Octavia Estelle Butler, 1947-2006
Updated 7:12 p.m., March 6
"I'm not writing for some noble purpose, I just like telling a good story. If what I write about helps others understand this world we live in, so much the better for all of us."
The Pasadena City Library had selected "Kindred" for its One City, One Story series before Butler's death.
"Octavia E. Butler's first creation
in the world of science fiction was herself."
Octavia Butler, 58;
Author Opened the Galaxies
of Science Fiction to Blacks
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
The Los Angeles Times
February 28, 2006
Before anybody told her that black girls do not grow up to write about futuristic worlds, Butler, the daughter of a shoeshine man and a maid, was already fashioning a place for herself in a white-dominated universe.
By remaining dedicated to her craft, sweeping floors and working as a telemarketer to pay the bills; by suffering the indignities that come with being among the first; and eventually winning a MacArthur Foundation grant, Butler carved a place for herself — and helped write a new world into existence.
Butler, whose 12 stunning, thought-provoking novels of science fiction inspired new readers and writers to explore the genre, died Saturday. Friends said Butler apparently suffered a stroke outside her home in Seattle. She was 58.
Over the years, Butler, author of the seminal work "Kindred," earned the distinction of being the first lady of a small, tightknit circle of African American writers of speculative fiction — science fiction, horror and fantasy.
"She was an utter inspiration," said Steven Barnes, a longtime friend and science fiction author who was the first African American to write one of the novels based on "Star Wars." "I don't know what would have happened to me had I not had her as an example."
Mystery writer Walter Mosley said Butler expanded the genre "by writing a kind of fiction that African American women around the country could read and understand both technically and emotionally…. She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels, she was writing very difficult, brilliant work."
"For an African American woman to somehow define herself as a science fiction writer and to realize that dream is an extraordinary thing," he said in an interview Monday.
"Kindred" is the story of a 20th century African American woman who travels in time back to the antebellum South to save her great-great-grandfather, a white plantation owner. Though published under the general banner of fiction, it exemplifies Butler's use of speculative ideas to explore issues such as the relationship between the empowered and the powerless.
In the worlds that Butler created, African Americans and other people of color were present and significant in ways they had not been before. That inclusion not only attracted readers, it allowed Butler to use the genre as a powerful means of speaking to a range of issues including race, gender and the environment while also mastering the tenets of science fiction writing.
Dan Simon, founder of the publishing house Seven Stories, said Butler's readers — a body as diverse as the worlds she created — felt a relationship with her work that was deeply personal and startling.
"There was an intensity to the way people read her that is very unusual," said Simon, who was Butler's editor. "You always feel when reading her that you're looking in a mirror that gives you an even truer reflection than any mirror ever could."
In a brief autobiography, Butler described herself simply: "I'm comfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of a large city, 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."
Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena and known to family and friends as Junie. She spent part of her childhood on her grandmother's chicken farm near Victorville, where there was no electricity, telephone or running water, but to Butler it was idyllic.
Early in her life, Butler found refuge in her writing — a place where there was freedom from whatever troubled her. "The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation," Butler told The Times in 1998. "But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through."
At the age of 4 she created stories about a magical horse; she was the horse. As a 10-year-old, she was already putting those stories down on paper. By the time an aunt told her "Honey, Negroes can't be writers," it was too late. At 13, Butler was already tapping out new worlds on a Remington portable typewriter that her mother had purchased.
As an adult, she was a powerful presence: tall and striking, with a deep voice. As a child she suffered because of her size, towering so tall over classmates that people wrongly assumed she had been held back in school.
Donna Oliver, a childhood friend, told The Times in 1998: "She wasn't the outgoing type. She was very, very shy and always seemed to be writing instead of playing."
The focus on writing paid off when, at the age of 18, she earned a spot in a screenwriting program conceived by a group of writers that included Harlan Ellison, a legend in the science fiction genre whose work includes scripts for "Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits" and "Star Trek." Although her screenplay was awful, Ellison saw wonderful prose in it and encouraged her to write a novel.
"She's one of my best discoveries," he told The Times in 1998.
Early on, she developed a rigorous writing schedule, working from 2 to 5 every morning. She sold two stories, but that success did not last. After a lull, she used previous works to piece together a novel titled "Patternmaster," the tale of a future in which humanity is divided into a telepathic ruling class of "Patternists" and "Clayarks," four-legged creatures contaminated by a disease brought back from outer space.
But in the 1970s, being an African American writer of science fiction was a lonely endeavor, dominated by Butler and her contemporary Samuel R. Delaney. Early on, some publishers placed images of white people or aliens on the covers of her novels, though the characters were black, Barnes said.
In 1979, Doubleday published "Kindred," which became one of her bestselling titles. By 1995, Butler had written 10 novels, including "Parable of the Sower," and won the nation's two top prizes for science fiction writers. That year, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Butler a $295,000 grant.
"It means a chance to write my novels without worrying about how I'm going to earn a living," she said.
For Butler, the grant was also an opportunity to buy a home for herself and her mother, with whom she shared a close relationship. After her mother's death in 1996, Butler moved to Seattle.
Last November, Seven Stories published Butler's 12th novel, "Fledgling." The novel ended a long stretch of writer's block caused in part by illness and the effect of medication. Butler suffered from congestive heart disease, Simon said.
"Octavia set such a high standard, to the point where [she finished] each and every novel, thought it was fine, then decided she had to start all over again from scratch," Simon said.
"In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch," writer Tananarive Due said. "So we just lost our mother, our grandmother."
"How could science fiction be set on a plantation? Octavia Butler showed them how."
Octavia Butler: A Lonely, Bright Star
Of the Sci-Fi Universe
By Marcia Davis
The Washington Post
February 28, 2006; Page C01
What must it have been like to be Octavia Butler?
There she was, this woman of great intellect, of immense talent, of tremendous passion, and, it seems, so very much alone. Her death on Friday after falling and hitting her head outside her home in Seattle has rattled those who loved her work. She was 58.
There she was, a tall, awkward and shy black girl thinking that she wanted to write science fiction, of all things. A young woman who believed the genre could deal with more than ray guns and transporters, and that she had a right to create fiction that tackled race and class and what it meant to be human in worlds where humanness had all but been obliterated. Publisher after publisher must have been puzzled.
She was an African American woman claiming her space in a literary universe dominated by white men. After years of rejection, she eventually won science fiction's most prestigious awards, the Nebula and the Hugo. She picked up other honors along the way, too, including a PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.
Her following was loving and loyal -- protective even -- for they seemed to know instinctively how precious and powerful and simultaneously tender and fragile a spirit like hers had to be.
"That's terrible, terrible, terrible news," my mother kept saying over and over at word of Butler's death. A die-hard science fiction fan, she is one of those people who gobbled up many of Butler's 11 novels. I was proud of myself for having turned her on to Butler's first work, "Kindred." Soon she was devouring the other works, among them "Dawn" and the highly regarded "Parable of the Sower."
Over the years I had heard Butler speak at literary conferences, listened as she engaged the audiences and patiently indulged those eager young writers with their sometimes doting questions. She was always warm, always gracious. She was easy with people, a strong public presence who seemed so comfortable in her open and direct way.
But that was Octavia Butler's public presence. Those who knew her, as well as anyone could, knew that she was a very private and shy person.
