In the realm of science fiction authors, many names are recognized and respected for the impact they have had on the imaginations of generations of readers. Authors such as Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, James Tiptree Jr, Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, and A.E. van Vogt.
But, one who stands alone in a class by herself, is the late, great Octavia Butler.
Her novels of a future of wide-ranging topics and issues broke the mold on what a science fiction author should tackle. Here is her story.
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Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006): science-fiction author. Ms. Butler is one of the most thoughtful and imaginative authors of her time. The first Black woman to make a name for herself in science fiction and one of the few Black writers in that field, she had taken full advantage of the speculative freedom that the genre allowed writers to explore her interest in sociology, biology, race relations, American history, and the future of humanity. She was a pioneer in bringing Black people into the imagined future that is the most common focus of science fiction, and in telling the story of that future in the voices of Black women.
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California, to Laurice and Octavia M. (Guy) Butler. Her father was a shoeshine man who died when she was a baby, and her mother was a maid. Although they lived in a racially mixed community, her mother took her to work with her when no child care was available, and there the young Octavia observed the condescension and lack of respect that Black servants of the time were expected to accept.
By the time she was ten, she was producing her own short stories. Her future vocation called her one day when she was twelve. Watching a bad science fiction movie on television convinced her that she could write something better, and she immediately set out to prove it. The stories that resulted laid the groundwork for the later development of her first series of novels.
Ms. Butler had a hard time in school, as she suffered from dyslexia, a condition not recognized at the time by the medical profession. This caused her much isolation from fellow students and even teachers. But, not all of her teachers were uncaring or blind to her abilities; when she was thirteen one of them took it upon himself to type out the first short story she submitted to a science fiction magazine.
After graduating from John Muir High School in Pasadena in 1965, Ms. Butler worked during the day and attended college at night, completing a two-year degree program at Pasadena City College, where her studies included writing fiction. She graduated, entered California State College in Los Angeles, worked a series of temporary jobs, and left California State for the University of California at Los Angeles where she took more writing course. At that time, Ms. Butler attended writing workshops sponsored by the Writers Guild of America. One of the Writers Guild teachers was Harlan Ellison, a well-known science-fiction writer and an innovative editor with a keen interest in encouraging new and original voices in the field. Through his invitation, Ms. Butler participated in the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in 1970. The six-week program for aspiring science fiction writers exposed her to the teaching of a variety of successful writers and the support and encouragement of fellow novices, later producing an anthology that included her first published story.
Success eluded Ms. Butler for a time, but she worked on her craft, honing her skills.
Finally, in 1974, she began work on what would become the novel Patternmaster, which was published by Doubleday in 1976. Patternmaster was followed by Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). The five books are linked by story lines and characters and the constant struggle between a power-hungry race of telepaths, the Patternmasters, and a breed of grossly mutated posthumans known as Clayarks. Among the major themes they cover are racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be a human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people.
Ms. Butler wrote Kindred (1979), her most popular and well-known novel, which is an entirely different kind of book to date. Inspired by a flippant remark from a friend about previous generations of Black Americans and keenly aware of the indignities her mother endured in order to provide for her, Ms. Butler set out to illustrate the sacrifices that generations of Black Americans made to give their descendants a better life. The book tells the story of a young Black woman in 1976 who keeps getting pulled back in time to the early nineteenth century in Maryland, where she repeatedly has to save the life of a White slave-owning ancestor. In the process, the character, Dana, experiences the horror of slavery firsthand. The appeal of this book, Ms. Butler’s most successful novel, which is taught in high schools and colleges, stretches far beyond the usual science fiction audience. Originally published in 1979, it was reissued in 1984 and in a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2004.
Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, the three novels making up the Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lillith’s Brood), appeared from 1987 to 1989. Devastated by nuclear war, a weakened human race must decide whether to survive at the cost of cross-breeding with an alien species. The aliens are rational and empathic, but they intend to let the purebred strain of humanity die out after the hybrid species succeeds.
Parable of the Sower (1993) opens in the year 2024 in a world where the economic gap between rich and poor has increased to the point that the social order is on the verge of collapse. After her community is destroyed by raging pyromaniacs, a young Black-Latina woman, Lauren Olamina, sets out to create a community of refugees, built around the tenets of her religious faith, Earthseed, which preaches that “God is Change,” and the hope of a better life and eventual escape from a ravaged planet through interstellar travel. Parable of the Talents, which won the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award as the Best Science Fiction Novel of 1999, is a continuation of the same story.
Ms. Butler went in a different direction with her novel Fledgling. Published in 2005, it is a vampire novel with a science fiction angle. The novel explores race, sexuality, belonging to a community, as well as the diversity in biology.
Although she was known more for her novels, Ms. Butler also has written short stories, most notably her 1984 novella, Blood Child, which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her 1980 novel Wild Seed won the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant”. A resident of Pasadena, most of her life, she moved to Seattle, Washington in 1999.
After suffering a fall outside of her home, Lake Forest Park, Washington, she died from a stroke.
Much of Ms. Butler’s work centers on her bleak yet hopeful vision of humanity’s future, with the Parable books taking the reader on a relentlessly brutal and almost hopeless future. Ms. Butler did not believe that humanity is doomed to extinction, rather, she believed that it would have to change patterns of behaviour in order to survive.
Ms. Butler believed in the possibility of travel to the stars and distant planets, but in her writing and in interviews, she suggested it would take the dedication that once produced programs similar to the arms race of the 1950s-1960s to bring such a program to viability.
Much of Ms. Butler’s work reflected a wide-range of interests in the physical sciences and the study of human behavior. She kept up with developments in biology and genetics and she believed that if humanity was to survive we must learn to adapt and co-exist with microorganisms.
Such coexistence would involve taking advantage of the beneficial properties and behaviours of many microbial organisms that were just beginning to be learned about before Ms. Butler’s death. This approach echoed the developments in Xenogenesis, where humanity survives by working with a race of aliens, changing into something different in the process.
“Octavia E. Butler”, by Bobert W. Logan, from Black Women in America, by Darlene Clark Hine, et. al, published by Oxford University Press, 2005.
Ann
