Octavia Butler

Source

• Born: 22 June 1947
• Birthplace: Pasadena, California
• Died: 24 February 2006
• Best Known As: African-American feminist Science Fiction author

Octavia Butler grew up in California and started writing science fiction stories when she was a young girl. She began getting published in the 1970s, then won a Hugo award for her short story, "Speech Sounds" in 1983. A year later Butler won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for her novella "Bloodchild." Her novels include Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents and Fledgling.

Butler, Octavia E. (b.1947), short fiction writer, novelist, and science fiction writer. Hugo and Nebula award—winning author, and a MacArthur Fellow, Octavia E. Butler was born on 22 June 1947 in Pasadena, California. Butler has helped to enrich the ever-expanding genre of speculative fiction by adding to it a previously excluded experience: the African American female's. She makes a way out of no way by drawing on her experiences growing up in one of America's most culturally diverse states. In struggling against the odds of racism and sexism, breaking into and publishing prolifically in America and abroad in the predominantly white and male dominated science fiction genre, Butler has made a substantial contribution to African American culture and literature.

Butler's emphasis on slavery and its cultural implications (the mixing of races and cultures) predominates from her science fiction to her critically acclaimed and only mainstream novel to date, Kindred (1979). In viewing her works we see that all of her characters try to free themselves from some system of bondage. This leitmotif of bondage situates her firmly in the African American literary tradition, which is infused with the racial memories of slavery. However, Butler not only appropriates slavery, she attempts to move beyond it.

In her first work, Patternmaster (1976), she devises a plot based on genetic evolution and vassalage, and this provides the framework for each successive novel. Several subthemes from slavery, like survival of the fittest, patterns of control and organization, sexual propagation or biological order, and allusions to African traditions, develop. In Patternmaster these subthemes situate themselves in a tier of societies based on the refinement, or lack thereof, of telepathic ability, and this pattern develops through an intricate process of breeding to evolve to a state of linked minds governed by the strongest telepath. With this pattern of mental prowess, Butler inadvertently suggests how it is ironic that the human mind can evolve and unify, and yet still rely on a slave system to maintain order.

In Mind of My Mind (1977) the slave state is shown in its protagonist, Mary, who breaks free of the bonds of poverty and racial oppression to establish the pattern of minds that will culminate in Patternmaster, Survivor (1978) picks up the strain of race stratification and enslavement by outlining an African Asian girl's experiences dealing with humans, fighting addiction to an alien drink, “meklah,” and joining the alien Garkohns, a race of furry aliens whose planet humans have colonized in an attempt to escape the Clayark invasion on earth. Butler published the historical novel Kindred next, and its subject matter positions it chronologically into a segment of Wild Seed (1980), because it explores the maintenance of the slave plantation. The encounters with systems of bondage in both works also illuminate the ethical issues of propagation, biological order, and cultural and racial interbreeding that are associated with slavery, by having their protagonists decide just how much they are willing to do to survive and make sure that their future generation succeeds.

Wild Seed continues the motif of slavery and propagation by going to the ancestral African beginning of the pattern and relating how it was conceived and instigated by Doro, a Nubian ogbanje (a spirit who cannot die and who manifests itself by continually being born into bodies that die). Butler plays with a societal order based not on race, but on a genetic capacity for telepathic power. The protagonist, a female African shapeshifter called Anyanwu, makes the Middle Passage and works to undercut Doro's need to kill. By the appropriation of the Middle Passage, an ogbanje, and an African shapeshifter and healer, Butler recreates her former works’ tension, which comes from having to decide how to free oneself from racial-biological or mental-telepathic slavery. Either, she suggests, is a slave state of mind that will destroy.

The next wave of fiction develops a paradigm of biological enslavement due to alien intervention and drug addiction. In Clay's Ark (1984); the Xenogenesis Trilogy, Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989); and Parable of the Sower (1993), the slave state is also located in the biological realm. These stories focus on humans who, through alien integration or drug abuse, are reprogrammed along a biological drive to reproduce or destroy at all costs. The price becomes cultural deconstruction and genetic mutation into something beyond human. However, what is interesting about the trilogy is how societal structure is determined not just by genetic mutation but also by the need to interact with one's environment on mutually beneficial terms that help both survive. Parable of the Sower moves to economic and spiritual enslavement caused by drug addiction. In this story Butler creates a multicultural society or family united by acceptance of a spiritual worldview of change, “earth-seed,” to combat the spiritual deterioration and cultural chaos hinted at in Clay's Ark.

