People had trouble fitting the work of the late African-American writer Octavia E. Butler into a box. Was it science fiction if it was set in a slave plantation in Maryland? Was it social realism if it took place in a dystopian future?

Twelve years after the death of Butler, the first black female writer to rise to prominence in both the science-fiction and literary worlds, a new opera based on her seminal novel Parable Of The Sower defies genre strictures in the same way.