Jaimee Hills writes, "Gerry Canavan has done a short writeup in an academic publication called The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction on the (amazing) contents of the Octavia E. Butler papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California."

Indeed, the Butler archive sounds amazing. It contains alternate versions of several of her best novels including the Lilith's Brood stories and the Parable novels, as well as significant unpublished works, including an unfinished story from the Patternist universe, an unpublished novel called Blindsight, and a nearly complete third Parable novel.

One of the things I became most interested in as I read Butler's alternative drafts

and unfinished work is the sharp tonal divide between the drafts and the final

books. Butler had a theory of bestsellerdom that preoccupied her and motivated her

writing, but which she was unable to ever quite put into practice: she sought

endlessly to write what she called YES-BOOKS, but felt they always seemed to

collapse into NO-BOOKS instead. (YES BOOKS, she thought, were bestsellers—NO

BOOKS sold, alas, the way her actual books did.) One of the things I was personally

surprised by in the archives was the way that optimism—usually an optimism

predicated on what Lee Edelman has famously called "reproductive futurity," the

presence and survival of children2—was quite often a late or unwilling addition to

her novels, something that emerged as she struggled to turn her many swirling

ideas into concrete forms she believed would actually sell. Perhaps relatedly, we

often see the drafts are actually much more disturbing that her famously disturbing

published fiction, particularly with regard to physical and sexual violence, and

frequently ending with far unhappier resolutions. (This is all the more remarkable

for how pessimistic and horrifying Butler's published fiction often was.)

We might perhaps say that her published works tend to be MAYBE-BOOKS,

somewhere between YES and NO—but in her drafts the form of the NO-BOOK is

allowed to fully flower, precisely because these unfinished tales were never

hammered into what she saw as final, publishable, salable shape. Not having to

conform to what she saw as the market's mandatory optimism, the drafts represent

in some sense the excess, or the remainder, of "YES."

Thus we find the sketches story where the typical logic of reproductive

futurity is turned completely on its head, a number of which I have mentioned

above: the fascinating novel fragment where Doro impregnates the Virgin Mary and

produces Christ, who is so talented as to almost be the two-thousand-years-too early

fulfillment of his breeding project and yet who instead becomes a famously

chaste, sexless reproductive dead end; or the version of the future of the Fledgling

universe where she imagines Shori not as the liberator of the Ina but as the

destroyer of the planet, as her children would be too powerful, too successful, and

would in their thriving overthrow the delicate ecological symbiosis that holds

humans and Ina in balance. Likewise, some of her notes for the end of the PARABLES

series (the so-called Parable of Clay) suggest that the children of the Earthseed

colony worlds would be deeply psychotic or (by our standards, at least) severely

autistic, almost monstrous in their difference from the humans of Earth—tokens of a

future so utterly posthuman as to be at least potentially anti-human.3 Her first

sketches for Lilith, the story that would become XENOGENESIS, see "Lilith's child,

mercifully born dead, is an armless, legless horror with some skin disorder that has

left it looking raw, flayed. Lilith's child is only the first 'mistake" to be born. Sadly,

some of them live, in spite of the lack of medical care or knowledge."4 In its original

formulation the Oankali breeding project is a horror after all, whose failure we are

glad to see. (Echoes of this plan can actually be found in the published Imago,

though the situation there resolves somewhat differently, and much more in accord

with both the optimism of reproductive futurity and with Butler's growing

sympathy for the Oankali.) Even the happy ending of the Canaan version of Kindred,

in which the Alice character is rescued from slavery and raised in the 1970s as Dana

and Kevin's child, is a NO-BOOK, albeit of an unusual sort: it refuses the

reconciliation with the history that the published book enforces in favor of a

fantastical utopian alternative that is utterly impossible to make real, and which has

no future anyway in the face of the inevitable rise of the Patternists.