One of the greatest, most original writers in the Black world died on Feb 24, 2006.

Octavia Butler stands as the most prominent Black (African American) Science Fiction (Speculative Fiction) authors and one of the most prominent female authors in the genre.

Her works regularly explore race, class and gender in ways that don't preach solutions, but explore dichotomies (and trichotomies).

Any readers who are interested in reading fiction that expands the boundaries of what is commonly referred to as "Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction" should spend time with Octavia Butler's works.

Most people start with Imago, Kindred or Dawn. Start where you wish... just don't miss out.

I'm saddened by the fact that I've missed many opportunities to meet Ms. Butler in person. She toured frequently and was often just a couple of miles away from my door, but I never made the effort. Now I never can.

Anyway, adventurous readers should look into Octavia Butler's work. Head on over to your local Black bookstore, to your local science fiction bookstore, or over to Amazon.com. Just get there.

JA

--



Octavia Butler was born in Pasadena, California. Her father, a shoeshiner, died when she was young; her mother, also named Octavia, raised her in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood, working as a maid to support the family. As a child, Octavia Jr., known as "Junie", was considered shy and a "daydreamer"; she was later diagnosed with dyslexia. She began writing at the age of 10 "to escape loneliness and boredom"; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction. "I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie" called Devil Girl from Mars, she told the journal 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."

After getting an associate degree from Pasadena City College, she attended California State University and took extension classes at UCLA. Butler credited two workshops as giving her "the most valuable help I received with my writing" : One was the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program "designed to mentor Latino and African-American writers", which she took part in during 1969 and 1970. Through Open Door she met the noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who introduced her to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, which she attended in 1970.

Her first published story, "Crossover", appeared in Clarion's 1971 anthology; another short story, "Childfinder", was bought by Ellison for the never-published collection, The Last Dangerous Visions. (Like other stories purchased for that volume, it has yet to appear anywhere.) "I thought I was on my way as a writer," Butler wrote in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. "In fact, I had five more years of rejections slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me." In 1974, she started the novel Patternmaster--reportedly related to the story she started after watching Devil Girl From Mars--which became her first published book in 1976. Over the next eight years, she would publish four more novels in the same storyline, in what became known as the Patternist series.

In 1979, she published Kindred, a novel about an African-American woman who is repeatedly thrown from 1976 to the ante-bellum South, where she is forced to deal with life in a culture based on slavery. Often shelved in Literature or African-American literature rather than with science fiction--Butler herself categorized it as a as not science fiction but rather as a "grim fantasy"--Kindred became the most popular of all her books, with a quarter of a million copies curently in print. "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you," she said of the book.

Butler's "Speech Sounds" won the Hugo award for best short story in 1984. The following year, her story "Bloodchild" won the Hugo and the Nebula awards for best novelette.

With Clay's Ark, the last of the Patternist novels, published in 1984, Butler began her Xenogenesis trilogy, about the Oankali, extraterrestrials who come to Earth to repopulate the planet with human/alien hybrids after a devastating war. Butler's aliens are notable for having a plausible third gender, known as ooloi. The first novel in the trilogy, Dawn, was published in 1987.

In 1994, her dystopian novel Parable of the Sower was nominated for a Nebula for best novel, an award she finally took home in 2000 for a sequel, Parable of the Talents. Butler had originally planned to write a third Parable novel, tentatively titled Parable of the Trickster, mentioning her work on it in a number of interviews. but at some point encountered a form of writer's block, going seven years without publishing a new novel.

She eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in 2005 in the novel Fledgling, a vampire novel with a science fiction context. Although Butler herself passed Fledgling off as a lark, the novel is connected to her other works through its exploration of race, sexuality, and what it means to be a member of a community. Moreover, the novel continues the theme, raised explicitly in Parable of the Sower, that diversity is a biological imperative.

She published a collection of her shorter writings, Bloodchild and Other Stories, in 1995. The collection includes five short stories spanning Butler's career, the first finished in 1971 and the last in 1993. In 2005, Seven Stories Press released an expanded edition.

Butler moved to Seattle in November 1999. In October 2000, she received an award for lifetime achievement in writing from the PEN American Center. She described herself as "comfortably asocial--a hermit in the middle of Seattle--a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work.

She died outside of her home on February 24, 2006, at the age of 58. Some news accounts have stated that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her walkway, while others report that she apparently suffered a stroke.


Octavia Butler Bibliography (by series)
# Patternist Series
* Patternmaster (1976)
* Mind of My Mind (1977)
* Survivor (1978) [Butler later disowned this book as one that she regrets ever made it to print. It's currently out of print and sells for extremely high prices because of its rarity]
* Wild Seed (1980)
* Clay's Ark (1984)

# Kindred (1979)

# Xenogenesis Series (Also released in 2000 under the title "Lilith's Brood")
* Dawn (1987)
* Adulthood Rights (1988)
* Imago (1989)

# Earthseed
* Parable of the Sower (1995)
* Parable of the Talent (1998)

# Bloodchild and other stories. Including:
* Bloodchild- Winner of the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus awards
* The Evening and the Morning and the Night
* Near of Kin
* Speech Sounds -Winner of the Hugo Award
* Crossover
* and two essays-
o Positive Obsession
o Furor Scribendi

--

Octavia Butler Bibliography (by publication date)
* Patternmaster (1976)
* Mind of My Mind (1977)
* Survivor (1978)
* Kindred (1979)
* Wild Seed (1980)
* Clay's Ark (1984)
* Dawn (1987)
* Adulthood Rites (1988)
* Imago (1989)
* Parable of the Sower (1993)
* Parable of the Talents (1998)
* Fledgling (2005)