In 1998, Butler continued the narrative of Lauren Olamina from Parable of the Sower with the publication of Parable of the Talents, the second novel in her Parable series. Slavery and enslavement remain key issues as Lauren and her followers try to adhere to their Earthseed philosophy in a hostile religious environment. Their opponents conquer them physically and put them in concentration camps; to further punish what they perceive as wayward Americans, they take away all the children of Earthseed believers, including Lauren's weeks-old daughter, in an effort to train the children away from Earthseed.

Like her novels, the pattern of slavery and multicultural generation resulting from a slave state derives from Butler's earlier short stories: “Crossover” (1971), “Near of Kin” (1979), and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” (1987). Two, “Speech Sounds” (1983) and “Bloodchild” (1984), won Hugo Awards. The tie between Butler's short stories and her fiction comes from her daring to explore taboo and untouched material, for in them she travels the realms of incest, chemical poisoning and the genetic mutations that result, and the tension of bonds between men and women. And she did this well before it became fashionable to do so. Butler's works, whether viewed as science fiction or not, develop the slave state to arrive at an evolution of the mind.

Bibliography

• Veronica Mixon, “Futurist Woman: Octavia Butler,” Essence, Apr. 1979, 12, 15.
• Frances Smith Foster, “Octavia Butler's Black Female Future Fiction,” Extrapolation 23.1 (1982): 37–48.
• Sandra Y. Govan, “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Paterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction,” Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (Spring 1984): 82–87.
• Ruth Salvaggio, “Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine,” Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (Spring 1984): 78–81.
• Joe Weixlmann, “An Octavia E. Butler Bibliography,” Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (Spring 1984): 88–89.
• Thelma J. Shinn, “The Wise Witches: Black Women Mentors in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 1985, pp. 203–215.
• Octavia E. Butler, “Black Scholar Interview with Octavia Butler: Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre,” interview by Frances M. Beal, Black Scholar 17.2 (Mar.-Apr. 1986): 14–18.
• Sandra Y. Govan, “Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel,” MELUS 13.1–2 (Spring-Summer 1986): 79–96.
• Octavia E. Butler, “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler,” interview by Randall Kenan, Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 495–504.
• Rebecca J. Holden, “The High Costs of Cyborg Survival: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy,” Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction 72 (Spring 1998): 49–56; this issue contains other articles on Butler.
• Jim Miller, “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision,” Science Fiction Studies 25:2 (75) (July 1998): 336–360

Mildred R. Mickle

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is best known as the author of the Patternist series of science fiction novels in which she explores topics traditionally given only cursory treatment in the genre, including sexual identity and racial conflict. Butler's heroines are black women who are both mentally and physically powerful.

Butler grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood in Pasadena, California. Her father died while she was very young, and her mother worked as a maid to support the two of them. Butler has written memoirs of her mother's sacrifices: buying her a typewriter of her own when she was ten years old, and to paying a large fee to an unscrupulous agent so Butler's stories could be read. Butler entered student contests as a teenager, and after attending workshops like the Writers Guild of America, West "open door" program during the late 1960s and the Clarion Science Fiction Writer's Workshop in 1970, Butler sold her first science fiction stories. This early training brought her into contact with a range of well-known science fiction writers, including Joanna Russ and Harlan Ellison, who became Butler's mentor.