Black science fiction trailblazer Samuel Delaney, 63, remembers teaching Butler as a 23-year-old student at the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop. She was, he says, incredibly shy, a student who spoke only when she had something to say, but someone who obviously had great talent.
It was years later, however, after she had published "Kindred," that he saw what she had become. "It was wonderful to see how she had bloomed and gained so much self-confidence and become a really extraordinary public speaker," Delaney says. She also was a pathblazer in a genre where once you could count the black writers on one hand.
Tananarive Due, a successful novelist, might be described as one of Butler's literary daughters. She and her husband, Steven Barnes -- who was part of that rare original club of black sci-fi writers -- were close to Butler.
The public and private lives of Butler, Due says, were remarkable to watch. "It's almost as if she lived in two worlds."
"I'm very happy alone," Butler once told Post writer David Streitfeld. "If I had to change myself into something else, I'd probably be unhappy."
She grew up poor in Southern California, where her father shined shoes before he died when she was a young girl, and her mother cleaned houses. Butler was a young black woman coming of age at a time when black women were mainly invisible. And when she was noticed, it was with unkind eyes. She was six feet tall by the time she was in her teens, a girl with deep brown skin and short hair. She was sometimes mistaken for a man, she would say. Early as a child, she cocooned herself in a world of books and nurtured audacious ambitions.
"She obviously had spent a tremendous amount of her early life feeling very, very alone," Barnes said. "She had no tribe. She didn't fit in any place. Her own family thought she was nuts . . . because of what she wanted to do with her life."
At one time Barnes lived just six blocks from Butler and they would spend time together, having dinner or just talking. One of the questions she seemed to care greatly about was, "Why is it that we are so cruel to each other?" Barnes says.
"The fact that she was so concerned with that made me think she had faced a lot of that" cruelty in her life, he adds.
She explored the question in a field that was forced, whether it wanted to or not, to acknowledge her talents.
"Women in general were rare in the science fiction field, and black women, ha," Barnes says.
She had to cloak her ideas thickly in metaphor, he says. "She was forced to speak through layers of obsfucation." Those challenges may have ultimately made her a better writer but must have taken their toll.
"It was like trying to drive in the Indy 500 with your brakes on," Barnes says. "You burn up."
Due last spoke with Butler in the summer when Butler was planning to send her last manuscript, "Fledgling," which was recently published to acclaim.
She and Barnes had been worried about Butler, who had been ill and on several medications. The side effects, she told them, made it hard for her to write. It must have been particularly trying for such a perfectionist, they say.
They worried about her, up there alone and probably pushing herself far too much, both in her writing and her travels. But she was drawn to the Pacific Northwest, they say, with its natural beauty and its opportunities for true solitude. Due wanted to call, but worried about interrupting her writing, the words that seemed so hard to come by lately.
I wonder if in all that aloneness, in all her solitude, she knew just how beautiful she was and that she was loved.
"'The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things,' Ms. Butler once said. 'One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.'"
Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler, 58
By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
The Washington Post
February 28, 2006; Page B08
Octavia Butler, 58, one of the country's leading science fiction writers who as an African American woman brought themes of race, gender and power to the genre, died of an apparent stroke Feb. 24 at her home in Seattle.
Ms. Butler, who had lived in Seattle since 1999, wrote 11 novels and a collection of short stories and had published stories in anthologies and magazines. She was an award-winning storyteller whose writings defied the boundaries of one genre. The first black woman to make inroads in the mostly white and male science fiction sphere, Ms. Butler appreciated the genre's literary freedom, and she used it to tell cautionary tales about what could happen to our world.
Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and a senior manager at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, said Ms. Butler was "bigger than just being a science fiction writer."
"One of the things that made Octavia special was how deeply she cared. She wanted to make the world a better place, to make humanity better able to survive its own misbehavior," Howle said. "Her work took an unflinching look at poverty, race, gender, religion, the environment, politics and what it means to be human."
Ms. Butler, who knew she wanted to be a writer at age 10, received numerous rejections before "Kindred," her first novel and most popular work, was published in 1979. The story, based on slave narratives that she had researched, was about a black woman named Dana who traveled back in time to save the life of her white, slave-owning ancestor. "Kindred" has been used widely in college classes.
Subsequent work brought her high honors in her field. Her short story "Speech Sounds" won a Hugo Award for the best short story of 1984. That year, her novelette "Bloodchild" won the Nebula -- science fiction's highest award -- and in 1985, it received a Hugo.
In 1995, Ms. Butler became the first science fiction writer to be awarded a coveted "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She received the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
Ms. Butler was once described as "one of the finest voices in fiction -- period" by The Washington Post. An astute observer of human behavior, she was known for her depiction of strong female characters. She was a writer, one critic said, with "a fine hand with lean, well-paced prose."
Six feet tall and a self-described happy hermit, Ms. Butler escaped easy definition. "I'm comfortably asocial," she once wrote, "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."
Octavia Estelle Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, Calif., the only child that her mother carried to full term; four other children died before her birth. Her mother, also named Octavia, did domestic work, often taking her daughter with her. She knew her father, Laurice Butler, who died when she was young, only through the stories told by her mother and grandmother. After her father's death, her mother took in boarders to bring in extra money.
As a painfully shy child, she kept to herself and spent a great deal of time reading whatever she could find. She also had dyslexia, although it was not known at the time, and performed poorly in grade school. But by the time she was 10, she had written her first story, about horses, and by 11 she was penning romance stories. She produced her first science fiction story at 12 after seeing the film "Devil Girl From Mars" and believing that she could write a better story.
She received an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 and studied at California State University at Los Angeles and the University of California at Los Angeles. She took classes with Harlan Ellison, an influential science fiction writer, at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, where she later taught.
Determined to make it as a writer, she worked a number of menial jobs while maintaining a rigid early-morning writing schedule. After "Kindred" sold, she was able to write full time.
Her other novels include "Patternmaster" (1976), "Mind of My Mind" (1977), "Survivor" (1978) and "Wild Seed" (1980). She had a seven-year period during which she could not finish anything that she attempted. Then she wrote her last novel, "Fledgling" (2005), about the Dracula legend.
In an interview with Essence magazine in October, she talked about the difference between "Fledgling" and other books she had written, such as "Parable of the Sower" (1993) and "Wild Seed."
"I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels," she said. " 'Fledgling' was a chance to play."
Her mother died in 1999, and she leaves no immediate survivors [see the P-I story below, which acutally lists relations -- Ed.].
"'I consider Octavia to be the most important science-fiction writer since Mary Shelley.'"
Octavia Butler, brilliant master
of science fiction, dies at 58
By Emily Heffter
The Seattle Times
February 27, 2006
For more than 30 years, Seattle science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler dreamed up fantastic worlds and religions, made-up creatures and futuristic plots. Then, in her stylistic prose, she used them to tackle the social issues she was most passionate about.
"Parable of the Talents," a futuristic story about a utopian community ravaged by civil war, explored modern-day issues of intolerance, the growing gap between rich and poor, and environmentalism. In her first novel, "Kindred," she plunged into racial issues when a modern-day character was transported into the body of a pre-Civil War slave.
"What [Ms. Butler] was writing for the first time was a kind of woman's-eye view, a very smart woman's-eye view, of say, 'Brave New World' or '1984,' " said writer Harlan Ellison, Ms. Butler's friend and mentor.
Ms. Butler died Friday at Northwest Hospital after a fall at her home in Lake Forest Park. She was 58.
