Octavia E. Butler’s Seeds of Change

Founders’ Day is observed annually at The Huntington in honor of Henry E. and Arabella Huntington’s roles in envisioning and establishing the institution. Over the past five years, the program has expanded to explore topics connected to the rich history of The Huntington’s location in the San Gabriel Valley and its surrounding communities.

This year’s program, “Sowing Community: Living with Octavia E. Butler’s Parables,” featured a special guest panel of scholars and local leaders discussing themes of resilience, community, and social change in two acclaimed works by science fiction writer and Pasadena native Octavia E. Butler. The Huntington is the home of Butler’s archive, which has been the most frequently accessed collection in the Library for the past nine years. 

Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence first encountered Butler’s work in the early 1990s while teaching literature at the University of Utah. In her welcoming remarks, she recalled a colleague recommending Butler’s novel Dawn for Lawrence’s “Experimental Novel” course. “I was fascinated by Butler’s powerful imagination and the genre-bending, gender-bending, even species-bending originality of her storytelling,” Lawrence said. 

Interest in Butler’s work has steadily increased since her untimely death in 2006. Her novels and short stories continue to be reexamined by scholars and embraced by new audiences. Since 2017, no fewer than six of her books have been adapted for film and television, or as graphic novels, with two projects currently in production—one by filmmaker Garrett Bradley, who delivered a moving and well-received tribute to Butler at the event. “All of us have the ability to pay attention to what’s happening and to communicate with one another and to love one another,” Bradley said. “And it’s all here. It’s in the DNA of [Butler’s] work and in this room.”

Actor and author LeVar Burton, a surprise guest at the event, looked out at the packed auditorium and said, “Octavia is smiling, y’all.” Burton wrote the foreword to the 2023 reprinting of Butler’s Parable of the Sower.  

A Timely Shift in Focus

The initial plan for this year’s program was to explore the inspiration Butler’s work has provided to other artists. However, the devastating regional wildfires in January prompted organizers to shift the focus to Butler’s Parable novels: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). Lawrence described these books as “cautionary tales” and “parables for our time.” 

The shift also led to a restructured format that emphasized community-building, a central theme in the Parable series. After the panel discussion, guests gathered in Haaga Hall for a reception featuring offerings from local independent businesses. “Seeds of Conversation” prompts provided at the venue’s tables encouraged people to continue discussing the evening’s themes. “If you could design a more resilient future for Pasadena and Altadena,” read one prompt, “what’s one thing you would prioritize?”

Butler’s Parables: Prophecy or Truth-Telling?

Set in a dystopian Southern California in the years 2024 to 2090, Butler’s Parable novels seem eerily prescient. They depict rampant wildfires, economic instability, and a political leader who promises to “make America great again.”

Moderator Monique L. Thomas opened the discussion by asking whether Butler’s Parable series should be considered prophetic. Scholar, artist, and theologian Tamisha A. Tyler offered a nuanced perspective. “If you think that ‘prophetic’ is only this sense of prediction … then, no,” she said. “But there is a difference between foretelling—prediction—and forthtelling, which is a sense of speaking truth to power.” Tyler placed Butler’s truth-telling in the wider historical context of the Black prophetic tradition, drawing a parallel with the work of theologian and public intellectual Cornel West. Butler’s kind of truth-telling, Tyler said, “requires us to understand what’s going on in the world.”

John Williams, executive director of the Center for Restorative Justice in Pasadena, cautioned against overemphasizing Butler’s supposed clairvoyance in the Parable books. “I think sometimes when we do that, we reduce it to maybe a vision or some magical power,” he said. “And that really takes away from how well studied and researched she was.”

Williams recommended that people unfamiliar with her work listen to interviews with Butler and study her archival notes in tandem with reading the Parable series. Such an approach adds illuminating context, he said. “So, when you’re reading … tough sections of the books, you can go into her brain [and learn] what she was thinking.” 

Writing the Future: Afrofuturism and Representation

Some of those “tough sections” in Butler’s novels include grim, even nightmarish depictions of violence and desperate acts of survival, often evoking the horrors of North American slavery. This echoing of time periods was an innovative approach that Butler claimed as her own in a journal entry from 1981—more than a decade before the term Afrofuturism was coined. “‘HistoFuturist’ is my invention,” she wrote, defining it as a “historian who extrapolates from the human past and present as well as the technological past and present.”

But perhaps Butler’s greatest contribution to speculative fiction was centering Black female protagonists—characters whose voices had been absent from the genre. 

For Nikki High, a former communications executive who opened the Pasadena bookstore Octavia’s Bookshelf in 2023, this inclusion altered her life’s course. “Reading books by Octavia Butler really did change what I expected out of sci-fi stories,” High said. “I had never really seen myself represented in those stories. … I just wanted to know, ‘Hey, where are the Black and brown people 100 years from now? What did they do to us?’ And [Butler] just made sure that she wrote us in.” 

The Power of Change

One major theme of the Parable series is change. Earthseed—a religion that the books’ main character, Lauren Oya Olamina, develops in response to several forms of upheaval taking place in the world around her—holds as its central tenet a deification of change:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

There was agreement among the panelists that change as represented in the books—whether the collapse of society, ecological catastrophe, or a sudden resurgence of nationalism—was a power to be shaped more than feared, especially through collective effort. Tyler spoke persuasively about Butler’s reframing of change—a seemingly determinative force in our lives that is, on the contrary, capable of being harnessed and redirected.

“One thing that I think Butler does beautifully is she restores our agency back to us, because she says, ‘All that you touch, you change,’” Tyler said. “And she gives us tools. She says, ‘Kindness eases change.’ She says, ‘Partnership is life.’”

High stressed the importance of partnership as an act of community-building, comparing it to the development of speculative worlds that is the essence of science fiction. “What literature does, and [Butler’s] sci-fi specifically, is it allows the writer to create a world, and create alternatives in this world, so that you can actually see what [social] equity might look like,” she said. “Hopefully, as you’re metabolizing this new world … you will start to ask yourself some questions about your role in world-building and to see every single decision you make as contributing to the world that you’re living in.”

Lessons from Recent Wildfires

The discussion turned to real-world examples of change and resilience, particularly the community response to the Eaton Fire that devastated Altadena—a disaster that disproportionately affected Black residents and Black creative culture.

“When you’re watching the world … burn right before your eyes, you’re forced to change,” High said. The fires dramatically altered her daily life. “But look at this change that we created. This community … was in crisis. We all came together. Everybody who was in these little, tiny circles suddenly started to open them and embrace each other.” 

A Night of Reflection and Celebration

The openness of the panel discussion continued at the post-program reception. Guests gathered at tables to meet new people, while enjoying a catered spread that included cupcakes decorated with miniature book covers of Butler’s works. In addition to the “Seeds of Conversation” prompts, the tables were adorned with gifted seed packets created in collaboration with the Altadena Seed Library.

Burton had eloquently expressed the spirit of the occasion earlier in the evening when he told the rapt audience: “This community—Pasadena, Altadena, the community that’s been created this evening in this room—these are the seeds of our survival. Relish the opportunity to be in community with one another. It is indeed the way forward.”

For a selection of books by and about Octavia E. Butler, visit the Huntington Store.

Watch a video of the Founders’ Day event in its entirety.

Andrew Kersey is the senior writer in the Office of Communications and Marketing at The Huntington.