Four of Butler's six novels revolve around the Patternists, a group of mentally superior beings who are telepathically connected to one another. These beings are the descendants of Doro, a four thousand-year-old Nubian male who has selectively bred with humans throughout time with the intention of establishing a race of superhumans. He prolongs his life by killing others, including his family members, and inhabiting their bodies. The origin of the Patternists is outlined in Wild Seed, which begins in seventeenth-century Africa and spans more than two centuries. The Novel recounts Doro's uneasy alliance with Anyanwu, an earth-mother figure whose extraordinary powers he covets. Their relationship progresses from power struggles and tests of will to mutual need and dependency. Doro's tyranny ends when one of his children, the heroine of Mind of My Mind, destroys him and united the Patternists with care and compassion. Patternmaster and Survivor are also part of the Patternist series. The first book set in the future, concerns two brothers vying for their dying father's legacy. However, the pivotal character in the novel is Amber, one of Butler's most heroic women, whose unconventional relationship with one of her brothers is often interpreted in feminist contexts. In Survivor, set on an alien planet, Butler examines human attitudes toward racial and ethnic differences and their effects on two alien creatures. Alanna, the human protagonist, triumphs over racial prejudice and enslavement by teaching her alien captors tolerance and respect for individuality. Kindred departs from the Patternist series yet shares its focus on male/female relationships and racial matters. The protagonist, Dana, is a contemporary writer who is telepathically transported to a pre-Civil War plantation. She is a victim both of the slave-owning ancestor who summons her when he is in danger and of the slave-holding age in which she is trapped for increasing periods. Clay's Ark (1984) reflects Butler's interest in the psychological traits of men and women in a story of a space virus that threatens the earth's population with disease and genetic mutation. In an interview, Butler commented on how Ronald Reagan's vision of a winnable nuclear war encouraged her to write more dystopic material. This shift in focus is most evident in Parable of the Sower (1994), a novel which depicts a religious sea-change, set against the backdrop of a strife-ridden inner city in 2025.

Critics have often applauded Butler's lack of sentimentality, and have responded favorably on her direct treatment of subjects not previously addressed in science fiction, such as sexuality, male/female relationships, racial inequity, and contemporary politics. Frances Smith Foster has commented: "Octavia Butler is not just another woman science fiction writer. Her major characters are black women, and through her characters and through the structure of her imagined social order, Butler consciously explores the impact of race and sex upon future society."

Further Reading

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 38, Gale, 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, Gale, 1984.

Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, January 5, 1981; November, 1984; December 15, 1987; December, 1988.

Black American Literature Forum, summer, 1984.

Black Scholar, March/April, 1986.

Equal Opportunity Forum Magazine, Number 8, 1980.

Essence, April, 1979; May, 1989, pp. 74, 79, 132, 134.

Extrapolation, spring, 1982.

Fantasy Review, July, 1984.

Janus, winter, 1978-79.

Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1981.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February, 1980; August, 1984.

Ms., March, 1986; June, 1987.

Salaga, 1981.

Science Fiction Review, May, 1984.

Thrust: Science Fiction in Review, summer, 1979.

Washington Post Book World, September 28, 1980; June 28, 1987; July 31, 1988; June 25, 1989.

writer

Personal Information

Born Octavia Estelle Butler on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, CA; daughter of Laurice and Octavia M. (Guy) Butler.
Died February 24, 2006.
Education: Pasadena City College, AA, 1968; attended California State University at Los Angeles, 1969; attended University of California at Los Angeles, 1970; attended Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, 1970.

Career

Freelance writer, 1970-76; author, 1976-2007.

Life's Work

"I didn't decide to become a science fiction writer," Octavia Butler claimed in an interview with Frances M. Beal 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 in Vibe, 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 Black Scholar, "A science fiction writer has the freedom to do absolutely anything. The limits are the imagination of the writer."

Inpsired Early By Science Fiction

Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California. Her father died during her infancy and her mother's occupation provided Butler with early lessons 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 Black Scholar. "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 modern black women travels back in time to the antebellum South and confronts slavery first-hand.

Butler discovered her vocation at an early age. "I was writing when I was 10 years old," she told Black Scholar. "I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I 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. After receiving her Associate's degree in 1968, she 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 Publishers Weekly 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.

Found First Success With Patternmaster

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. She originally only wrote short stories but finally deciding to undertake a novel near the end of 1974. The result was Patternmaster, which she executed rather quickly after getting over her fear of novelistic length. She sent the manuscript to Doubleday where an editor saw promise in the story. It was only after Butler made some of the major revisions suggested by the editor that Doubleday agreed to publish the book, and by 1976 Patternmaster was on bookstore shelves.