"I consider Octavia to be the most important science-fiction writer since Mary Shelley," said Steven Barnes, an African-American science-fiction writer and friend of Ms. Butler's. She wrote about race successfully because she did it with such subtlety, he said.
Though she was a giant in the science-fiction world, Ms. Butler was such a private person that even her closest friends said they knew little about her.
Ellison said Ms. Butler had a number of obstacles to overcome in the writing business, among them being female and being black.
But Ms. Butler persevered to become one of the few well-known African-American science-fiction writers.
In 1995, she won a $295,000 MacArthur Fellowship, known as the "genius grant." In 2000, she received the Nebula Award for her novel "Parable of the Talents." The Nebula award is science fiction's highest prize.
Those who knew Ms. Butler agreed that, in many ways, she was a contradiction. She kept to herself but was easy to talk to. She was tall and imposing, and, Ellison said, "very warm and charming, but there was gravitas in her." She was funny, with a dark, dry, self-deprecating wit.
Ms. Butler, who never married, described herself this way in 1999: "I'm also uncomfortably 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."
Robin Bailey, the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, remembered her "deep, rumbly voice."
The heroes in her stories were often people of color, and Ellison said Ms. Butler's sense of isolation came through in her work.
In a 1999 interview, Ms. Butler told a Seattle Times reporter that she had been a tall, socially awkward child in Pasadena, Calif., spending much of her time in the public library and sending manuscripts to publishers when she was only 12 or 13.
"I needed to write," she said then. "Writing was literally all I had consistently. ... I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking."
Ms. Butler kept that hard-working intensity as an adult, her friends said. But even in her success, she remained grounded. She bought a house with her MacArthur Fellowship money and traveled mostly to lecture about writing. Ellison remembered that she would cover her mouth when she laughed because she was embarrassed by her crooked teeth.
An only child, Ms. Butler grew up in Southern California and moved to Seattle in 1999, after her mother's death. She studied at Pasadena City College and California State University, Los Angeles, before participating in the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 1970.
"'All of [her writing] was a metaphor for war, poverty, power struggles and discrimination. All of that hurt her very deeply, but her gift was that she could use words for the pain and make the world better.'"
Octavia Butler, 1947-2006:
Sci-fi writer a gifted pioneer
in white, male domain
By John Marshall
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Her father was a shoeshine man who died when she was a child, her mother was a maid who brought her along on jobs, yet Octavia Butler rose from these humble beginnings to become one of the country's leading writers - a female African American pioneer in the white, male domain of science fiction.
Butler, 58, died after falling and striking her head Friday on a walkway outside her home in Lake Forest Park. The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment.
She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted "genius grants" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.
"People may call these 'genius grants,' " Butler said in a 2004 interview with the Seattle P-I, "but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine. I knew I'm no genius."
Butler's most popular work is "Kindred," a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler's solitary life.
"Kindred" was repeatedly rejected by publishers, many of whom could not understand how a science fiction novel could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South. Butler stuck to her social justice vision - "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you" - and finally found a publisher who paid her a $5,000 advance for "Kindred."
"I was living on my writing," Butler said, "and you could live on $5,000 back then. You could live, but not well. I got along by buying food I didn't really like but was nourishing: beans, potatoes. A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time."
Steven Barnes, another African American writer, knew Butler during her early writing days in Southern California and later in the Washington when he and his writer wife, Tananarive Due, lived for a time in Longview before returning to Los Angeles. Barnes saw Butler's confidence grow along with her reputation.
"Octavia was one of the purest writers I know," Barnes recalled Sunday. "She put everything she had into her work - she was extraordinarily committed to the craft. Yet, despite her shyness, she was also an open, generous and humane human being. I miss her so much already."
Due added, "It is a cliche to say that she was too good a soul, but it's true. What she really conveyed in her writing was the deep pain she felt about the injustices around her. All of it was a metaphor for war, poverty, power struggles and discrimination. All of that hurt her very deeply, but her gift was that she could use words for the pain and make the world better."
Due believed that Butler came to feel deeply at home in the Northwest after she relocated here with 300 boxes of books. The anonymity of her life in Seattle suited both her artistic devotion and temperament ("I always felt a deep loneliness in her," Barnes said). But Butler did become a frequent participant in readings and writers' conferences, especially Clarion West, which played a crucial role in her own start. She also served on the advisory board of Seattle's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.
A few friends did get to see the relaxed Butler away from her infrequent moments in the limelight, including Leslie Howle, who took her to see the recent version of "King Kong." Howle describes the writer as "one of the most fun people to be around, with an acerbic sense of humor and a keen observer of human nature."
Butler was a confirmed non-driver who would chat with other bus passengers or with neighbors who gave her rides when she trudged home with bags of groceries, as neighbor Terry Morgan did.
"The first time I picked her up, she took me into her house and autographed a copy of one of her books," Morgan said. "That was a great 'thank you,' especially since I am an African American and we felt a common bond. But it was also obvious to me that writing was her life."
The MacArthur grant brought increasing visibility to Butler and allowed her to buy her first house, where she tended to her ailing mother until her death. (Butler's survivors are two elderly aunts and many cousins in Southern California.)
But the MacArthur grant also brought daunting pressure. Three years later, Butler published "Parable of the Talents," winner of one of her two Nebula Awards in science fiction. Then years passed without another new novel, as projects in Seattle "petered out." Characters and ideas went nowhere and her blood pressure medication left her drowsy and depressed.
The frustrated artist - who first turned to writing at 12 after the sci-fi movie, "Devil Girl from Mars," convinced her that she could write something better - battled worries that "maybe I cannot write anymore."
But at long last, an unlikely vampire novel rekindled her creative fires and brought a burgeoning joy to her craft.
"I can't say I've had much fun in the last few years, what with my version of writer's block," a relieved Butler recalled in 2004. "Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun. But now the well is filling up again with this vampire novel."
Butler's death means that "Fledgling," published last fall to enthusiastic praise, will likely stand as her final novel, to the great disappointment to Butler's many fans and friends who expected more work.
"The only consolation in losing Octavia so soon," stressed Due, "is that she must have known her place in history."
Octavia Butler, the Pasadena native who was one of the nation's leading science-fiction writers and whose first novel, "Kindred," is Pasadena's 2006 One City, One Story book selection, died Friday. She was 58...
Sci-fi writer Butler dies
By Emanuel Parker
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
February 28, 2006
Butler died after falling and striking her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park.
Butler suffered from high blood pressure and heart problems, and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, but had enthusiastically accepted the Pasadena Library's invitation to be honored in March in her hometown.
Shirlee Smith, the former Star-News columnist who was a longtime friend of Butler's, said she spoke with Butler last week about her upcoming return to Pasadena for One City, One Story.
"I am devastated," Smith said. "Octavia as a person was the same now as she was when I first met her 30 years ago. She was down-to-earth, a good person. She had so much to say and she was a wise person. She was always willing to share her knowledge, to tell you what you needed to do and how to go about doing it," Smith said.
Jan Sanders, the Pasadena Library director, said Butler and her groundbreaking novel about time travel and slavery will remain the focus of March's One City, One Story program.
At a Monday afternoon meeting in Sanders' office at the library, representatives from One City, One Story committees affirmed that plan and started working toward creating a program with scholars, writers and friends of the author to celebrate "Kindred" and Butler's literary legacy.
