Before Gene Roddenberry brought diversity “where no one had gone before,” and Stan Lee imagined a hidden African country as the most technologically advanced on earth, a little black girl with a big pink notebook had already given the keys to space and time to people who looked like her.
It was the early 1950s in Pasadena, California, where the devastatingly shy, 7-year-old Octavia would fill her notebook with fantasy to get away from her reality – one where she entered the homes that her mother cleaned through the back door, overheard the slurs the homeowners used, and was picked on for being the dyslexic black girl who didn’t fit in with anyone in her integrated neighborhood. Her writing was indelibly tied to her circumstances, as she explained about one of her most successful books, KINDRED: “if my mother hadn’t put up with all those humiliations, I wouldn’t have eaten very well or lived very comfortably. So I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.”
When she grew into a teenager becoming serious about her craft, her family reminded her that in the world they lived in, “negroes can’t be writers.” But science fiction was a genre where anything could happen. After years of styling her works after those of white male sci-fi writers without receiving their level of success, Octavia attended a workshop specifically geared toward minority writers, and got the encouragement to seize her own voice.
Her writing was so groundbreaking in the genre that by 1983, her story “Speech Sounds” was published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and was later awarded the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award, one of the top honors for science fiction & fantasy achievement. Her career took off from there, and in 1995, she became the very first science fiction writer to win the prestigious MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant.” In all of the 15 novels and numerous short stories Octavia wrote before her death in 2006, black characters starred as time-travelers, telepaths, shape-shifters, and vampires in stories that explored deep and intersectional themes like racism, technology, morality, religion, mental health, climate change and more.
Octavia Butler’s work was not only lauded for its scientific accuracy and universality that lead to her nickname “The Grand Dame of Science Fiction,” but it inspired the cultural aesthetic known today as “afrofuturism,” that integrates the African diaspora with futuristic fashion, technology and concepts to include our past and present experiences in what could be to come. It’s an impressive legacy for a woman who once simply stated: “When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn’t in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn’t manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing.”
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Someone wrote of Octavia “It is a rare writer who can use sci-fi not simply to chart an escape from reality, but as a pointed reflection of the most minute and magnified experiences that frame and determine the lives of those who live in black skin. Octavia E. Butler was one such writer.”
Curious? Two Butler scholars discuss where to start with her books & where to go from there after you fall in love.
VICE republished Octavia’s 1980 essay “The Lost Races of Science Fiction” and it is still wildly relevant & required reading if you made it this far.
THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 