Patternmaster addressed issues of class division with a plot revolving around telepathic people known as "Patternists" 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, a sequel to Patternmaster, while Doubleday was reviewing her first. Published in 1977, Mind of My Mind followed the saga into the next generation, as did the third book in the series, Survivor in 1978. The series sold well, but the people at Doubleday were still leery of publishing science fiction that attempted to bring in both African-American and female audiences, groups that had notoriously stayed away from the genre. Hence, Butler interrupted her work on the series to write a very different story.

Deleved Into History With Kindred

Motivated by considerations of what previous generations of black people--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."

In the March/April 1986 issue of Black Scholar, Butler discussed 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 in 1979, 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 ... Kindred. "

Won Hugo Award

Coming off the success of Kindred, Doubleday published Wild Seed in 1980, the fourth book in the Patternmaster series. St. Martin's Press took over the series in 1984 and published the fifth book, Clay's Ark. By that time, 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 as well.

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 Trilogy, 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."

Found New Direction

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 Publishers 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 herself 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."

Shortly after publishing Parable of the Sower Butler received perhaps one of the most lucrative honors of her career when she was named a recipient of a Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award. The award, given to the brightest and most promising African Americans in their field, allows the recipient to pursue new and ground-breaking activities without worry of financial backing. When Butler received the fellowship in 1995, she was presented with a prize of $295,000 which would be paid out over five years. When asked what she would do with the money by Jet magazine, Butler said that she would continue to write new and genre breaking science fiction in order to reach a wider variety of readers interested in the genre, especially those readers of the African-American community.

True to her word, Butler continued to write significant science fiction which commented on social issues. In a follow-up to Parable of the Sower, Butler produced the critically acclaimed Parable of the Talents in 1998, which traced the path of Lauren Olamina as she attempted to reconcile her world by starting a community called Acorn. Much like Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents is more a study of the character of human beings instead of an action or sci-fi genre novel. Butler said to Poets & Writers Magazine that she felt the need to continue to write about the future world she had created in Parable of the Sower because "I examined a lot of the problems in Parable of the Sower, and now I'd like to consider some of the solutions. Not propose solutions, you understand--what I want to do is look at some of the solutions that human beings can come up with when they're feeling uncertain and frightened."

Collected Works Published

In 1995 Butler's early work was compiled for the first time in a book called Bloodchild: And Other Stories. The collected work included her Hugo and Nebula award winning story "Bloodchild," as well as "The Evening of Morning Sounds," "Near of Kin," "Speech Sounds," and "Crossover." Also included were insights from Butler herself, including an afterword to each short story and two essays, "Positive Obsessions" and "Furor Scribendi," which talk about the habit of writing and overcoming personal challenges, including racism and poverty, to achieve a goal. According to Publishers Weekly, this book was one of the first instances where the reading public was able to "clarify what excites and motivates this exceptionally talented writer."

However, Butler has always been very open about what types of themes and issues her writing deals with. "I don't write utopian science fiction because I don't believe that imperfect humans can form a perfect society," Butler confessed in Black Scholar. "Nobody is perfect," she insisted to Vibe. "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 tried, in her later writings, including the Parable tales, 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. She asserted to Vibe, "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 LA Weekly: "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 Black Scholar what drew her to the form, she replied "The freedom of it; it's potentially the freest genre in existence."

Awards

Selected: 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; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award recipient, 1995.

Works

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.
• Lilith's Brood, SFBC, 1989.
• Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
• Bloodchild: And Other Stories, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995.
• Parable of the Talents, Seven Stories Press, 1998.
• 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.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Writers, Gale, 1993.
• The Complete Marquis Who's Who, Marquis Who's Who, 2003.

• Black Scholar, March/April 1986, pp. 14-18.
• College English, February 1993, pp. 135-57.
• Emerge, June 1994, pp. 65-6.
• Jet, July 3, 1995, pp. 34-5.
• L.A. Weekly, March 4, 1994, pp. 37-8.
• Library Journal, November 1, 1998, p. 123.
• Publishers Weekly, December 13, 1993, pp. 50-1; August 21, 1995, pp. 50-1; October 19, 1998, p. 60.
• Science-Fiction Studies, 20 (1993), pp. 394-408.
• Vibe, February 1994.

