Butler, Octavia E. 1947–2006

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Butler, Octavia E. 1947–2006

(Octavia Estelle Butler)

PERSONAL: Born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, CA; died from a head injury sustained during a fall, February 24, 2006, in WA; daughter of Laurice (a shoe shiner) and Octavia Margaret (Guy) Butler. Education: Pasadena City College, A.A., 1968; attended California State University, Los Angeles, 1969, and University of California, Los Angeles.

CAREER: Freelance writer, 1970–2006.

MEMBER: Science Fiction Writers of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fifth Prize, Writer's Digest Short Story Contest, 1967; Creative Arts Achievement Award, Los Angeles YWCA, 1980; Hugo Award, World Science Fiction Convention, 1984, for short story "Speech Sounds"; Hugo Award, and Nebula Award, Science Fiction Writers of America, Locus Award, Locus magazine, and award for best novelette, Science Fiction Chronicle Reader, all 1985, all for novelette Bloodchild; Nebula Award nominations, 1987, for novelette "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," 1994 for Parable of the Sower; MacArthur fellowship, 1995; Nebula Award for Best Novel, 1999, for Parable of the Talents; Penn Center West Lifetime Achievement Award, 2000.

WRITINGS:

SCIENCE FICTION

Patternmaster (first novel in the "Patternist" series), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1976.

Mind of My Mind (second novel in the "Patternist" series), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1977.

Survivor (third novel in the "Patternist" series), Double-day (New York, NY), 1978.

Kindred, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1979, second edition, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1988, 25th anniversary edition, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2003.

Wild Seed (fourth novel in the "Patternist" series), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1980, Warner Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Clay's Ark (fifth novel in the "Patternist" series), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1984.

Dawn: Xenogenesis (first novel in "Xenogenesis" trilogy), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1987.

Adulthood Rites (second novel in "Xenogenesis" trilogy), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1988.

Imago (third novel in "Xenogenesis" trilogy), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1989.

Lilith's Brood, Aspect/Warner Books (New York, NY), 1989.

The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Pulphouse (Eugene, OR), 1991.

Parable of the Sower (first novel in the "Earthseed" series), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Bloodchild and other Stories, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 1995.

Parable of the Talents (second novel in the "Earthseed" series), Seven Stories Press (New York, NY), 1998, republished with Reading Group Guide questions, Warner (New York, NY), 2000.

Fledgling, Seven Stories Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributed to anthologies, including Clarion, 1970, and Chrysalis 4, 1979; contributor to Isaac Asimov's Science-Fiction Magazine, Future Life, Transmission, and other publications.

SIDELIGHTS: Concerned with genetic engineering, psionic powers, advanced alien beings, and the nature and proper use of power, Octavia E. Butler's science fiction presents these themes in terms of racial and sexual awareness. "Butler consciously explores the impact of race and sex upon future society," Frances Smith Foster explained in Extrapolation. As one of the few African American writers in the science-fiction field, and the only black woman, Butler's racial and sexual perspective was unique. This perspective, however, did not limit her fiction or turn it into mere propaganda. "Her stories," Sherley Anne Williams wrote in Ms., "aren't overwhelmed by politics, nor are her characters overwhelmed by racism or sexism." Speaking of how Butler's early novels dealt with racial questions in particular, John R. Pfeiffer of Fantasy Review maintained that "nevertheless, and therefore more remarkably, these are the novels of character that critics so much want to find in science fiction—and which remain so rare. Finally, they are love stories that are mythic, bizarre, exotic and heroic and full of doom and transcendence."

Among Butler's strengths as a writer, according to several reviewers, is her creation of believable, independent female characters. "Her major characters are black women," Foster explained, and through these characters Butler explored the possibilities for a society open to true sexual equality. In such a society Butler's female characters, "powerful and purposeful in their own right, need not rely upon eroticism to gain their ends." Williams also contended that Butler posited "a multiracial society featuring strong women characters." Still, her characters' race and gender were not Butler's primary concerns, according to a 1993 Publishers Weekly interview with the author. "I'm just interested in telling a story, hopefully a good one," the author told Lisa See. "If what I wrote helps others understand the world we live in, so much the better for all of us," said Butler in an interview with Michigan Chronicle's Robert E. Mc-Tyler. In addition to her unique characters, critics praise Butler's controlled, economical prose style. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, Elizabeth A. Lynn described the author's prose as "spare and sure, and even in moments of great tension she never loses control over her pacing or over her sense of story." "Butler," Dean R. Lambe of Science Fiction Review similarly attested, "has a fine hand with lean, well-paced prose."

