Octavia Butler

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Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 — February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer, one of very few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards, and was the first science fiction writer ever to be a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 1995. Image:Butler signing.jpg

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Biography

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Background

Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. As her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (also named Octavia) who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood [1]. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literture, Butler was "an introspective only child in a strict Baptist household" and "was drawn early to magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics" (p. 2515).

Octavia Jr., known as "Junie", was thus considered shy and a "daydreamer" and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 "to escape loneliness and boredom"; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction.[2] "I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars", she told the journal Black Scholar, "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."[3]

After getting an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 [4], she next enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles. She eventually left CalState and took writing classes through UCLA extension.

Butler would later credit two writing workshops for giving her "the most valuable help I received with my writing" [5]:

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Career

Her first published story, "Crossover", appeared in Clarion's 1971 anthology; another short story, "Childfinder", was bought by Ellison for the never-published collection, The Last Dangerous Visions. (Like other stories purchased for that volume, it has yet to appear anywhere.) "I thought I was on my way as a writer," Butler wrote in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. "In fact, I had five more years of rejections slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me." In 1974, she started the novel Patternmaster--reportedly related to the story she started after watching Devil Girl From Mars--which became her first published book in 1976. Over the next eight years, she would publish four more novels in the same storyline, in what became known as the Patternist series.

In 1979, she published Kindred, a novel about an African-American woman who is repeatedly thrown from 1976 to the ante-bellum South, where she is forced to deal with life in a culture based on slavery. Often shelved in Literature or African-American literature rather than with science fiction--Butler herself categorized it not as science fiction but rather as a "grim fantasy"--Kindred became the most popular of all her books, with a quarter of a million copies curently in print. "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you," she said of the book. [7]

After Clay's Ark (the last of the Patternist novels) was published in 1984, Butler began her Xenogenesis trilogy, about the Oankali, extraterrestrials who come to Earth to repopulate the planet with human/alien hybrids after a devastating war. Butler's aliens are notable for having a plausible third gender, known as ooloi. The first novel in the trilogy, Dawn, was published in 1987.

In 1994, her dystopian novel Parable of the Sower was nominated for a Nebula for best novel, an award she finally took home in 2000 for a sequel, Parable of the Talents. Butler had originally planned to write a third Parable novel, tentatively titled Parable of the Trickster, mentioning her work on it in a number of interviews, but at some point encountered a form of writer's block, going seven years without publishing a new novel.

She eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in 2005 in the novel Fledgling, a vampire novel with a science fiction context. Although Butler herself passed Fledgling off as a lark, the novel is connected to her other works through its exploration of race, sexuality, and what it means to be a member of a community. Moreover, the novel continues the theme, raised explicitly in Parable of the Sower, that diversity is a biological imperative.

She published a collection of her shorter writings, Bloodchild and Other Stories, in 1995. The collection includes five short stories spanning Butler's career, the first finished in 1971 and the last in 1993. In 2005, Seven Stories Press released an expanded edition.

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Seattle and death

Butler moved to Seattle in November 1999. In October 2000, she received an award for lifetime achievement in writing from the PEN American Center. She described herself as "comfortably asocial--a hermit in the middle of Seattle--a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." [8] Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work.

She died outside of her home on February 24, 2006, at the age of 58. Some news accounts have stated that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her walkway, while others report that she apparently suffered a stroke.

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Awards

Winner:

Nominated:

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Scholarship Fund

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established in Ms. Butler's memory in 2006 by the Carl Brandon Society. Its goal is to provide an annual scholarship to enable writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops where Ms. Butler got her start. The first scholarship will be awarded in 2007.

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Obituaries

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Bibliography

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Novels

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Series

  • Patternist series
    • Wild Seed (1980)
    • Mind of My Mind (1977)
    • Patternmaster (1976)
    • Clay's Ark (1984)
    • Survivor (1978)
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Other Fiction

  • Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995); Second edition, with additional stories (2006)
  • Speech Sounds (1983)
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Articles

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See also

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References

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Biographies

  • Gates, Henry Louis Jr (ed.). "Octavia Butler." In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 2004: 2515.
  • Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy. "Octavia Butler." In Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998: 554-555.
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Scholarship

  • Baccolini, Raffaella. "Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler." In Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, Marleen S. Barr (ed.). New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000: 13-34.
  • Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991: 149-181.
  • Ramirez, Catherine S. "Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler and Gloria Anzaldua." In Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002: 374-402.
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External links

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Biographies and works

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Interviews

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