• "Octavia E(stelle) Butler," Contemporary Authors Online, reproduced in Biography Resource Center, www.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (September 24, 2003).

— Simon Glickman and Ralph G. Zerbonia

Octavia Estelle Butler
Butler signing a copy of Fledgling
Born	June 22, 1947(1947-06-22) Pasadena, California
Died	February 24, 2006 (aged 58) Lake Forest Park, Washington
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	United States
Writing period	1970s–2000s
Genres	Science fiction
Influences Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Toni Morrison
Official website

Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Career 2.1 Patternist series 2.2 Kindred 2.3 Lilith's Brood 2.4 The Parable series 2.5 Fledgling 2.6 Short stories 2.7 Series 2.8 Themes of Social Criticism 3 Awards 4 Scholarship fund 5 Works 5.1 Series 5.2 Standalone novels 5.3 Short stories 5.4 Articles 6 See also 7 Notes 8 Further reading 8.1 Biographies 8.2 Scholarship 9 External links 9.1 Biographies and works 9.2 Interviews

Biography

Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler) who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood.^[2] According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 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."^[3]

Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically 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.^[4] "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."^[5]

After getting an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 [1], 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" [2]:

• 1969–1970: The Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor Latino and African American writers. Through Open Door she met the noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.
• 1970: The Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, (introduced to her by Ellison), where she first met Samuel R. Delany.^[6]

Butler moved to Seattle, Washington, in November 1999.

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."^[7] Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work.

She died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, at the age of 58.^[8] 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 as a result of those injuries. Another suggestion, backed by Locus magazine (issue 543; Vol.56 No.4), is that a stroke caused the fall and hence the head injuries.

Career

Her first published story, "Crossover," appeared in Clarion's 1971 anthology; another short story, "Childfinder," was bought by Harlan 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 rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me before I sold another word."^[9]

Patternist series

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 (though it would become the fifth in the Patternist series). Over the next eight years, she would publish four more novels in the same story line, though the publication dates of the novels do not match the internal order of the series (see Works below).

Wild Seed, the first book in the Patternist series, was published in 1980. In Wild Seed, Butler contrasts how two potentially immortal characters go about building families. The male character, Doro, engages in a breeding program to create people with stronger psychic powers both as food, and as potential companions. The female character, Anyanwu, creates villages. Yet Doro and Anyanwu, in spite of their differences grow to need each other, as the only immortal/extremely long-lived beings in the world. This book also explores the psychodynamics of power and enslavement.

Kindred

In 1979, she published Kindred, a novel that uses the science-fiction staple of time travel to explore slavery in the United States. In this story, Dana, an African American woman, is inexplicably transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth century Maryland. She meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, an African American woman who was born free but forced into slavery later in life.

This novel is often shelved in the literature or African-American literature sections of bookstores instead of science fiction—Butler herself categorized the novel not as science fiction but rather as a "grim fantasy," as there was "absolutely no science in it"^[10] (no scientific explanation of the book's time travel is ever given^[11]). Kindred became the most popular of all her books, with 250,000 copies currently 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 novel.^[12]

Lilith's Brood

Lilith's Brood (formerly Xenogenesis trilogy) refers to a collection of three novels. The central characters are Lilith and her genetically altered children. Lilith, along with the few other surviving humans, are saved by extraterrestrials, the Oankali, after a "handful of people [a military group] tried to commit humanicide," leading to a missile war that destroyed much of Earth. The Oankali have a third gender, the ooloi, who have the ability to manipulate genetics, plus the ability of sexually seductive neural-stimulating and consciousness-sharing powers. All of these abilities allow them to unify the other two genders in their species, as well as unifying their species with others that they encounter. The Oankali are biological traders, driven to share genes with other intelligent species, changing both parties.

The Parable series

In 1994, her dystopian novel Parable of the Sower was nominated for a Nebula for best novel, an award she received in 1999 for a sequel, Parable of the Talents. The two novels provide the origin of the fictional religion Earthseed.

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.

Fledgling

She eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in the 2005 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.

