LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The author Octavia Butler has only gotten more and more popular since she passed away 20 years ago.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Readers love works like "Kindred" and "Parable Of The Sower," and they also tracked down her earlier novel "Survivor." Nana K. Twumasi oversees much of Butler's catalog at Grand Central Publishing.
NANA K TWUMASI: It's been almost 50 years since "Survivor" was effectively taken out of print. In that time, Butler has become even more visible than she ever was in her lifetime as a working writer.
FADEL: And now "Survivor" is back in bookstores nearly half a century after its brief initial release. In the story, the protagonist, Alanna, is a biracial orphan adopted by religious missionaries. The family flees a pandemic on Earth and searches for a new planet to call home.
INSKEEP: "Survivor" was part of a series of books, but the author blocked reprints after the first edition was published in 1978. Alyssa Collins studies Butler's work and says she knows why Butler stopped the presses.
ALYSSA COLLINS: She felt that the novel wasn't up to par with a lot of her other work.
INSKEEP: Apparently, fans disagree, and first-edition copies of the novel can sell for thousands of dollars online. Others have been pirated.
FADEL: Collins says AI is one reason she wanted to work on it.
COLLINS: Large language models had already read "Survivor," and that felt really unfair to readers, to people who love Butler, especially because it has previously been so difficult to access the novel.
INSKEEP: Collins says she was also inspired by Octavia Butler's work and its connections to larger themes like colonialism.
COLLINS: This story, "Survivor," is about what happens when humans try to kind of leave Earth to reimagine or recodify a specific version of humanity that they want on another planet and what happens if that planet is not empty of life or civilization.
INSKEEP: Now, even if Butler did not love this particular work, Collins hopes that readers remember her as a trailblazer - a Black woman writing sci-fi in the '70s.
COLLINS: I'm hoping that readers get a larger and longer look at Butler as a writer, can kind of consider her own creative process when they're reading through this in the introduction, and perhaps - I don't know - take away a more full experience of who Octavia might have been at the time of publication.
FADEL: Thanks to an agreement with Octavia Butler's estate, the new reprint of "Survivor" is back on bookstore shelves.
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