A celebration of Butler will be held at 7:30 p.m. March 17 at All Saints Episcopal Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena.
Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena. She attended Pasadena grade schools and graduated from Muir High School in 1965. In 1992, she was named one of Muir's outstanding graduates and inducted into its Hall of Fame.
"Butler’s fascination with women’s stories came out of a genuine and abiding fascination with history — her advice to young writers was to study subjects like history or anthropology, on the very sound basis that they would have to know a great deal about humanity before they could try to write about alien intelligences."
Octavia Butler: 1947-2006
By Nilanjana S Roy
The Business Standard (New Delhi)
February 28, 2006
You’d have to be a serious B-movie fan to remember Devil Girl From Mars, a piece of generic schlock in which a Martian woman arrives in a Scottish town in search of willing, able male volunteers to breed with other women from her planet.
Octavia Butler saw the film when she was 12 years old and decided she could do much better—she had been writing since she was 10, but it was the Devil Girl who inadvertently kickstarted one of the more unusual SF careers of our time. Butler had all the wrong credentials for a writer in a white, male-dominated field: she was black, female and utterly uninterested in writing about gizmos and machines.
Many years later, when Butler had become a name to reckon with in SF and experimental fiction, her intelligent, morally questioning work the precursor to the kind of SF novels Margaret Atwood and Nancy Kress would write, she looked back to the early struggle. She had a hard time finding a publisher for her first novel, Kindred. This work, set in the plantations of the American South that featured a black woman protagonist who travels in time to save a white man who turns out to be her own ancestor, fitted no conventional SF matrix. The meagre $5,000 advance she got for the book helped Butler, no stranger to hardship and deprivation, survive for almost a year.
The first African-American woman to break barriers in the SF field continued to break the mold right till the end. Butler died this week at the age of 58 after she slipped and fell on the sidewalk near her house; news of the accident spread fast on SF networks, and tributes have been coming in from Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison: peers who were also fans. She had just published Fledgling, which promises to change the face of vampire fiction. The protagonist of Fledgling, Shori Matthews, is a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl—probably the first time Dracula’s many literary descendants have included a black female among their numbers.
Butler came up with two fabulous twists on the vampire story. In her version, vampires are actually members of a matriarchal race that predates humanity: aside from needing human blood to survive, they are shy, peaceful people. And Shori’s skin colour is because of an experiment to see whether black-skinned vampires might be able to bypass the race’s legendary intolerance of sunlight.
Like many women writers in the SF field, Butler’s work often revolved around gender. In Bloodchild, for instance, she asked a deceptively simple question—what if men could become pregnant—and came up with a typically unusual answer. But while she was definitely a feminist role model for many writers, it would be limiting to define her as a writer whose central theme was gender.
Butler’s fascination with women’s stories came out of a genuine and abiding fascination with history—her advice to young writers was to study subjects like history or anthropology, on the very sound basis that they would have to know a great deal about humanity before they could try to write about alien intelligences. And like the best of writers in any field, she never let go of a driving moral curiosity, a passionate interest in how to define virtue, religion and ethics in rapidly changing societies. Perhaps her best-known sequence of novels is the Patternist series, where she created a world of elite humans who had developed telepathic powers—Butler’s interest lay not in the mechanics of psionic powers, but in the way a telepathic culture would develop its shibboleths, taboos, virtues and cultural straitjackets. Wild Seed was described by one reviewer as “an unholy cross between Roots and Wuthering Heights”.
For me, Butler provided the key that unlocked the doors of science fiction. I read Kindred years ago with joyful astonishment: instead of the stereotypes of SF that we had been fed, tales of spaceships and wars between distant galaxies, here was a writer who was willing to push the frontiers of the genre as hard as she could. There were other writers who made me realise the vast, rich variety of SF, from Philip K Dick to Walter Leibowitz to Jorge Luis Borges, from Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood to James Blish. But Octavia Butler was the first. For all of us who knew her work, the true sadness lies in knowing that we will never again look forward to seeing what brave new worlds she would open up this time.
"Like all great science fiction writers, Butler grounds her boundless imagination in that very real human experience. All her stories are complex allegories that challenge us in the here and now."
The Power and Legacy of Octavia Butler
PopPolitics.com
When I meet a science fiction newbie or skeptic and I want to show them one book that contains all the power and profundity of the genre, I show them "Dawn" by Octavia Butler. It's not the genre's longest book. It clocks in at a manageable 256 pages. It's certainly not the most expansive in terms of setting. The entire novel actually takes place in one unique but contained space. But it's perfect -- both as an introduction to and an ultimate justification for what science fiction can do.
If I described the story at all to you, it would ruin the wonderment of its opening moments. So I won't. I will only say that through its meticulous exploration of a very alien culture -- everything from its ways of eating, thinking and making love to its distinct sense of time, history and progress -- the novel provides, somewhat ironically, one of literature's deepest explorations of what it means to be human.
Like all great science fiction writers, Butler grounds her boundless imagination in that very real human experience. All her stories are complex allegories that challenge us in the here and now.
That's not to say that Butler's work doesn't transcend the science fiction genre. Her prose is effortless -- Hemingwayesque in its deceptive simplicity. And her narrative style is always engaging, allowing us to lose ourselves in what should be extremely foreign worlds.
Her work is as an essential part of our culture -- as Americans, as humans -- as any writer's or artist's that I know.
Butler died this past weekend at the age of 58, having left a collection of short stories and about a dozen novels. I have no doubt she had at least a dozen more in her. The loss of that potential -- and more significantly, an intensely compassionate, empathetic and justice-seeking person -- hurts me deeply. But maybe the best I can do is appreciate her deep legacy.
Her latest work, published late last year to gushing reviews, was "Fledgling," an unconventional take on a very popular genre: the vampire story.
But possibly her best known work is "Parable of the Sower," the story an 18-year-old woman with a hyperempathy syndrome who must wander through a ravaged dystopian American landscape feeling everyone's pain. She ultimately must -- as many of Butler's women do -- shoulder the responsibility for the future of the human race.
Her first novel -- "Kindred" -- is also well-known and widely taught in secondary school and college. It tells the story of an African American woman who is periodically transported mysteriously and involuntarily back into the antebellum South. While the gripping narrative reads like a great action movie (in the best sense), it tackles such weighty issues as our collective responsibility for -- and the collective legacy of -- slavery in America.
Despite the critical acclaim for these novels, she actually won the highest honors in science fiction -- the Hugo and Nebula awards -- for two separate short stories, both of which are collected in "Bloodchild."
Besides appreciating Butler herself, I'm sure she would want us to ensure that the field of science fiction continued to welcome other writers and artists that shared her sensibilities.
In that spirit, I imagine Butler must have tuned into Battlestar Galactica -- with its multitude of strong female characters (at least one of which, Starbuck, seems to carry the burden of saving humanity) and, as evidenced in its most recent episode, a very complex use of an "alien" culture to ask penetrating questions about human nature.
After all, she had originally been inspired to become a science fiction writer at age 12 after watching the film Devil Girl From Mars -- and thinking she could do a whole lot better than that.
"I'm not writing for some noble purpose, I just like telling a good story. If what I write about helps others understand this world we live in, so much the better for all of us."The Pasadena City Library had selected "Kindred" for its One City, One Story series before Butler's death.
"Octavia E. Butler's first creation
in the world of science fiction was herself."