Butler's stories have been well received by science-fiction fans. In 1985 she won three of the genre's top honors—the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award—for her novella Bloodchild, the story of human males on another planet who bear the children of an alien race. " Bloodchild," Williams explained, "explores the paradoxes of power and inequality, and starkly portrays the experience of a class who, like women throughout most of history, are valued chiefly for their reproductive capacities." The novella was reprinted in 1995's Bloodchild and Other Stories, which also includes the remainder of Butler's previously published short fiction, with afterwords, and two essays. The short stories explore some science-fiction themes—"Speech Sounds" and "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," for instance, envision a troubled future in California—and some family ones, as in "Near of Kin," which focuses on a strained mother-daughter relationship. One of the essays deals with Butler's life, the other with her craft. Chicago's Tribune Books reviewer Danille Taylor-Guthrie deemed the afterwords to the short stories valuable: "The author's commentaries on her works are as pleasurable to read as the fiction itself." She also finds that the essays contribute much to the volume. "Bloodchild and Other Stories is not only vintage Butler, it permits the reader to look beyond the pen," Taylor-Guthrie remarked. Elizabeth Hand, writing in the Washington Post Book World, said the collection will provide "a useful signpost" to Butler's novels.

It is through her novels that Butler has reached her largest audience. She is perhaps best known for her books set in the world of the "Patternists," including Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, and Wild Seed. The "Patternist" series tells of a society dominated by an elite, specially bred group of telepaths who are mentally linked together into a hierarchical pattern. Originally founded by a 4,000-year-old immortal Nubian named Doro who survives by killing and then taking over younger bodies, these telepaths seek to create a race of superhumans. But Doro's plans are repeatedly thwarted in Wild Seed by Anyanwu, an immortal woman who does not need to kill to survive. And in Mind of My Mind Mary, Doro's daughter, organizes all the other telepaths to defeat him, thus giving the Patternists an alternative to Doro's selfish and murderous reign. As Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Margaret Anne O'Connor observed, "this novel argues for the collective power of man as opposed to individual, self-interested endeavor."

The "Patternist" novels cover hundreds of years of human history. Wild Seed takes place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Mind of My Mind is set in a Los Angeles of the near future, but the other books in the series are set in the distant future. Patternmaster, like Mind of My Mind, addresses the theme of the importance of compassion and empathy between people over the ambitions of the individual. In this tale Butler describes an agrarian society now ruled by the telepaths whose communities are at constant risk of attack from humans who have been monstrously mutated by a genetic disease—just how this disease is brought to Earth by an astronaut is explained in Clay's Ark. During one of these raids, a Patternist ruler is wounded and becomes an invalid. His two sons vie for his position, and Butler shows how the younger son, Teray, learns from a woman healer named Amber that compassion is necessary to maintain and control the communal Pattern. By learning—as Mary did in Mind of My Mind—the benefits of the community over the individual, Teray defeats his brother and takes his father's place.

Although many of Butler's protagonists in the "Patter-nist" books are black women, the novelist did not display any particular favoritism towards either African Americans or women. Instead, she emphasized the need for breaking down race and gender barriers by illustrating the inability of those hindered by prejudice and narrow vision to progress and evolve. According to Foster, for "the feminist critic, Octavia Butler may present problems. Her female characters are undeniably strong and independent." But whether, as Joanna Russ insisted in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is crucial, "the assumptions underlying the entire narrative are feminist," is uncertain, for "who wins and who loses" is less clear than that a compromise has been made which unifies the best of each woman and man. For African American literary critics, Butler can present problems as well, for their attention has been focused upon the assumptions and depictions about the black experience of the past and the present, yet the implications of Butler's vision should be a significant "challenge."

In Survivor, another "Patternist" novel, the author used alien beings to help illustrate her themes. The differences between humans and aliens magnifies the issue of cultural misunderstanding and prejudice-inspired antipathy. With Survivor, the character Alanna survives on a distant world by learning to understand and love one of the alien Kohns. Butler's "Xenogenesis" books explore the interrelationships between two peoples in greater depth by creating a race called the Oankali, nomadic aliens who interbreed with other sentient species in order to improve their gene pool. Arriving on Earth after a nuclear holocaust has wiped out almost all of humanity, the Oankali offer mankind a second chance through the combination of the best characteristics of both species. They accomplish this through a third sex, which is both male and female, called ooloi, whose function is to manipulate the two races' genes into a new species. Here, according to Analog reviewer Tom Easton, "we may have Butler's [main] point: The ooloi are the means for gene transfer between species, but they also come between, they are intermediaries, moderators, buffers, and Butler says that the human tragedy is the unfortunate combination of intelligence and hierarchy."

