Death and Disability in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred and Parable of the Sower

This is my life. I write best-selling novels.” This incantation, penned within Octavia E. Butler’s 1988 journal, became a prophecy that materialized in 2020. Her novel, The Parable of the Sower (1993) reached the New York Times Best Seller List in the Fall of 2020, almost three decades after it was first published. As the first science fiction author to be named to the MacArthur Fellows Program (otherwise known as the “Genius Grant”), Butler changed and shaped the genre of science fiction through her Afrofuturist works. Her fiction centered on the narratives of Black protagonists with disabilities as she herself confronted racial, class, gender, and ability-based discrimination. This chapter examines the intersections of death work and disability in Butler’s speculative fictions, as well as how these narrative threads have been knit into contemporary Afrofuturist works. By closely attending to Butler’s novel Kindred, this work argues that death and disability within Butler’s fiction are thematically interconnected, relating similarities and tensions within her work.