Octavia Butler, 58;
Author Opened the Galaxies
of Science Fiction to Blacks
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
The Los Angeles Times
February 28, 2006
Before anybody told her that black girls do not grow up to write about futuristic worlds, Butler, the daughter of a shoeshine man and a maid, was already fashioning a place for herself in a white-dominated universe.
By remaining dedicated to her craft, sweeping floors and working as a telemarketer to pay the bills; by suffering the indignities that come with being among the first; and eventually winning a MacArthur Foundation grant, Butler carved a place for herself — and helped write a new world into existence.
Butler, whose 12 stunning, thought-provoking novels of science fiction inspired new readers and writers to explore the genre, died Saturday. Friends said Butler apparently suffered a stroke outside her home in Seattle. She was 58.
Over the years, Butler, author of the seminal work "Kindred," earned the distinction of being the first lady of a small, tightknit circle of African American writers of speculative fiction — science fiction, horror and fantasy.
"She was an utter inspiration," said Steven Barnes, a longtime friend and science fiction author who was the first African American to write one of the novels based on "Star Wars." "I don't know what would have happened to me had I not had her as an example."
Mystery writer Walter Mosley said Butler expanded the genre "by writing a kind of fiction that African American women around the country could read and understand both technically and emotionally…. She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels, she was writing very difficult, brilliant work."
"For an African American woman to somehow define herself as a science fiction writer and to realize that dream is an extraordinary thing," he said in an interview Monday.
"Kindred" is the story of a 20th century African American woman who travels in time back to the antebellum South to save her great-great-grandfather, a white plantation owner. Though published under the general banner of fiction, it exemplifies Butler's use of speculative ideas to explore issues such as the relationship between the empowered and the powerless.
In the worlds that Butler created, African Americans and other people of color were present and significant in ways they had not been before. That inclusion not only attracted readers, it allowed Butler to use the genre as a powerful means of speaking to a range of issues including race, gender and the environment while also mastering the tenets of science fiction writing.
Dan Simon, founder of the publishing house Seven Stories, said Butler's readers — a body as diverse as the worlds she created — felt a relationship with her work that was deeply personal and startling.
"There was an intensity to the way people read her that is very unusual," said Simon, who was Butler's editor. "You always feel when reading her that you're looking in a mirror that gives you an even truer reflection than any mirror ever could."
In a brief autobiography, Butler described herself simply: "I'm comfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of a large city, 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."
Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena and known to family and friends as Junie. She spent part of her childhood on her grandmother's chicken farm near Victorville, where there was no electricity, telephone or running water, but to Butler it was idyllic.
Early in her life, Butler found refuge in her writing — a place where there was freedom from whatever troubled her. "The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation," Butler told The Times in 1998. "But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through."
At the age of 4 she created stories about a magical horse; she was the horse. As a 10-year-old, she was already putting those stories down on paper. By the time an aunt told her "Honey, Negroes can't be writers," it was too late. At 13, Butler was already tapping out new worlds on a Remington portable typewriter that her mother had purchased.
As an adult, she was a powerful presence: tall and striking, with a deep voice. As a child she suffered because of her size, towering so tall over classmates that people wrongly assumed she had been held back in school.
Donna Oliver, a childhood friend, told The Times in 1998: "She wasn't the outgoing type. She was very, very shy and always seemed to be writing instead of playing."
The focus on writing paid off when, at the age of 18, she earned a spot in a screenwriting program conceived by a group of writers that included Harlan Ellison, a legend in the science fiction genre whose work includes scripts for "Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits" and "Star Trek." Although her screenplay was awful, Ellison saw wonderful prose in it and encouraged her to write a novel.
"She's one of my best discoveries," he told The Times in 1998.
Early on, she developed a rigorous writing schedule, working from 2 to 5 every morning. She sold two stories, but that success did not last. After a lull, she used previous works to piece together a novel titled "Patternmaster," the tale of a future in which humanity is divided into a telepathic ruling class of "Patternists" and "Clayarks," four-legged creatures contaminated by a disease brought back from outer space.
But in the 1970s, being an African American writer of science fiction was a lonely endeavor, dominated by Butler and her contemporary Samuel R. Delaney. Early on, some publishers placed images of white people or aliens on the covers of her novels, though the characters were black, Barnes said.
In 1979, Doubleday published "Kindred," which became one of her bestselling titles. By 1995, Butler had written 10 novels, including "Parable of the Sower," and won the nation's two top prizes for science fiction writers. That year, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Butler a $295,000 grant.
"It means a chance to write my novels without worrying about how I'm going to earn a living," she said.
For Butler, the grant was also an opportunity to buy a home for herself and her mother, with whom she shared a close relationship. After her mother's death in 1996, Butler moved to Seattle.
Last November, Seven Stories published Butler's 12th novel, "Fledgling." The novel ended a long stretch of writer's block caused in part by illness and the effect of medication. Butler suffered from congestive heart disease, Simon said.
"Octavia set such a high standard, to the point where [she finished] each and every novel, thought it was fine, then decided she had to start all over again from scratch," Simon said.
"In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch," writer Tananarive Due said. "So we just lost our mother, our grandmother."
"How could science fiction be set on a plantation? Octavia Butler showed them how."
Octavia Butler: A Lonely, Bright Star
Of the Sci-Fi Universe
By Marcia Davis
The Washington Post
February 28, 2006; Page C01
What must it have been like to be Octavia Butler?
There she was, this woman of great intellect, of immense talent, of tremendous passion, and, it seems, so very much alone. Her death on Friday after falling and hitting her head outside her home in Seattle has rattled those who loved her work. She was 58.
There she was, a tall, awkward and shy black girl thinking that she wanted to write science fiction, of all things. A young woman who believed the genre could deal with more than ray guns and transporters, and that she had a right to create fiction that tackled race and class and what it meant to be human in worlds where humanness had all but been obliterated. Publisher after publisher must have been puzzled.
She was an African American woman claiming her space in a literary universe dominated by white men. After years of rejection, she eventually won science fiction's most prestigious awards, the Nebula and the Hugo. She picked up other honors along the way, too, including a PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant.
Her following was loving and loyal -- protective even -- for they seemed to know instinctively how precious and powerful and simultaneously tender and fragile a spirit like hers had to be.
"That's terrible, terrible, terrible news," my mother kept saying over and over at word of Butler's death. A die-hard science fiction fan, she is one of those people who gobbled up many of Butler's 11 novels. I was proud of myself for having turned her on to Butler's first work, "Kindred." Soon she was devouring the other works, among them "Dawn" and the highly regarded "Parable of the Sower."
Over the years I had heard Butler speak at literary conferences, listened as she engaged the audiences and patiently indulged those eager young writers with their sometimes doting questions. She was always warm, always gracious. She was easy with people, a strong public presence who seemed so comfortable in her open and direct way.
But that was Octavia Butler's public presence. Those who knew her, as well as anyone could, knew that she was a very private and shy person.
Black science fiction trailblazer Samuel Delaney, 63, remembers teaching Butler as a 23-year-old student at the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop. She was, he says, incredibly shy, a student who spoke only when she had something to say, but someone who obviously had great talent.
It was years later, however, after she had published "Kindred," that he saw what she had become. "It was wonderful to see how she had bloomed and gained so much self-confidence and become a really extraordinary public speaker," Delaney says. She also was a pathblazer in a genre where once you could count the black writers on one hand.
