Butler, Octavia 1947–

Octavia Butler 1947–

Science fiction writer

Schlock Spurned Patternmaster

Tackled Social Issues

Defied Categorization

Introduced New Species

Selected writings

Sources

“I didn’t decide to become a science fiction writer,” Octavia Butler claimed in an interview with Frances M. Beai in the Black Scholar. “It just happened.” Butler—the only recognized black woman writer in the genre—has become one of sci-fi’s leading lights, having published the Patternmaster Series, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, the celebrated historical fantasy Kindred, and 1993’s highly praised dystopian saga The Parable of the Sower, among other works. Along with “cyberpunk” novelist William Gibson, Terri Sutton of the LA Weekly listed Butler among “science fiction’s most thoughtful writers.” Vibe magazine’s Carol Cooper declared that what Gibson “does for young, disaffected white fans of high tech and low life, Octavia Estelle Butler does for people of color. She gives us a future.”

Butler’s work has helped put race and gender into the foreground of speculative fiction, exploring these and other social and political issues with a developed sense of ambiguity and difficulty. Such explorations, Cooper noted, were previously absent from science fiction: “In the ’70s, Butler’s work exploded into this ideological vacuum like an incipient solar system.” As the award-winning author told Beai, “A science fiction writer has the freedom to do absolutely anything. The limits are the imagination of the writer.”

In 1947, Butler was born in Pasadena, California. Her father died during her infancy and her mother’s experience provided an early lesson in racism and economic inequity: “My mother was a maid and sometimes she took me to work with her when I was very small and she had no one to stay with me,” Butler recalled to Beai. “I used to see her going to back doors, being talked about while she was standing right there, and basically being treated like a non-person.” Butler recognized these kinds of working conditions as a tradition in her own ancestry, and that legacy helped alienate her from her peers, who in the 1960s blamed their parents’ generation for contemporary problems. The realizations sparked by these issues helped inspire Butler’s novel Kindred, in which a modem black women travels back in time to the antebellum South and confronts slavery first-hand.

Schlock Spurned Patternmaster

Butler discovered her vocation at an early age. “I was writing when I was 10 years old,” she informed Black

At a Glance…

Born Octavia Estelle Butler, June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, CA; daughter of Laurice and Octavia M. (Guy) Butler. Education: Pasadena City College, A.A., 1968; attended California State University at Los Angeles, University of California at Los Angeles, Screen Writers’ Guild Open Door Program, and Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop.

Writer, 1970—; published first story in the anthology Clarion, New American Library, 1970; worked odd jobs until publication of novel Patternmaster, Doubleday, 1976.

Selected awards: Hugo Award for “Speech Sounds,” 1984; Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards for Bloodchild, 1985; Nebula Award nomination for The Evening and the Morning and the Night, 1987.

Addresses: Office— P.O. Box 40671, Pasadena, CA 91114.

Scholar’s Beai. “I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12,1 was watching a bad science fiction movie [Devil Girl From Mars] and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I’ve been writing science fiction ever since.” The story upon which Butler embarked would form the basis for her first published novel and the rest of the Patternmaster Series.

Butler later attended Pasadena City College, winning a short-story contest during her first semester, and moved on to California State University at Los Angeles, taking “everything but nursing classes,” as she recollected to Lisa See of Publishers Weekly. “I’m a little bit dyslexic and worried about killing people.” Thanks to the Open Door Program at the Screen Writers’ Guild, Butler was able to attend a class taught by esteemed science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. The venerated Ellison was supportive of her work, offering to publish one of her stories in an anthology and encouraging her to attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop in Pennsylvania, described as a “boot camp” for would-be practitioners of the genre.

Butler spent six weeks at Clarion. “We were all social retards,” she quipped to See about her class there, “but we seemed to get along with each other.” She elaborated on this sense of isolation among her peers, believing that “to write science fiction you do have to be kind of a loner, live in your head, and, at the same time, have a love for talking. Clarion was a good place for that.” The workshop published an anthology in 1970, that included one of her stories. Ellison’s collection, meanwhile, didn’t get published.

