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).
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.
As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.
In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.
Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”
Susana Morris is Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and was most recently the Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature, co-editor, with Brittney C. Cooper and Robin M. Boylorn, of The Crunk Feminist Collection, and co-author, with Brittney C. Cooper and Chanel Craft Tanner, of the young adult handbook Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. She is the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective and has written for Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com and Ebony.com, and has also been featured on NPR and the BBC, and in Essence and the New York Times.