Adaptions of Octavia E. Butler’s novels in the twenty-first century
The project “Adaptions of Octavia E. Butler’s novels in the twenty-first century” is conducted by Maria Holmgren Troy, who is Director of KuFo and professor of English.
Academic work on Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction has increased exponentially since the 1990s, and Butler is a towering presence in the multidisciplinary field termed Afrofuturism. A fairly new development regarding Butler’s oeuvre – her first novel Patternmaster was published in 1976, her last, Fledgling, in 2005 – is the interest in adapting her novels to different media. There have been two graphic novel adaptations: Kindred (2017) and Parable of the Sower (2021). A TV series based on Butler’s neoslave narrative Kindred (1979) premiered on Hulu in December 2022, and some of her other novels are considered for film and television adaptations. These adaptations were, however, preceded by The Seeing Ear Theater’s audio theater adaptation of Kindred in February 2001.
In this project, Troy draws on Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006; 2nd ed. 2013) in order to discuss the adaptations of Butler’s novels. As Hutcheon points out, “An adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in a context – a time and a place, a society and a culture …” (142). In addition to addressing contextual and media aspects, Troy examines the adaptations in terms of narrative and aesthetic strategies.