Tackled Social Issues

After leaving Clarion, Butler hit something of a wall professionally, and ended up taking a series of low-paying jobs. She supported herself and woke during the wee hours to write; at last, toward the end of 1974, she decided to undertake a novel. The result was Patternmaster, which she executed rather quickly after getting over her fear of novelistic length. She sent the manuscript to Doubleday and made the revisions suggested by an editor; the book was published in 1976.

Patternmaster addressed issues of class division with a plot revolving around telepathic people known as “Pattemists” and their domination over the mute, nontelepathic masses and mutant beings called “Clayarks.” Vibe’s Carol Cooper praised Butler’s characterizations, stating that “her lead characters—whether telepaths or human/alien half-breeds—remained assertive black homegirls with attitude.”

Butler wrote her next novel, which was the second installment in the series, while Doubleday was reviewing her first. Published in 1977, Mind of My Mind followed the saga into the next generation. Next came Survivor in 1978, but Butler interrupted her work on the series to write a very different story. Motivated by considerations of what previous generations of black people—and especially women—had experienced, Butler wrote Kindred, a novel in which a present-day black woman, Dana, travels back in time to Maryland during the time of slavery. There she confronts a white ancestor whom she must rescue repeatedly in order to preserve her own future.

Writing Kindred helped Butler exorcise some of her feelings about generational distrust. “If my mother hadn’t put up with those humiliations, I wouldn’t have eaten very well or lived very comfortably,” she reflected to Publishers Weekly. “So I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people had to live through in order to survive.”

Defied Categorization

In the March/April 1986 issue of Black Scholar, Butler discussed with Francis M. Beai, the trouble she had placing Kindred because it didn’t fit into any preconceived literary category. “I sent it off to a number of different publishers because it obviously was not science fiction. There’s absolutely no science in it. It was the kind of fantasy that nobody had really thought of as fantasy because after all, it doesn’t fall into the sword and sorcery or pseudo-medieval fantasy that everyone expects with lots of magic being practiced.” Eventually Doubleday published the novel, but as fiction rather than science fiction.

Kindred met considerable praise upon its arrival, and has continued to generate discussion. “Probably no contemporary African-American novelist has so successfully exercised the imagination of her readers with acute representations of familial and historical relations as has Octavia Butler,” surmised Ashraf H. A. Rushdy in College English, “and nowhere more so than in her 1979 novel Kindred.” The book was reissued by Beacon Press in 1988, as part of a series commemorating black women authors.

In 1980, Doubleday published Wild Seed and the fifth book in the series, Clay’s Ark, was put out four years later by St. Martin’s Press. By the mid-1980s, Butler’s work had begun to receive more serious recognition from her peers. She won a Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Society in 1984, for the short story “Speech Sounds”; her short novel Bloodchild, which explored issues of power surrounding childbirth, won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards the following year. Her novella The Evening and the Morning and the Night was nominated for a 1987 Nebula award.

Introduced New Species

In the late 1980s, Butler embarked on a new series of novels, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, which began in 1987, with Dawn: Xenogenesis. The series depicts the plight of human beings who must choose between certain death or hybridization with a race of rational, compassionate space-faring creatures. Both the characters and the reader are forced to question what it means to be human, and to what lengths human beings might go to preserve their species.

As Eric White wrote in his analysis of the series for Science-Fiction Studies, despite the initial horror induced in the human survivors by the alien beings—known as Oankali—who want to mate with them, “the loss of human specificity entailed in hybridization with the irreducibly other is, in the last analysis, depicted affirmatively.” The next two books in the “Xenogenesis” series, Adulthood Rites and Imago, were published in 1988 and 1989, respectively. “The Xenogenesis books,” wrote Sutton in the LA Weekly, “are weighted with the horror and rebellion of what are in effect an enslaved people: change is no cheap date.”