Tananarive Due, a successful novelist, might be described as one of Butler's literary daughters. She and her husband, Steven Barnes -- who was part of that rare original club of black sci-fi writers -- were close to Butler.
The public and private lives of Butler, Due says, were remarkable to watch. "It's almost as if she lived in two worlds."
"I'm very happy alone," Butler once told Post writer David Streitfeld. "If I had to change myself into something else, I'd probably be unhappy."
She grew up poor in Southern California, where her father shined shoes before he died when she was a young girl, and her mother cleaned houses. Butler was a young black woman coming of age at a time when black women were mainly invisible. And when she was noticed, it was with unkind eyes. She was six feet tall by the time she was in her teens, a girl with deep brown skin and short hair. She was sometimes mistaken for a man, she would say. Early as a child, she cocooned herself in a world of books and nurtured audacious ambitions.
"She obviously had spent a tremendous amount of her early life feeling very, very alone," Barnes said. "She had no tribe. She didn't fit in any place. Her own family thought she was nuts . . . because of what she wanted to do with her life."
At one time Barnes lived just six blocks from Butler and they would spend time together, having dinner or just talking. One of the questions she seemed to care greatly about was, "Why is it that we are so cruel to each other?" Barnes says.
"The fact that she was so concerned with that made me think she had faced a lot of that" cruelty in her life, he adds.
She explored the question in a field that was forced, whether it wanted to or not, to acknowledge her talents.
"Women in general were rare in the science fiction field, and black women, ha," Barnes says.
She had to cloak her ideas thickly in metaphor, he says. "She was forced to speak through layers of obsfucation." Those challenges may have ultimately made her a better writer but must have taken their toll.
"It was like trying to drive in the Indy 500 with your brakes on," Barnes says. "You burn up."
Due last spoke with Butler in the summer when Butler was planning to send her last manuscript, "Fledgling," which was recently published to acclaim.
She and Barnes had been worried about Butler, who had been ill and on several medications. The side effects, she told them, made it hard for her to write. It must have been particularly trying for such a perfectionist, they say.
They worried about her, up there alone and probably pushing herself far too much, both in her writing and her travels. But she was drawn to the Pacific Northwest, they say, with its natural beauty and its opportunities for true solitude. Due wanted to call, but worried about interrupting her writing, the words that seemed so hard to come by lately.
I wonder if in all that aloneness, in all her solitude, she knew just how beautiful she was and that she was loved.
"'The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things,' Ms. Butler once said. 'One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.'"
Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler, 58
By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
The Washington Post
February 28, 2006; Page B08
Octavia Butler, 58, one of the country's leading science fiction writers who as an African American woman brought themes of race, gender and power to the genre, died of an apparent stroke Feb. 24 at her home in Seattle.
Ms. Butler, who had lived in Seattle since 1999, wrote 11 novels and a collection of short stories and had published stories in anthologies and magazines. She was an award-winning storyteller whose writings defied the boundaries of one genre. The first black woman to make inroads in the mostly white and male science fiction sphere, Ms. Butler appreciated the genre's literary freedom, and she used it to tell cautionary tales about what could happen to our world.
Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and a senior manager at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, said Ms. Butler was "bigger than just being a science fiction writer."
"One of the things that made Octavia special was how deeply she cared. She wanted to make the world a better place, to make humanity better able to survive its own misbehavior," Howle said. "Her work took an unflinching look at poverty, race, gender, religion, the environment, politics and what it means to be human."
Ms. Butler, who knew she wanted to be a writer at age 10, received numerous rejections before "Kindred," her first novel and most popular work, was published in 1979. The story, based on slave narratives that she had researched, was about a black woman named Dana who traveled back in time to save the life of her white, slave-owning ancestor. "Kindred" has been used widely in college classes.
Subsequent work brought her high honors in her field. Her short story "Speech Sounds" won a Hugo Award for the best short story of 1984. That year, her novelette "Bloodchild" won the Nebula -- science fiction's highest award -- and in 1985, it received a Hugo.
In 1995, Ms. Butler became the first science fiction writer to be awarded a coveted "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She received the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
Ms. Butler was once described as "one of the finest voices in fiction -- period" by The Washington Post. An astute observer of human behavior, she was known for her depiction of strong female characters. She was a writer, one critic said, with "a fine hand with lean, well-paced prose."
Six feet tall and a self-described happy hermit, Ms. Butler escaped easy definition. "I'm comfortably asocial," she once wrote, "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."
Octavia Estelle Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, Calif., the only child that her mother carried to full term; four other children died before her birth. Her mother, also named Octavia, did domestic work, often taking her daughter with her. She knew her father, Laurice Butler, who died when she was young, only through the stories told by her mother and grandmother. After her father's death, her mother took in boarders to bring in extra money.
As a painfully shy child, she kept to herself and spent a great deal of time reading whatever she could find. She also had dyslexia, although it was not known at the time, and performed poorly in grade school. But by the time she was 10, she had written her first story, about horses, and by 11 she was penning romance stories. She produced her first science fiction story at 12 after seeing the film "Devil Girl From Mars" and believing that she could write a better story.
She received an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 and studied at California State University at Los Angeles and the University of California at Los Angeles. She took classes with Harlan Ellison, an influential science fiction writer, at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, where she later taught.
Determined to make it as a writer, she worked a number of menial jobs while maintaining a rigid early-morning writing schedule. After "Kindred" sold, she was able to write full time.
Her other novels include "Patternmaster" (1976), "Mind of My Mind" (1977), "Survivor" (1978) and "Wild Seed" (1980). She had a seven-year period during which she could not finish anything that she attempted. Then she wrote her last novel, "Fledgling" (2005), about the Dracula legend.
In an interview with Essence magazine in October, she talked about the difference between "Fledgling" and other books she had written, such as "Parable of the Sower" (1993) and "Wild Seed."
"I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels," she said. " 'Fledgling' was a chance to play."
Her mother died in 1999, and she leaves no immediate survivors [see the P-I story below, which acutally lists relations -- Ed.].
"'I consider Octavia to be the most important science-fiction writer since Mary Shelley.'"
Octavia Butler, brilliant master
of science fiction, dies at 58
By Emily Heffter
The Seattle Times
February 27, 2006
For more than 30 years, Seattle science-fiction novelist Octavia Butler dreamed up fantastic worlds and religions, made-up creatures and futuristic plots. Then, in her stylistic prose, she used them to tackle the social issues she was most passionate about.
"Parable of the Talents," a futuristic story about a utopian community ravaged by civil war, explored modern-day issues of intolerance, the growing gap between rich and poor, and environmentalism. In her first novel, "Kindred," she plunged into racial issues when a modern-day character was transported into the body of a pre-Civil War slave.
"What [Ms. Butler] was writing for the first time was a kind of woman's-eye view, a very smart woman's-eye view, of say, 'Brave New World' or '1984,' " said writer Harlan Ellison, Ms. Butler's friend and mentor.
Ms. Butler died Friday at Northwest Hospital after a fall at her home in Lake Forest Park. She was 58.
"I consider Octavia to be the most important science-fiction writer since Mary Shelley," said Steven Barnes, an African-American science-fiction writer and friend of Ms. Butler's. She wrote about race successfully because she did it with such subtlety, he said.
Though she was a giant in the science-fiction world, Ms. Butler was such a private person that even her closest friends said they knew little about her.
