Octavia E. Butler was a visionary Black writer from Pasadena who transformed science fiction into a tool for confronting power and imagining survival beyond it. She was raised by her mother, a domestic worker, and her grandmother, and she wrote in the early mornings before long days of working-class jobs. She broke into a genre that had largely excluded Black women. Her novels treat slavery, empire, and hierarchy as living forces rather than distant history.

In Kindred, a Black woman from 1970s Los Angeles is pulled back into the antebellum South, forcing the reader to feel how the violence of slavery shapes the present. In the Xenogenesis trilogy, she imagined humanity destroyed by the deadly combination of intelligence and the drive toward domination. Her Parable novels foresaw a United States torn apart by climate collapse, privatization, corporate servitude, and authoritarian nationalism. From that wreckage a young Black woman named Lauren Olamina gathers the displaced and dispossessed into a community built on mutual aid, collective defense, and a shared vision of a different future. Butler refused easy utopias.

Her characters survive through struggle, adaptation, and solidarity, and through the hard work of building something new among people the old world had discarded. Organizers and cultural workers have taken up her vision, from the movement anthology Octavia's Brood to the practice of emergent strategy, as a guide for imagining and building liberated futures. Octavia Butler's legacy reminds us that another world is possible only if we are willing to imagine it clearly and fight for it together.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• Printed on acid-free, premium luster photo paper

• Paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*