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| <back | home Octavia Butler Dies February 24, Octavia Butler, one of a very few Afro-American women writing in the science fiction genre, died at 58 outside her home in Seattle. News accounts gave the cause of death alternately as a stroke or a head injury resulting from a slip and fall mishap on her walkway. Among her awards was PEN American Center lifetime achievement in writing and the first award to a science fiction writer from the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” an award of $295,000 designed to give talented people a respite from the time-stealing necessity of making a living. The grant would have served her better earlier in her history, for her beginning was one of struggle. Born in Pasadena in 1947, she was raised by her mother, a single parent following the early death of her father, shoe shiner. Her mother supported the family as a maid. “Junie,” as Butler was called then, was self described as a shy daydreamer who began writing stories at age ten to escape “loneliness and boredom.” At age 12, a minor event shaped the lasting direction of her work: “I was watching a bad science fiction movie called ‘Devil Girl from Mars’,” she said in an interview with Black Scholar, “and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try and I’ve been writing science fiction ever since.” The aspiring young writer earned an associate degree from Pasadena City (Community) College and attended California State University and UCLA extension. In the latter, she obtained “the most valuable help I received with my writing” from two writing workshops. During one she met Harlan Ellison, a noted science fiction writer who influenced her to join the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. There ensued several short stories and some success in getting published, but she had “five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me.” Her first published novel in 1974 Patternmaster grew out of the story she created after watching ‘Devil Girl from Mars.’ Four more novels from this story line followed over the next eight years . In 1979, her most successful work Kindred arrived, a “grim fantasy” about a contemporary Afro-American woman catapulted back to the ante-bellum South. It was followed by the Xenogenesis Trilogy about space aliens who repopulate Earth with human/alien hybrids after a devastating war. Meanwhile she won the Hugo award for the best short story in 1984 for “Speech Sounds” and both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelette in 1984 for “Bloodchild.” 1984 also saw the first of her dystopias Parable of the Sower, about refugees from suburban Los Angeles escaping, hunger, drug crazed, fire setting mobs, and disastrous climate change. The novel was nominated for a Nebula Award as best novel, and the sequel Parable of the Talents won this award in 2000. A period of writer’s block plagued her for the seven years following the writing of this last, but her final novel, Fledgling, a vampire novel appeared in 2005. She disparaged the book as a lark. Butler’s self-description “comfortably asocial...a pessimist, if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist” is reflected in her work --filled with Biblical references and racial and sexual themes. Margaret Morris <back | top^ |