The "Xenogenesis" series is comprised of the novels Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. In Dawn humans awake on a space ship after the earth is destroyed by a nuclear war and choose mates. Lilith, the novel's heroine, chooses Joseph. The two also have a physical alliance with Nikanj, an Oankali. Adele S. Newson, in Black American Literature Forum, observed that "Joseph and Lilith are not traditional science-fiction heroes. Neither would they be regarded as people likely to form an alliance. This refreshing approach to human relationships makes a good bit of Butler's literature sensuous." Newson went on to say, "Butler is adept at challenging the reader to evaluate his own moral codes. Dawn is philosophical in that it asks the reader, by virtue of the circumstances surrounding the human characters, to pose the basic question, 'What does it mean to be human?'"

Adulthood Rites is the second novel in the "Xenogen-sis" series and picks up with Lilith's son, Akin, the first male child born of a human since the war that destroyed the earth three hundred years ago. In this novel, the earth is restored and Akin is committed to also restoring a wholly human society. In Foundation Francis Bonner criticized the book for making promises it doesn't fulfill. "It is indecisive in its characterization. It flirts with developing a relationship between Lilith and Augustino Leal (Tino), which is never realized," she remarked. Bonner also added that the novel "relies too heavily on dialogue." Imago, the last book in the series, tells the story of Jodahs, another of Lilith's children.

Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago were republished together in 1989 as Lilith's Brood. Writing in Literary Review, Burton Raffel noted that Lilith readers are "initially drawn on by the utterly unexpected power and subtly complex intelligence of her extraordinary trilogy" but are "sustained and even compelled by the rich dramatic textures" and "profound psychological insights." Bonner contended, "One of the more unusual aspects of the trilogy is that it has no triumphal conclusion. Humanity has lost before the story begins, has still lost, and is disappearing as it ends." However, a reviewer on Times Warner Bookmark Web site praised the trilogy, describing it as a "profoundly evocative, sensual—and disturbing—epic of human transformation."

Butler's book Kindred, has nothing to do with her other series. Like her other books, Kindred has a time-travel theme, but it diverges enough from the science-fiction genre that her publisher marketed it as a mainstream novel. Kindred concerns Dana, a contemporary African-American woman who is pulled back in time by her great-great-grandfather, a white plantation owner in the antebellum American South. To insure that he will live to father her great-grandmother—and thus provide the means for her own birth in the twentieth century—Dana is called upon to save the slave owner's life on several occasions. "Butler makes new and eloquent use of a familiar science-fiction idea, protecting one's own past, to express the tangled interdependency of black and white in the United States," Joanna Russ wrote in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Williams called Kindred "a startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery."

Parable of the Sower, the first novel in Butler's "Earth-seed" series, also deals with the racial and social concerns typical of Butler's work. Set in a dystopian California in the years 2024 and 2025, the 1995 novel is written in the form of a journal by a young black woman named Lauren Olamina. In Butler's horrific future, a dearth of jobs has created such hostility between haves and have-nots that middle-class towns like the one where Lauren lives have become armed fortresses. Lauren's hometown is eventually attacked and destroyed, but she becomes a leader of survivors who seek to establish a society built on a new religion and nontraditional values. The question of whether or not this society will endure is left unresolved.

Critiquing the novel for Women's Review of Books, Hoda Zaki noted that there are echoes of the African-American past in Butler's tale of the future. For instance, Zaki observed, "Lauren's band of survivors recalls the Underground Railroad." She adds that the book, in common with Butler's other works, is a "celebration of racial differences and the coming together of diverse individuals to work, live and build community." Some reviewers point out that in this tale of a world gone awry—according to Zaki, "an exaggerated reflection of what is occurring today"—Butler does not take the expected or obvious approach. "Many other science fiction writers would take this setting and spin out an adventure story following the usual schematics," wrote Thomas Wiloch in the Bloomsbury Review. "Many already have. Butler turns her story into a character study of a young woman."

Butler followed Parable of the Sower, with Parable of the Talents, the second book in the same series. In Parable of the Talents Lauren Olamina embraces a religious belief called Earthseed, and sees herself as a future leader of this religion. Lauren founds a community, where she teaches people about Earthseed and encourages them to embrace change. A conservative president who wishes to eradicate any religion other than his own threatens the community and Lauren. He is followed by a ban of terrorists who will do whatever it takes to reach their goal, including separating parents from their children. Parable of the Talents received the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1999.

In 2005, Butler published Fledgling, another "beautifully written and inclusive" science fiction novel, according to Bernadette Adams Davis in Black Issues Book Review. In the story, a vampire named Shoni wakes to discover that she has lost her memory and must re-learn her entire life. Shoni's dark skin works to her advantage in that it blocks the sunlight, yet it's uniqueness and power is also the reason that she is being hunted. Davis called the book "a literary gem … accessible to all readers." A Kirkus Reviews critic added, "racist fears of miscegenation are also given an interesting spin in a story so convincingly told … that one is likely to forget it's about vampires."

