Octavia Butler’s ‘Survivor’ Returns to Print After Nearly 50 Years, In Spite of Pasadena Author’s Dislike

Octavia E. Butler’s long-suppressed 1978 novel “Survivor” hit shelves Sept. 1 in its first U.S. reprint in roughly four decades, a move made in agreement with her estate despite the late Pasadena-born author’s repeated public objections to the book, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, released the new edition in print, ebook and audiobook formats, nearly 50 years after “Survivor” was first published as the third novel in Butler’s “Patternist” series.

The book had not been reprinted in the U.S. since 1981, and Butler refused during her lifetime to allow it back into print, according to Reactor, a science-fiction and fantasy publication.

Butler, who died in 2006, publicly and repeatedly disparaged “Survivor.”

In an interview with Amazon.com quoted by Reactor, Butler called it “my Star Trek novel” and said its premise — in which humans travel to another planet and begin having children with the aliens they meet there — resembled older science fiction that wrote alien peoples as lesser, a habit she called “really offensive garbage.”

In a conversation with the writer Randall Kenan, cited in academic research published in the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature in the U.S., she called the book “a good story badly told.”

Despite that history, Butler reportedly never specified that “Survivor” should never be reprinted.

Jules Jackson, managing director of the Octavia E. Butler Estate and Octavia E. Butler Enterprises, said in a news release quoted by the Times that the estate, Grand Central Publishing and Butler’s longtime literary agency, Writers House, reached a “joint agreement that to deprive readers of the ability to read any of Butler’s works would simply be unjust and unfair”.

Jackson added: “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”.

Merrilee Heifetz, who represented Butler during her lifetime and continues to represent her estate at Writers House, told the Times she believes Butler never fully anticipated her own posthumous popularity.

“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, according to the Times, adding that leaving fans to pay high prices for scarce used copies “doesn’t sound like her”.

Alyssa Collins, the Huntington Library’s inaugural Octavia E. Butler Research Fellow and an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Cal State Northridge, wrote the introduction to the new edition.

The reprint follows a broader publishing push tied to renewed interest in Butler’s work.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, which holds Butler’s literary archive, recently scheduled a public discussion of the reprint for Sept. 2, from 6 to 8 p.m., featuring Collins alongside Butler scholars Alaina Morgan of the University of Southern California and Phoenix Alexander of the University of California, Riverside.