Ellison said Ms. Butler had a number of obstacles to overcome in the writing business, among them being female and being black.
But Ms. Butler persevered to become one of the few well-known African-American science-fiction writers.
In 1995, she won a $295,000 MacArthur Fellowship, known as the "genius grant." In 2000, she received the Nebula Award for her novel "Parable of the Talents." The Nebula award is science fiction's highest prize.
Those who knew Ms. Butler agreed that, in many ways, she was a contradiction. She kept to herself but was easy to talk to. She was tall and imposing, and, Ellison said, "very warm and charming, but there was gravitas in her." She was funny, with a dark, dry, self-deprecating wit.
Ms. Butler, who never married, described herself this way in 1999: "I'm also uncomfortably 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."
Robin Bailey, the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, remembered her "deep, rumbly voice."
The heroes in her stories were often people of color, and Ellison said Ms. Butler's sense of isolation came through in her work.
In a 1999 interview, Ms. Butler told a Seattle Times reporter that she had been a tall, socially awkward child in Pasadena, Calif., spending much of her time in the public library and sending manuscripts to publishers when she was only 12 or 13.
"I needed to write," she said then. "Writing was literally all I had consistently. ... I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking."
Ms. Butler kept that hard-working intensity as an adult, her friends said. But even in her success, she remained grounded. She bought a house with her MacArthur Fellowship money and traveled mostly to lecture about writing. Ellison remembered that she would cover her mouth when she laughed because she was embarrassed by her crooked teeth.
An only child, Ms. Butler grew up in Southern California and moved to Seattle in 1999, after her mother's death. She studied at Pasadena City College and California State University, Los Angeles, before participating in the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in 1970.
"'All of [her writing] was a metaphor for war, poverty, power struggles and discrimination. All of that hurt her very deeply, but her gift was that she could use words for the pain and make the world better.'"
Octavia Butler, 1947-2006:
Sci-fi writer a gifted pioneer
in white, male domain
By John Marshall
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Her father was a shoeshine man who died when she was a child, her mother was a maid who brought her along on jobs, yet Octavia Butler rose from these humble beginnings to become one of the country's leading writers - a female African American pioneer in the white, male domain of science fiction.
Butler, 58, died after falling and striking her head Friday on a walkway outside her home in Lake Forest Park. The reclusive writer, who moved to Seattle in 1999 from her native Southern California, was a giant in stature (she was 6 feet tall by age 15) and in accomplishment.
She remains the only science fiction writer to receive one of the vaunted "genius grants" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a hard-earned $295,000 windfall in 1995 that followed years of poverty and personal struggles with shyness and self-doubt.
"People may call these 'genius grants,' " Butler said in a 2004 interview with the Seattle P-I, "but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine. I knew I'm no genius."
Butler's most popular work is "Kindred," a time-travel novel in which a black woman from 1976 Southern California is transported back to the violent days of slavery before the Civil War. The 1979 novel became a popular staple of school and college courses and now has more than a quarter million copies in print, but its birth was agonizing, like so much in Butler's solitary life.
"Kindred" was repeatedly rejected by publishers, many of whom could not understand how a science fiction novel could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South. Butler stuck to her social justice vision - "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you" - and finally found a publisher who paid her a $5,000 advance for "Kindred."
"I was living on my writing," Butler said, "and you could live on $5,000 back then. You could live, but not well. I got along by buying food I didn't really like but was nourishing: beans, potatoes. A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time."
Steven Barnes, another African American writer, knew Butler during her early writing days in Southern California and later in the Washington when he and his writer wife, Tananarive Due, lived for a time in Longview before returning to Los Angeles. Barnes saw Butler's confidence grow along with her reputation.
"Octavia was one of the purest writers I know," Barnes recalled Sunday. "She put everything she had into her work - she was extraordinarily committed to the craft. Yet, despite her shyness, she was also an open, generous and humane human being. I miss her so much already."
Due added, "It is a cliche to say that she was too good a soul, but it's true. What she really conveyed in her writing was the deep pain she felt about the injustices around her. All of it was a metaphor for war, poverty, power struggles and discrimination. All of that hurt her very deeply, but her gift was that she could use words for the pain and make the world better."
Due believed that Butler came to feel deeply at home in the Northwest after she relocated here with 300 boxes of books. The anonymity of her life in Seattle suited both her artistic devotion and temperament ("I always felt a deep loneliness in her," Barnes said). But Butler did become a frequent participant in readings and writers' conferences, especially Clarion West, which played a crucial role in her own start. She also served on the advisory board of Seattle's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.
A few friends did get to see the relaxed Butler away from her infrequent moments in the limelight, including Leslie Howle, who took her to see the recent version of "King Kong." Howle describes the writer as "one of the most fun people to be around, with an acerbic sense of humor and a keen observer of human nature."
Butler was a confirmed non-driver who would chat with other bus passengers or with neighbors who gave her rides when she trudged home with bags of groceries, as neighbor Terry Morgan did.
"The first time I picked her up, she took me into her house and autographed a copy of one of her books," Morgan said. "That was a great 'thank you,' especially since I am an African American and we felt a common bond. But it was also obvious to me that writing was her life."
The MacArthur grant brought increasing visibility to Butler and allowed her to buy her first house, where she tended to her ailing mother until her death. (Butler's survivors are two elderly aunts and many cousins in Southern California.)
But the MacArthur grant also brought daunting pressure. Three years later, Butler published "Parable of the Talents," winner of one of her two Nebula Awards in science fiction. Then years passed without another new novel, as projects in Seattle "petered out." Characters and ideas went nowhere and her blood pressure medication left her drowsy and depressed.
The frustrated artist - who first turned to writing at 12 after the sci-fi movie, "Devil Girl from Mars," convinced her that she could write something better - battled worries that "maybe I cannot write anymore."
But at long last, an unlikely vampire novel rekindled her creative fires and brought a burgeoning joy to her craft.
"I can't say I've had much fun in the last few years, what with my version of writer's block," a relieved Butler recalled in 2004. "Writing has been as difficult for me as for people who don't like to write and as little fun. But now the well is filling up again with this vampire novel."
Butler's death means that "Fledgling," published last fall to enthusiastic praise, will likely stand as her final novel, to the great disappointment to Butler's many fans and friends who expected more work.
"The only consolation in losing Octavia so soon," stressed Due, "is that she must have known her place in history."
Octavia Butler, the Pasadena native who was one of the nation's leading science-fiction writers and whose first novel, "Kindred," is Pasadena's 2006 One City, One Story book selection, died Friday. She was 58...
Sci-fi writer Butler dies
By Emanuel Parker
San Gabriel Valley Tribune
February 28, 2006
Butler died after falling and striking her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park.
Butler suffered from high blood pressure and heart problems, and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, but had enthusiastically accepted the Pasadena Library's invitation to be honored in March in her hometown.
Shirlee Smith, the former Star-News columnist who was a longtime friend of Butler's, said she spoke with Butler last week about her upcoming return to Pasadena for One City, One Story.
"I am devastated," Smith said. "Octavia as a person was the same now as she was when I first met her 30 years ago. She was down-to-earth, a good person. She had so much to say and she was a wise person. She was always willing to share her knowledge, to tell you what you needed to do and how to go about doing it," Smith said.
Jan Sanders, the Pasadena Library director, said Butler and her groundbreaking novel about time travel and slavery will remain the focus of March's One City, One Story program.