Butler's writing has a solid reputation among both readers and critics of science fiction, and Williams noted that her work has a "cult status among many black women readers." She also observed that "Butler's work has a scope that commands a wide audience." Many of her books have been recommended by critics as examples of the best that science fiction has to offer. For example, speaking of Kindred and Wild Seed, Pfeiffer argued that with these books Butler "produced two novels of such special excellence that critical appreciation of them will take several years to assemble. To miss them will be to miss unique novels in modern fiction." And Easton asserted that with Dawn "Butler has gifted SF with a vision of possibility more original than anything we have seen since [Arthur C.] Clarke's Childhood's End."

Nevertheless, Foster believed that Butler's novels deserve more recognition because they fill a void in the science fiction genre, which often neglects to explore sexual, familial, and racial relationships. "Since Octavia Butler is a black woman who writes speculative fiction which is primarily concerned with social relationships, where rulers include women and nonwhites," Foster concluded, "the neglect of her work is startling." For her part, Butler did not discount the unique place she occupies as a black female science-fiction writer, but she had no wish to be typecast by her race or gender, or even by her genre. A reviewer on the Voices from the Gap Web site quoted Butler as saying, "Every story I write adds to me a little, changes me a little, forces me to reexamine an attitude or belief, causes me to research and learn, helps me to understand people and grow …. Every story I create creates me. I write to create myself."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 8, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 38, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Contemporary Novelists, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Contemporary Popular Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Newsmakers 1999, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Notable Black Writers, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Stevenson, Rosemary, Black Women in America, An Historical Encyclopedia, Carlson Publishing (Brooklyn, NY), 1993.

PERIODICALS

African American Review, summer, 1994, pp. 223-35, 259-71.

Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, January 5, 1981; November, 1984; December 15, 1987; December, 1988; September, 1999, review of Parable of the Talents, p. 132; December, 2000, Tom Easton, review of Lilith's Brood, pp. 132-138.

Black American Literature Forum, summer, 1984; summer, 1989, Adele S. Newson, review of Dawn and Adulthood Rites, pp. 389-396.

Black Issues Book Review, September, 2000, Sandra Gregg, "Writing out of the Box," p. 50; November/December 2005, Bernadette Adams Davis, review of Fledgling, p. 71.

Black Scholar, March/April, 1986.

Bloomsbury Review, May/June, 1994, p. 24.

Ebony, August, 2000, p. 20.

Emerge, June, 1994, p. 65.

Equal Opportunity Forum, number 8, 1980.

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

Extrapolation, spring, 1982.

Fantasy Review, July, 1984.

Foundation, spring, 1990, Francis Bonner, "Difference and Desire, Slavery and Seduction: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis," pp. 50-62.

Janus, winter, 1978–79.

Kirkus, August 15, 2005, review of Fledgling p. 867.

Library Journal, August 1, 2005, "Blood Vetting," p. 66.

Literary Review, April 1, 1995, Burton Raffel, "Genre to the Rear, Race and Gender to the Fore: The Novels of Octavia E. Butler," p. 454.

Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1981.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 26, 1995, p. 14.

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

Michigan Chronicle, April 26, 1994, Robert E. McTyre, "Octavia Butler: Black America's First Lady of Science Fiction," p. PG.

Ms., March, 1986; June, 1987.

New York Times Book Review, January 2, 1994, p. 22; October 15, 1995, p. 33; January 3, 1999, Gerald Jones, "Science Fiction," p. 18; June 6, 1999, review of Parable of the Talent, p. 42; December 5, 1999, review of Parables of the Talent, p. 101; January 1, 2000, Michel Marriott, "We Tend to the Right Thing when We Get Scared," p. 21; April 7, 2001, review of Parables of the Talent, p. 49; April 29, 2001, Gerald Jones, review of Wild Seed, p. 18; June 3, 2001, review of Wild Seed, p. 31; December 2, 2001, review of Wild Seed, p.74.

Poets & Writers, March/April, 1997, pp. 58-69.

Publishers Weekly, December 13, 1993, pp. 50-51.

Salaga, 1981.

Science Fiction Review, May, 1984.

Science Fiction Studies, November, 1993, pp. 394-408.

Thrust: Science Fiction in Review, summer, 1979.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 31, 1996, p. 5.

Washington Post Book World, September 28, 1980; June 28, 1987; July 31, 1988; June 25, 1989; October 29, 1995, p. 8; January 24, 1999, review of Parable of the Talent, p. 9.

Women's Review of Books, July, 1994, pp. 37-38.