Short stories

Butler published one collection of her shorter writings, Bloodchild and Other Stories, in 1996. She states in the preface that she "hate[s] short-story writing" and that she is "essentially a novelist. The ideas that most interest me tend to be big."^[13] The collection includes five short stories spanning Butler's career, the first finished in 1971 and the last in 1993. "Bloodchild," the Hugo and Nebula award-winning title story, concerns humans who live on a reservation on an alien planet ruled by insect-like creatures. The aliens breed by implanting eggs in the humans, with whom they share a symbiotic existence. In Butler's afterword to the story, she writes that it is not about slavery as some have suggested, but rather about love and coming-of-age—as well as male pregnancy and the "unusual accommodation[s]" that a group of interstellar colonists might have to make with their adopted planet's prior inhabitants.^[14] She also states that writing it was her way of overcoming a fear of bot flies.^[14]

In 2005, Seven Stories Press released an expanded edition.

Series

Butler is well known for her Patternist series, Lilith's Brood (formerly the Xenogenesis trilogy), and the Parable of the Sower Series. The first book which she wrote for the Patternist series, Patternmaster (1976), is actually the last in the internal chronology of the series. In fact, most of the Patternmaster novels were written and published out of sequence. The four novels in Butler's "Patternist series" other than Survivor were released in 2006 as the single volume Seed to Harvest.

Themes of Social Criticism

Butler used the hyperbolic reach of speculative fiction to explore modern and ancient social issues. She often represented concepts like race, sexuality, gender, religion, social progress and social class in metaphoric language. However, these issues were not relegated only to metaphor. For instance, class struggle is an overt topic in the Parable of the Sower series.

Awards

Winner:

• 2000: lifetime achievement award in writing from the PEN American Center
• 1999: Nebula Award for Best Novel - Parable of the Talents
• 1995: MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
• 1985: Hugo Award for Best Novelette - Bloodchild
• 1985: Locus Award for Best Novelette - "Bloodchild"^[15]
• 1985: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette - "Bloodchild"^[16]
• 1984: Nebula Award for Best Novelette - Bloodchild
• 1984: Hugo Award for Best Short Story - Speech Sounds
• 1980: Creative Arts Award, L.A. YWCA

Nominated:

• 1994: Nebula Award for Best Novel - Parable of the Sower
• 1987: Nebula Award for Best Novelette - The Evening and the Morning and the Night
• 1967: Fifth Place, Writer's Digest Short Story Contest

Scholarship fund

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established in 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 Butler got her start. The first scholarships were awarded in 2007.^[17]

Works

Series

• Patternist series
  • Patternmaster (1976)
  • Mind of My Mind (1977)
  • Survivor (1978)
  • Wild Seed (1980)
  • Clay's Ark (1984)
  • Seed to Harvest (compilation; 2007-does not include Survivor)
• Lilith's Brood (formerly the Xenogenesis trilogy)
  • Dawn (1987)
  • Adulthood Rites (1988)
  • Imago (1989)
• Parable of the Sower Series
  • Parable of the Sower (1993)
  • Parable of the Talents (1998)

Standalone novels

• Kindred (1979)
• Fledgling (2005)

Short stories

• Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995); Second edition with additional stories (2006)

Articles

• A Few Rules For Predicting The Future by Octavia E. Butler - Essence (magazine)
• AHA! MOMENT-Eye Witness: Octavia Butler - oprah.com

See also

• Afrofuturism
• List of science fiction authors
• Oankali
• Ooloi
• Women science fiction authors

Literature portal

Notes

1. ^ Crossley, Robert (2003). "Critical Essay". Kindred: 25th Anniversary Edition. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 273. 
2. ^ AA Registry.com profile on Octavia Butler.
3. ^ Norton Anthology of African American Literature, p.2515.
4. ^ Voices.
5. ^ Essay.
6. ^ Washington Post obituary, 2006/2/27
7. ^ TW Bookmark.
8. ^ New York Times obituary, March 1, 2006
9. ^ Butler, Octavia E. (2005), Bloodchild and Other Stories (second ed.), Seven Stories Press, pp. 120 
10. ^ Crossley, Robert (2003). "Critical Essay". Kindred: 25th Anniversary Edition. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 269. 
11. ^ Crossley, Robert (2003). "Critical Essay". Kindred: 25th Anniversary Edition. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 267-268. 
12. ^ Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
13. ^ Butler, Octavia E. (2005), Bloodchild and Other Stories (second ed.), Seven Stories Press, pp. vii-viii 
14. ^ ^{a b} Butler, Octavia E. (2005), Bloodchild and Other Stories (second ed.), Seven Stories Press, pp. 30–32 
15. ^ 1985 Locus Awards
16. ^ Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Awards Winners By Year
17. ^ Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship

Further reading

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.

