There's a story of a little girl who watched a science ficiton movie that was so bad, she immediately sat down and wrote her own story. That is what is attributed to Octavia Butler. The rest, so they say, is history. But the details are far better and the apocryphal.
Over the course of a 35 year career, Octavia Estelle Butler took the every-day people of the world and then injected them into the science fiction slipstream. If that were the whole story, it would still mark a seismic shift in the genre. But that's just the overview.
Long a monolith of white-male perspective, science fiction’s bedrock for nearly a century was the ubermensch: extraordinary, messianic, and decidedly male. Butler saw the potential for so much more. As a result of her experience, drive, and a bit of opportunity, she was the first African-American woman to publish science fiction under her own name.
Butler’s work explores themes of racism and injustice, gender identity and sexual politics, the myriad lasting implications of genocide and survival—indeed the things that define humans from monsters. Through science fiction she creates a dialogue between the reader and the author. It's not always an easy conversation but it is always a rewarding one.
In building diverse, complicated worlds, Butler created an almost-safe space to discuss hard things. In the process, she opened the genre up to women, people of color, and a broader world of hopes—and fears—informed by a very different reality from the whiz-bang boys. Of course a lot of work (and a lot of "no's") went into turning ideas into a groundbreaking career.
The truth can be a bitter pill, but it does heal
Butler’s writing predates that television viewing event by several years. Diagnosed early as dyslexic, Octavia (Junie to her family) nonetheless harbored a deep fascination and love for the printed word. Like many bibliophiles, the books were young Junie’s first friends. As she grew older, books were also her only refuge.
Junie was tall. One writer called her a mountain and attributed power and affection to her stature and prepossessed atmosphere. However, the over-tall child was an over-tall target for the cruelty of other children. That Junie was dark, with strong Afrocentric features only contributed to the bullies' arsenal. If her stature and features were not enough, she was also painfully shy, bordering on psychologically mute.
While the effects of the ridicule and cruelty informed Butler’s writing, Lilith Iyapo’s experiences in Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago reflect the brutality under the serine serface of civility. Iyapo's reality is informed by Junie's experience with integration in 1950s and 60s Los Angeles. She accompanied her housekeeper-mother to work, witnessing harsh treatment from “good” white people in Pasadena. The eyewitness perspecitve directly informed the social dynamics among a group of multi-racial survivors intending to repopulate a resurrected Earth.
Written at the height of the cold war, in the wake of the murders and incarcerations that all but silenced the Civil Rights movement, Dawn was clearly a book of it’s time. Extraterrestrials hold the few human survivors of nuclear war in stasis while the ruined Earth heals. Intergalactic conservationists, those extraterrestrials called "Oankali" see a chance for a genetic exchange and the possibility to rehabilitate and save humanity from itself.
Spoiler alert!
But Dawn, (like every other Butler book) is also a book of today. When Jean, a HIGHLY entitled white woman, challenges African-descendant Lilith’s appointment as the leader among the first group to land on Earth, the racism is palpable. When Lilith demonstrates her qualifications to lead, through quiet-confident capability the group-think of racial distrust and dehumanization only grows more pronounced and more violent.
“I’ve fought men and women and no woman hits like that.” Jean, Dawn
Rather than rejoice in their “Yay! Humanity has a second shot!” moment, rather than remake Earth into Eden that was lost, a hateful clique falls back on tribalism. Jean pushes the group to choose the murderous Curt Loeher—a former cop—to lead them in mutiny against Lilith and the Oankali.
In full acknowledgement of the bullet that they dodged, they insist on recreating the institution of murder. Lilith, in a supreme show of leadership works through the loss of a second family and even more loss to guide mankind away from its worst nature.
"It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress." Leto II, God Emperor of Dune
The burden of the survivor is another recurring theme in Butler’s work. Like Frank Herbert, (that's his quote above) Butler understood that mankind may survive through brutality but it cannot truly build and sustain a civilization until we reconcile the brutality at the foundation. Herbert and Butler agreed—indeed it's a central thesis to both authors' work—that humanity has to evolve beyond brutal behaviors if it is to survive the cycle of horror, atrocity, and denial.
Inspired by two events: a tour of Mount Vernon, the historic home to George Washington where a tour guide referred to African slaves as "servants," and a classroom discussion with a Black Power activist who expressed bald-faced contempt for the older generations of African-Americans based on his perception of their willing subservience to whites, Butler wrote Kindred. The story of a 20th century black woman named Dana who travels through time to the Maryland plantation where her ancesters were subjugated to a living hell, Kindred is both a defense of the survivor as well as a groundbreaking attempt to more accurately depict genocidal slavery.
As may be surmised, Butler never aspired to write the “easy” read. If she didn’t have the answers she did have the courage to raise the hard questions on a BIG canvas with speculative nuances. Butler eschewed comfortable tropes and mass-market storylines. With no interest in feeding pablum to adults, she served truth and discomfort and meaningful dialogue—all with a hard-won optimism. As a result, her books seldom found the success of traditional space opera or “hard science” (means “white”) novels.
But she did find an audience.
Fellow writer Harlan Ellison was one of her earliest champions, sponsoring her to attend the Clarion Writers Workshop. At Clarion, Samuel Delany, (a fellow groundbreaking writer) became a life-long friend. Both men were known to generations of readers as visionaries with powerful voices. Both were known for their passion and strong opinions. Ellison in particular was known to be a brilliant, if at times, caustic critic of science fiction.
That both men fostered and promoted Butler’s work is a testament to her staggering talent. They believed in her work to produce better stories to address bigger ideas. The MacArthur foundation agreed, awarding Butler with a genius grant—the first awarded to any science fiction author. That her work continues to inform and shape science fiction is a testament to her enduring vision.
In her later years, Octavia Butler became a teacher, at Clarion and other workshops, to guide other people of color and especially women to express themselves and their hopes, dreams, and fears. She trained best-seller Walter Mosley to reach beyond tropes when he workshopped his first science fiction pieces in her class.
Octavia Estelle Butler authored over a dozen books, even more short stories and essays. She died at the age of 59 and it was nowhere near enough time for us to have known her. Butler awakened readers and writers—as Lilith Iyapo awakened so many sleepers—to a life beyond heartbreak and loss and mundane ideas. The trio now collected as Lilith’s Brood remains my favorite of her works. But if you only read one book by Butler, please, choose Kindred. You can find all of her work here.
The photo above, "Me but with books," is owned by myself. I own none of the other photos. They are use here, for instructional/educational purposes, as covered by the Fair Use Doctrine.
