Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler (1947-2006) was born and raised in Pasedena, California, and attended Pasedena City College. She received a Remington typewriter at age 10. Despite many discouragments and battles with self-doubt, Butler never looked back, a dedicated writer the rest of her too-brief life. I remember Harlan Ellison writing about her in the late 70s, soon after she had him as a teacher in a writer’s workshop. In 1984 I read her short story “Bloodchild” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and like the rest of the science fiction world, I was rocked. She captured the strangeness and the drama of a radical new perspective on humanity that binded together Cordwainer Smith and Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr. and Michael Bishop. It signaled that the science fiction would not be the same from then on.
In 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, bookending this exciting news with The Parable of the Sower (1993) beforehand and The Parable of the Talents (1998) afterwards. She eventually moved to Washington state, struggling with high blood pressure and her own pressure on her work. Her influence on the next generation of writers was already being discerned when she died of a stroke at 58. Fifteen years and counting afterwards, the appreciation of what she did and what it meant for writers and readers grows year to year. The Library of America published its first volume of her work in January 2021, and a few months later NASA named the landing site of the Mars explorer Perseverance after her (a wonderfully appropriate connection).
Kindred [Gift hardcover edition]
Kindred [Gift hardcover edition]
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. (“You have to read them.”)
The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.
Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).