Afterword

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006)—winner of a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant,” a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and several Hugo and Nebula Awards—was my client, and she was a pack rat. In her will, she named me literary executor of her estate and left her papers to the Huntington Library outside of Pasadena. There were so many boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, and notes that it was soon clear to everyone that the archiving alone was going to take years.

When Octavia’s cousin Ernestine Walker asked me to come out to California in October of 2012 to help identify some letters and photos that had ended up in the family archives, we also planned to visit Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts, who was still hard at work supervising the archiving of the windfall.

I knew that somewhere existed a finished story Octavia had sold to Harlan Ellison in the 1970s for his much-anticipated Last Dangerous Visions anthology, which was never published. I had always wanted to find this story, and Ernestine, along with many in the science fiction community, had urged me to make this a priority.

After a long and disappointing search through the stacks, we went back to the office of Natalie Russell, the wonderful assistant curator, where she was still finishing her catalog of Butler’s works. There were desks covered with organized mountains of papers and files that had yet to be read through, and there was absolutely no reason to feel hopeful. But then my eye fell on a box marked Contracts, and while I admit that not everyone might have considered this a breathtaking discovery, as an agent, I couldn’t resist. I started rifling through them and tripping down memory lane (“I remember this deal—whatever happened to that editor?” and “Oh my god, how did I ever agree to those mass market royalties?!”) but finally, there it was—the official signed agreement for “Childfinder.” Armed now with title and date, we quickly found the original, typewritten manuscript.

Natalie, who was still knee deep in her work, needed time to make copies of all this (the woman is, after all, a librarian) and find all the other relevant, supporting documents that might ever have existed. She promised to send everything to my office in New York.

Back at my hotel, still kind of dazed by our success, I finally focused on the calls and texts on my phone from family, friends, and Delta Airlines. Hurricane Sandy’s rising waters were devastating the East Coast. Flights cancelled, mother panicking in Connecticut, husband and daughter hunkering down … and of course CNN was in full 24/7 disaster mode. Suddenly there were a few other things to think about.

I finally got home a week later. When the package from the Huntington arrived sometime after that, I found not just “Childfinder,” but also another story—truly unexpected—“A Necessary Being,” with notes from the author indicating that it had been submitted a very few times in the early seventies, then apparently shelved.

Now, after much discussion and thought, the time feels right to make these early stories available, not just to the graduate students and professors who have access to a great research library, but also to her many fans and readers.

Octavia’s family thought it was important that these stories be published and available to anyone who might be interested in the early work of a true genius (and believer in global warming)—Octavia E. Butler.

Merrilee Heifetz

Writers House

April 29, 2014