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).
Parable of the Shower
Parable of the Shower
This highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel of hope and terror from award-winning author Octavia E. Butler "pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale" (John Green, New York Times)--now with a new foreword by N. K. Jemisin.
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions.
Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.