Butler, Octavia E(stelle)

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BUTLER, Octavia E(stelle)

Born 22 June 1947, Pasadena, California

Daughter of Laurice and Octavia Guy Butler

Hailed as the first African-American woman science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler began writing what would become the first draft of her Patternmaster series at age twelve after "watching a bad science fiction movie and [deciding] I could write a better story than that." She admits, however, that she kept on writing science fiction because she needed "fantasies to shield her from the world." Butler grew up in a strong matriarchal family with strict Baptist morals. Her mother and grandmother were the primary influences in her life; her father, a shoeshine man, died when she was an infant. Butler's mother, who had worked as a maid, was born on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. At age ten, she was taken out of school so she could work. It was perhaps this hard life and history that made Butler's family worry that a writing career would not be reliable employment for her. One of her aunts, the first in the family to earn a college degree, agreed, but encouraged her niece to do what she wanted.

After earning an associate degree at Pasadena City College in 1968, where a creative writing teacher once asked her, "Can't you write anything normal?," Butler went on to California State College (CSC) at Los Angeles. She left CSC when she couldn't major in creative writing and began taking evening writing classes at UCLA. While at CSC, Butler met Harlan Ellison, who encouraged her to attend the summer 1970 Clarion Science Fiction Writer's Workshop. Her first two stories were written during this intensive Pennsylvania workshop. In 1980 Butler won the YWCA Achievement Award for Creative Arts; in 1984, at the 42nd World Science Fiction Convention, her short story "Sounds" won a Hugo award, and at the next World Science Fiction Convention, Butler's peers voted her the winner of the Nebula Award for best novelette for Bloodchild. She received another Nebula award nomination in 1987 for her novelette The Evening and the Morning and the Night.

Butler's first five novels are part of her Patternist saga, based on imposing generations of Patternists, the telepathic humans who wrestle for control of the Earth. Her novel Kindred (1979), though set apart from the serial stories and marketed as a mainstream novel by Butler's publisher, continues the Patternist tradition of independent women of color who challenge the power structures of their societies and are embroiled in intense social relationships, and for whom self-expression and leadership roles are vital. Butler probes female experiences in terms of women's survival, sexual objectification, threats to their autonomy, and full expression of their psychic and healing talents, as well as their strong, abiding kinship ties. Her female characters represent a dazzling array of experience and origins—both futuristic and historically grounded. Anyanwu of Wild Seed (1980) is a 300-year-old woman whom Butler fashioned after a mythological Onitsha Ibo woman named Atagbusi; Mary of Mind of My Mind (1977), a 20th-century woman and descendant of Anyanwu, is a gifted telepath who has survived physical abuse to become the mother of a new race of beings. Both Alanna, the Afro-Asian heroine of Survivor (1978), and Lilith, the matriarch of a small dislocated group of humans, forge bonds between different ethnic groups and species within their futuristic societies. Dana, the modern African-American heroine of Kindred, is repeatedly dragged back into her family's slavery past and becomes an elusive, but nevertheless affected accomplice, victim, and link between her enslaved and free ancestors and her own, less-peopled, postslavery American future.

Butler began a new series with Parable of the Sower (1993), a futuristic tale of an America decimated by violence and environmental catastrophes. In Los Angeles, small numbers of workers barricade themselves behind walls to hide from the mobs of desperate unemployed homeless. One of these workers is Lauren Olamina, a black teenager who suffers from hyperempathy, a condition causing her to literally feel the pain of others. Lauren escapes when her community is overrun and heads north, hoping that Earthseed, the religion she created, will guide her to better times.

Lauren's story is continued in Parable of the Talents (1998) when her community of believers must go to war against the fanatical terrorists in newly elected U.S. President Reverend Andrew Steele Jarret's right-wing sect Christian America. Butler wrote Parable of the Talents partly on the proceeds of a $295,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation ("genius") she received in 1995. Butler's love of writing poetry is evident in both Parable of the Sower and its sequel in the form of poetry written by Lauren, the books' protagonist.

One of the signs Butler has posted above her desk reminds her that "tension and conflict can be achieved through uncompromising characters in a death struggle." Indeed, the societies and communities of Butler's fiction are inundated by a host of unpredictable, unrelenting individuals. The human, mutant, or hybrid life forms in Butler's works are often engaged in violent struggles for power and mental freedom. Butler's central female characters are not always protectors or mediators in these intense, high-stake struggles; women such as Mary in Mind of My Mind rely heavily on their warlike, competitive natures to reach positions of formidable power. Yet in places so diverse as the Patternist domains and the floating Oankali nations of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rights (1988), and Imago (1989), Butler also suggests there are nurturing environments that can be culled from besieged nations and embattled histories.

Butler capitalizes on the science fiction genre most dynamically in her representations of history as a layered entity—one that can be traversed, reentered, and never separated. Kindred and the works forming Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, are especially gripping because of the ways in which Butler constructs versions of historical reality. Of Butler's central characters, the women are especially imposing figures, whose identities as women, consorts, and childbearers are under siege by the social, racial, or genetic chaos of their communities. For the individuals—remnants of nations, and newly forming societies—drawn into such timeless and time-laden environments, tortured contemplation and mourning are inevitable. Yet the historical burdens and traditions of which they are so conscious also propel them to achieve increasingly symbolic victories against their oppressors. In her treatment and revisions of history, and her consistent development of evolving multiracial women, Butler puts a most distinctive mark upon the science fiction genre. She grounds her work in African-American history and complements her fictional plots with realistic debates on such contemporary issues as race, bigotry, sexism, and expansionism.

The ways in which Butler's characters have to resolve their "otherness" with their essential membership within groups may be seen as a telling metaphor for her own place within the realm of science fiction. Butler and writer Samuel Delany are the only well-known African-American science fiction writers, and Butler is perhaps the only African-American woman science fiction writer. Although she believes science fiction is "potentially the freest genre in existence," she acknowledges the confines and preferred foci that have been encouraged for writers of the genre. Describing science fiction as having begun "in this country as a genre for young boys," she argues it is this fact that explains the traditional exclusion of issues of race or sex from science fiction texts of the past. Butler uses powerful historical fact, African-American experience, and facets of the science fiction genre itself to challenge these narrow parameters. Her compelling stories masterfully blend traditional aspects of the genre and innovative futuristic designs with sobering contemplations of the realities of the world's racial and historical present and past.

Other Works:

Patternmaster (1976). Clay's Ark (1984).

Bibliography:

Reference Works:

Black Writers (1989). CANR (1988, 1990). CLC (1986). DLB (1984). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). NBAW (1992). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1991).

Other reference:

Black American Literary Forum (Summer 1984). Black Scholar (Mar.-Apr. 1986). Callaloo (1991). Emerge (June 1994). Equal Opportunity Forum Magazine (1980). Essence (April 1979). Extrapolation (Spring 1982). Life (July 1984). MELUS (Spring-Summer 1986). PW (13 Dec.1993). Salaga (1981). Sanus (Winter 1978-79). Thrust: Science Fiction in Review (Summer 1979).