At a Monday afternoon meeting in Sanders' office at the library, representatives from One City, One Story committees affirmed that plan and started working toward creating a program with scholars, writers and friends of the author to celebrate "Kindred" and Butler's literary legacy.
A celebration of Butler will be held at 7:30 p.m. March 17 at All Saints Episcopal Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena.
Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena. She attended Pasadena grade schools and graduated from Muir High School in 1965. In 1992, she was named one of Muir's outstanding graduates and inducted into its Hall of Fame.
"Butler’s fascination with women’s stories came out of a genuine and abiding fascination with history — her advice to young writers was to study subjects like history or anthropology, on the very sound basis that they would have to know a great deal about humanity before they could try to write about alien intelligences."
Octavia Butler: 1947-2006
By Nilanjana S Roy
The Business Standard (New Delhi)
February 28, 2006
You’d have to be a serious B-movie fan to remember Devil Girl From Mars, a piece of generic schlock in which a Martian woman arrives in a Scottish town in search of willing, able male volunteers to breed with other women from her planet.
Octavia Butler saw the film when she was 12 years old and decided she could do much better—she had been writing since she was 10, but it was the Devil Girl who inadvertently kickstarted one of the more unusual SF careers of our time. Butler had all the wrong credentials for a writer in a white, male-dominated field: she was black, female and utterly uninterested in writing about gizmos and machines.
Many years later, when Butler had become a name to reckon with in SF and experimental fiction, her intelligent, morally questioning work the precursor to the kind of SF novels Margaret Atwood and Nancy Kress would write, she looked back to the early struggle. She had a hard time finding a publisher for her first novel, Kindred. This work, set in the plantations of the American South that featured a black woman protagonist who travels in time to save a white man who turns out to be her own ancestor, fitted no conventional SF matrix. The meagre $5,000 advance she got for the book helped Butler, no stranger to hardship and deprivation, survive for almost a year.
The first African-American woman to break barriers in the SF field continued to break the mold right till the end. Butler died this week at the age of 58 after she slipped and fell on the sidewalk near her house; news of the accident spread fast on SF networks, and tributes have been coming in from Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison: peers who were also fans. She had just published Fledgling, which promises to change the face of vampire fiction. The protagonist of Fledgling, Shori Matthews, is a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl—probably the first time Dracula’s many literary descendants have included a black female among their numbers.
Butler came up with two fabulous twists on the vampire story. In her version, vampires are actually members of a matriarchal race that predates humanity: aside from needing human blood to survive, they are shy, peaceful people. And Shori’s skin colour is because of an experiment to see whether black-skinned vampires might be able to bypass the race’s legendary intolerance of sunlight.
Like many women writers in the SF field, Butler’s work often revolved around gender. In Bloodchild, for instance, she asked a deceptively simple question—what if men could become pregnant—and came up with a typically unusual answer. But while she was definitely a feminist role model for many writers, it would be limiting to define her as a writer whose central theme was gender.
Butler’s fascination with women’s stories came out of a genuine and abiding fascination with history—her advice to young writers was to study subjects like history or anthropology, on the very sound basis that they would have to know a great deal about humanity before they could try to write about alien intelligences. And like the best of writers in any field, she never let go of a driving moral curiosity, a passionate interest in how to define virtue, religion and ethics in rapidly changing societies. Perhaps her best-known sequence of novels is the Patternist series, where she created a world of elite humans who had developed telepathic powers—Butler’s interest lay not in the mechanics of psionic powers, but in the way a telepathic culture would develop its shibboleths, taboos, virtues and cultural straitjackets. Wild Seed was described by one reviewer as “an unholy cross between Roots and Wuthering Heights”.
For me, Butler provided the key that unlocked the doors of science fiction. I read Kindred years ago with joyful astonishment: instead of the stereotypes of SF that we had been fed, tales of spaceships and wars between distant galaxies, here was a writer who was willing to push the frontiers of the genre as hard as she could. There were other writers who made me realise the vast, rich variety of SF, from Philip K Dick to Walter Leibowitz to Jorge Luis Borges, from Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood to James Blish. But Octavia Butler was the first. For all of us who knew her work, the true sadness lies in knowing that we will never again look forward to seeing what brave new worlds she would open up this time.
"Like all great science fiction writers, Butler grounds her boundless imagination in that very real human experience. All her stories are complex allegories that challenge us in the here and now."
The Power and Legacy of Octavia Butler
PopPolitics.com
When I meet a science fiction newbie or skeptic and I want to show them one book that contains all the power and profundity of the genre, I show them "Dawn" by Octavia Butler. It's not the genre's longest book. It clocks in at a manageable 256 pages. It's certainly not the most expansive in terms of setting. The entire novel actually takes place in one unique but contained space. But it's perfect -- both as an introduction to and an ultimate justification for what science fiction can do.
If I described the story at all to you, it would ruin the wonderment of its opening moments. So I won't. I will only say that through its meticulous exploration of a very alien culture -- everything from its ways of eating, thinking and making love to its distinct sense of time, history and progress -- the novel provides, somewhat ironically, one of literature's deepest explorations of what it means to be human.
Like all great science fiction writers, Butler grounds her boundless imagination in that very real human experience. All her stories are complex allegories that challenge us in the here and now.
That's not to say that Butler's work doesn't transcend the science fiction genre. Her prose is effortless -- Hemingwayesque in its deceptive simplicity. And her narrative style is always engaging, allowing us to lose ourselves in what should be extremely foreign worlds.
Her work is as an essential part of our culture -- as Americans, as humans -- as any writer's or artist's that I know.
Butler died this past weekend at the age of 58, having left a collection of short stories and about a dozen novels. I have no doubt she had at least a dozen more in her. The loss of that potential -- and more significantly, an intensely compassionate, empathetic and justice-seeking person -- hurts me deeply. But maybe the best I can do is appreciate her deep legacy.
Her latest work, published late last year to gushing reviews, was "Fledgling," an unconventional take on a very popular genre: the vampire story.
But possibly her best known work is "Parable of the Sower," the story an 18-year-old woman with a hyperempathy syndrome who must wander through a ravaged dystopian American landscape feeling everyone's pain. She ultimately must -- as many of Butler's women do -- shoulder the responsibility for the future of the human race.
Her first novel -- "Kindred" -- is also well-known and widely taught in secondary school and college. It tells the story of an African American woman who is periodically transported mysteriously and involuntarily back into the antebellum South. While the gripping narrative reads like a great action movie (in the best sense), it tackles such weighty issues as our collective responsibility for -- and the collective legacy of -- slavery in America.
Despite the critical acclaim for these novels, she actually won the highest honors in science fiction -- the Hugo and Nebula awards -- for two separate short stories, both of which are collected in "Bloodchild."
Besides appreciating Butler herself, I'm sure she would want us to ensure that the field of science fiction continued to welcome other writers and artists that shared her sensibilities.
In that spirit, I imagine Butler must have tuned into Battlestar Galactica -- with its multitude of strong female characters (at least one of which, Starbuck, seems to carry the burden of saving humanity) and, as evidenced in its most recent episode, a very complex use of an "alien" culture to ask penetrating questions about human nature.
After all, she had originally been inspired to become a science fiction writer at age 12 after watching the film Devil Girl From Mars -- and thinking she could do a whole lot better than that.
Octavia Estelle Butler, 1947-2006
mr damon, 22:09
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