984) and British-American Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1992). In Butler’s novel the virus is brought to Earth by a returning astronaut, who tries to keep the virus from spreading; in Griffith’s the virus infects people who try to colonize another planet and kills the men. The remaining women settles the planet, and many years later, which constitutes the present of the novel, the Company sends an expedition to try out a vaccine. Both novels depict newly infected main characters who experience that the virus changes them and ultimately empowers them in certain ways. It also irreversibly changes the conditions under which they live. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s theories, as well as Octavia Butler’s ideas as expressed across her oeuvre, I will discuss the relationship between the human host and the virus in the two novels, and its impact on the individual and society within the imagined worlds. In particular, the paper will highlight issues of gender and sexuality.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate why and how African American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s fiction is taught at Karlstad University, Sweden. Over the past twenty years, a number of her novels and short stories have been included in various courses in English at different levels at this university. The essay focuses in particular on why and how Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980) is integrated into an M.A. course on African American women writers’ novels, which was taught in the springs of 2019 and 2020. This novel is contextualized both in terms of the course as a whole, which includes novels from Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), and the genres of speculative fiction and the neoslave narrative. The essay also briefly brings up and reflects on student responses to Wild Seed, concerning gender issues and sexuality. It concludes that there are numerous reasons for including this novel in a course on African American women’s novels. In general, Octavia Butler is among the most important and influential American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and her works have much to offer in a contemporary European classroom.

In the 1990s, I analyzed science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1979 neoslave narrative Kindred by employing Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which focuses on how time and space are fused together in literature: time “becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes … responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 84). The chronotope, moreover, “defines genre and generic distinctions,” as well as shaping the constitution of characters and the meaning of narratives (85, 250). In Butler’s novel, African American Dana, who is its first-person narrator and protagonist, is repeatedly thrown back in time from her house in Pasadena, California, in 1976, in order to save her white ancestor’s life in Maryland in the early 1800s. In the process, she has to adapt to a time and place where she is regarded and treated as a slave.

This paper will focus on Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (2017) by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. The chronotope has proven to be productive in scholarly discussions on the relatively new genre of the graphic novel, and I will briefly address the specific relations between time and space in graphic novels in general compared to the comic book, the novel, and film, before presenting how time, space, and time travel are depicted in this graphic novel adaptation of Butler’s novel in terms of the chronotope. Different aspects of history, as well as cultural history, are obviously important to this speculative neo-slave narrative from the 1970s and its adaptation almost 40 years later.