Alyssa Collins knew when she assumed her post as the Huntington’s inaugural Octavia Butler fellow in 2021 that the science-fiction luminary had openly criticized her lost novel, “Survivor.”
Butler’s disdain for the book was so evident in her notes and letters that Collins, now an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Cal State Northridge, feared reading it would be a betrayal of Butler’s wishes and taboo to her fans. When she finally did read the book, she understood Butler’s criticisms.
So when Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central Publishing division requested Collins write the introduction to its new edition of “Survivor,” hitting shelves in September after more than 40 years out of print, she was apprehensive. All that time she’d spent in Butler’s archive had made her feel emotionally connected to the author, who died in 2006 and has recently skyrocketed in popularity as her dystopian fiction has become regarded as prophetic. Butler’s 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower” hit the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in 2020, nearly 15 years after her death.
“On the one hand, I knew that Butler wasn’t a huge fan of [‘Survivor’] and just let it lapse,” Collins said. “On the other hand, I knew she was incredibly critical of her own work.”
One of the things that tipped the scales was Collins’ discovery through the Anthropic Copyright Settlement Works List Lookup tool — which allows authors, publishers and literary agents to check if their books were used without permission to train Anthropic’s AI models — that nearly all of Butler’s novels had been downloaded. If AI could read “Survivor,” Collins reasoned, fans should be able to do the same, and with context that honored Butler’s ambivalence about the work.
After much deliberation, she accepted the publisher’s offer, penning an introduction to “Survivor” that considers it both as an underdeveloped work Butler famously derided as her “Star Trek novel” and a still useful “seed” for the revelations that succeeded it, namely “Kindred” and “Wild Seed.”
“In [‘Survivor’], a reader can see the initial shapes of long connective themes and arguments that Butler develops across her works around humanity, alienness, hybridity and the potential futures that arise when we cede its imagining to Black women,” Collins writes, adding, “There has never been more of an imperative to imagine different, new and inclusive futures.”
Published in 1978 as the third novel in Butler’s “Patternist” series, “Survivor” follows Alanna, a biracial orphan who is adopted by religious missionaries fleeing a plague-ravaged Earth in search of a new home. The group winds up settling on a new planet inhabited by two rival native factions, the Garkohn and the Tehkohn, and Alanna gets caught right in the middle of their conflict.
Butler’s distaste for the novel stemmed mainly from her feeling that it had been rushed to publication — Butler sold the work prematurely in part to fund a research trip for what would become her book “Kindred” — at the expense of quality. She found its themes trite, and its prose subpar. In response, she requested the book not be reprinted, and “Survivor” has become a rare and pricey collector’s item ever since.
Nana K. Twumasi, vice president and publisher of the Balance imprint at Grand Central Publishing, recalled paying about $300 for her copy. (That’s on the lower end of today’s offerings.)
Twumasi said she knew the decision to reprint “Survivor” could be perceived as “opportunis[tic]” or profit-driven, but she maintained that for her and others with the author’s estate, “it’s far more about wanting to have a piece of this person that we all respect and want to get her due.”
“We do it with the confidence from those people who knew her and worked with her that it’s something that she could have been made to feel confident about doing,” Twumasi said, adding, “I don’t know that we would have pursued this if there were very clear notes that said, ‘Do not ever release this book. I don’t want anyone to see it’ … as opposed to, ‘I could have made this better, and I didn’t get the opportunity to do it.’”
Jules Jackson, managing director of the Octavia E. Butler Estate and Octavia E. Butler Enterprises, said in a news release that he, together with those at Butler’s longtime publisher Grand Central Publishing and the Estate’s literary agency Writers House, came to the “joint agreement that to deprive readers of the ability to read any of Butler’s works would simply be unjust and unfair.”
“While Butler was incredibly prescient, she couldn’t foresee the massive rise in the popularity of her work — or the demand for a novel that had been published, but which she later didn’t think was good enough to meet her own high standards,” Jackson said.
Merrilee Heifetz, agent to the Estate and to Butler while she was alive, agreed that the author never envisioned a world wherein she had the massive following she does today.
“I don’t know that she ever really said to herself, ‘Well, what if? What if my books really are that popular, and people want to read “Survivor,” and they can’t?’” Heifetz said. Hence, whenever the agent pitched the idea to revive the book — “it would come up every once in a while, because she definitely needed income” — Butler dismissed her.
Heifetz said that she doesn’t presume to speak for Butler, and knows she didn’t come to decisions lightly. But leaving dedicated fans to drop hundreds and thousands of dollars on a story they sincerely care to have, the agent said, “doesn’t sound like her.”
Heifetz is grounded in her decision by a central tenet of Earthseed, the fictional religion Butler constructs in “Parable of the Sower.”
“‘God is change,’” she said. “I think [Butler] believed that you have to pay attention to what changes in the world and what changes in yourself.”
The new edition of “Survivor” will be published Sept. 1 and will include Butler’s short story “A Necessary Being,” the only short fiction set in the Patternist universe.
Repackaged, deluxe paperback editions of the other titles in the “Patternist” series — “Patternmaster,” “Mind of My Mind,” “Wild Seed” and “Clay’s Ark” — will be released June 23, the day after Butler’s birthday. Also on June 23, Grand Central Publishing will release a new audio edition of “Kindred,” read by the “Avatar” franchise’s CCH Pounder. Audio editions of “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents,” read by Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose, will follow on July 14.
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