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," and "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991: 149-181, 203-230.
• Holden, Rebecca J., "The High Costs of Cyborg Survival: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy," in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 72 (1998): 49–56.
• Lennard, John. Octavia Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith's Brood. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84760-036-3
• -- "Of Organelles: The Strange Determination of Octavia Butler." In Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007: 163-90. ISBN 978-1-84760-038-7
• Levecq, Christine, "Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) History in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred," in Contemporary Literature 41.1 (2000 Spring): 525–53.
• Luckhurst, Roger, "'Horror and Beauty in Rare Combination': The Miscegenate Fictions of Octavia Butler," in Women: A Cultural Review 7.1 (1996): 28–38.
• Melzer, Patricia, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-292-71307-9
• Omry, Keren, "A Cyborg Performance: Gender and Genre in Octavia Butler," in Phoebe:Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques. 17.2 (2005 Fall): 45-60.
• 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.
• Ryan, Tim A. "You Shall See How a Slave Was Made a Woman: The Development of the Contemporary Novel of Slavery, 1976-1987," in Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008: 114-48.
• Schwab, Gabriele. "Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency and Power in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis." In Accelerating Possession, William Maurer and Gabriele Schwab (eds.). New York: Columbia UP, 2006: 204-228.
• Scott, Johnathan. "Octavia Butler and the Base for American Socialism" In Socialism and Democracy 20.3 November 2006, 105-126
• Slonczewski, Joan, "Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response" [3]

External links

Biographies and works

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Octavia E. Butler

• Octavia Butler homepage from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
• Voices from the Gaps: Octavia Estelle Butler; biography.
• Bibliography from Feminist Sci Fi Utopia
• Octavia E. Butler at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database; bibliography.
• Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, administered by the Carl Brandon Society
• OctaviaButler.net; a fansite which includes rare content by and about Octavia Butler.
• "The Book of Martha"^{[dead link]} at Scifi.com
• "Amnesty"^{[dead link]} at Scifi.com
• Octavia Butler biography from Black Women in America at OUP Blog
• "Devil Girl From Mars": Why I Write Science Fiction, MIT Media in Transition Project, October 4, 1998
• Strange Bedfellows: Eugenics, Attraction, and Aversion in the Works of Octavia E. Butler
• Octavia Butler Collection at The Huntington Library; includes manuscripts, correspondence, school papers, notebooks, photographs, and other materials.

Interviews

• "Interview with Octavia Butler", Addicted to Race, February 6, 2006.
• "Interview with Octavia Butler", The Indypendent, January 2006
• "Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler on Race, Global Warming, and Religion", Democracy Now!, November 11, 2005.
• Interview with Octavia Butler by Joshunda Sanders,In Motion Magazine (2004)
• "The Interplay of Science and Science Fiction" Panel Discussion, on NPR, Talk of the Nation, June 18, 2004 (audio)
• "Interview: Octavia Butler", scifidimensions, June 2004; on the 25th anniversary of Kindred.
• Kindred Reader’s Guide: A Conversation with Octavia Butler, Writers & Books, 2003
• "Essay on Racism: A Science-Fiction Writer Shares Her View of Intolerance", Weekend Edition Saturday, September 1, 2001 (audio)
• Interview with Octavia Butler, Locus magazine, June 2000
• Ask the Experts: Octavia Butler, PBS (video)
• 1996 Science Fiction Studies interview

Persondata
NAME	Butler, Octavia Estelle
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	June 22, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH	Pasadena, California
DATE OF DEATH	February 24, 2006
PLACE OF DEATH	Seattle, Washington

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