Bloodchild (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Octavia Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947, the only child of Laurice and Octavia Butler. Her father died when she was a baby, and she was raised by her mother and grandmother. Butler was a shy and solitary child who took refuge in reading. Her mother, a maid with a limited education, instilled in Butler a love of books and learning. From the age of ten, Butler knew that she wanted to be a writer. Despite the fact that she was unaware of the work of any black authors, she was determined to publish and began submitting stories to magazines in her teens. Her teachers gave her little encouragement, expressing no interest in Butler’s science fiction themes.

Butler attended Pasadena City College and California State College in Los Angeles, after which she took several office, factory, and warehouse jobs. She continued to write and submit stories, which continued to be rejected by publishers. An important turn in Butler’s career as a writer came when she attended the Clarion Science Fiction workshop in 1970. The workshop resulted in the publication of her first short story, “Crossover,” in a Clarion anthology. She did not publish any more of her work until she sold her first novel, Patternmaster, the first installment in her Patternist series, to Doubleday in 1976.

Over the next decade, Butler came out with four more Patternist novels, as well as a time travel novel about slavery, Kindred, which was published in 1979. Her next project was the Xenogenesis series, which includes the novels Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. Butler rose to prominence in the science fiction world during a time when women were just starting to assert a voice in the genre. She gained a particularly strong following of black women, among whom she was the only prominent sci-fi writer. But an increasingly wider audience soon came to enjoy and appreciate her work. After the publication of two more sci-fi novels and a collection of short stories, Bloodchild and Other Stories, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (1995). Her most recent novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), are part of her Earthseed series, which deals with a young woman’s attempt to found a new religion in the twenty-first century.

Despite her growing fame, Butler has remained in her adult life the loner she was as a child. In a personal statement printed in Women of Wonder, Butler describes herself as “comfortably asocial. . . a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, an African-American, a former Baptist, and an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”