As Butler attempted to leave behind the Xenogenesis books and move in a new direction, she experienced what she alternately described to Lisa See of Publisher’s Weekly, as a “literary metamorphosis” and “literary menopause.” Taking a new direction wasn’t as easy as she expected: “I knew that I wanted my next book to be about a woman who starts a religion, but everything I wrote seemed like garbage…. I also had this deep-seated feeling that wanting power, seeking power, was evil.” She finally resorted to expressing her ideas in poetry, which became the expressive medium of her next novel’s protagonist. “I’m the kind of person who looks for a complex way to say something,” she told See. “Poetry simplifies it.” This simplification helped her to conceive Parable of the Sower.

In Parable of the Sower, half-black, half-Latina protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina escapes the walled city of the middle class to venture into the unknown “outside,” where she ends up leading an attempt to build a new human community. Sprinkled throughout the text are quotations from Lauren’s poems, called “Earthseed: The Books of the Living.” L.A. Weekly’s Terri Sutton called the novel “the plainer sister to Butler’s elaborate, luminous Xenogenesis series,” a tale in which change becomes, simply, God. As Butler put it to See, “One of the first poems I wrote sounded like a nursery rhyme. It begins: ‘God is power,’ and goes on to: ‘God is malleable.’ This concept gave me what I needed.”

“I don’t write Utopian science fiction because I don’t believe that imperfect humans can form a perfect society,” Beai confessed in Black Scholar. “Nobody is perfect,” she insisted to Vibe’s Cooper. “One of the things I’ve discovered even with teachers using my books is that people tend to look for ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ which always annoys the hell out of me. I’d be bored to death writing that way. But because that’s the only pattern they have, they try to fit my work into it.”

Most importantly, she asserted to Cooper, she tried to explore issues of nation building and community building without some of the fantastic ingredients she and other science fiction writers had relied upon in the past. “Part of what I wanted to do in the new book was to begin a new society that might actually get somewhere, even though nobody has any special abilities, no aliens intervene, and no supernatural beings intervene. The people just have to do it themselves.” Sutton seconded this: “In Butler’s bible, the meek don’t inherit the earth: they refuse both the earth and the idea of meekness.”

Though much of Butler’s work confronts the sort of bedrock difficulties of co-existence that many of her fellow science fiction authors tend to avoid, Butler has repeatedly emphasized that she finds the genre intensely liberating. When asked by Beai what drew her to the form, she replied “The freedom of it; it’s potentially the freest genre in existence.” As for her singular status, she proclaimed to See, “I’m the only black woman writing science fiction today because I’m the only black woman writing science fiction. I don’t mean to be facetious, but it’s true.”

Selected writings

Patternmaster, Doubleday, 1976.

Mind of My Mind, Doubleday, 1977.

Survivor, Doubleday, 1978.

Kindred, Doubleday, 1979.

Wild Seed, Doubleday, 1980.

Clay’s Ark, St. Martin’s, 1984.

Dawn: Xenogenesis, Warner Books, 1987.

Adulthood Rites, Warner Books, 1988.

Imago, Warner Books, 1989.

Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

Also contributed to anthologies Clarion, edited by Robin Scott Wilson, New American Library, 1970; The Last Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, Harper, 1978; and Chrysalis 4, 1979. Contributor to periodicals, including Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Omni, American Visions, Essence, Future Life, Transmission, and Writers of the Future.

Sources

Books

Black Writers, Gale, 1993.

Contemporary Authors, Gale, 1979.

Periodicals

Black Scholar, March/April 1986, pp. 14-18.

College English, February 1993, pp. 135-57.

Emerge, June 1994, pp. 65-6.

LA Weekly, March 4, 1994, pp. 37-8.

Publishers Weekly, December 13, 1993, pp. 50-1.

Science-Fiction Studies, 20 (1993), pp. 394-408.

Vibe, February 1994.

—Simon Glickman