Quiet Rebel Writer

I rarely go to book readings or literary events. I learned early on that I’m a very visual person: listening to a person speak or read from a book, no matter if I normally find the topic fascinating or the book compelling, is enough to make my eyes cross and my mind go blank. But in 2004 I was presenting at a literary conference that featured Octavia Butler as a guest speaker. I went. And I was wowed.

Butler was a tall woman. By society’s accepted and f’ed up standards of beauty, she was an unattractive woman. She spoke plainly and politely. She discussed her path to a successful, genre-bending, pioneering career with humor. She mentioned her new project, a lark of a book on vampires. I went home after that speech and read a slew of her novels, voraciously consuming some of the most poignant and thought-provoking sci-fi I’ve ever read. And then, in 2006, she died suddenly. I’m not a crier, but felt like crying that day.

Why does Butler matter? She grew up in the 1950s as a poor black girl on the west coast who dreamed big. At the age of 10 or thereabouts she saw her first televised sci-fi schlock, believed she could do better, and immediately got to work writing her own. Over the next decades, she wrote constantly, putting herself through school through menial work, surviving on next to nothing, but rousing herself every morning at 2 am to write and write and write. She wrote fantastical stories, persevered through years of rejection slips from sci-fi magazines and publishers, and finally published her first book in 1974. But it was Kindred, the novel published in 1979, that cemented her status as a truly unique and necessary writer.

Here’s the thing. The best sci-fi and fantasy takes a picture of our world and twists it. It offers up an example of what is and what could be. It’s a lens through which we can view our society, seeing with abject clarity how desperately we fuck things up and also with piercing intensity how we are capable of greatness. Kindred was the story of a woman of color in 1970s California somehow mysteriously transported back to the antebellum South. Over various trips she meets her slave and slavemaster ancestors and becomes trapped in the vicious cycle of being owned. It’s a biting, painful indictment of the past, but also the present. Butler funneled her own dissatisfaction with society and its outspoken and subtle racism, and created a haunting story that still sticks with me years after my first read.

Butler wrote several more successful series of sci-fi books, and in the 1990s created her Nebula-award-winning series. The Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents are dystopian masterpieces. In the near future an African-American woman and her family face a near-complete breakdown of social and government function, and join the legions of people taking over the highways moving ever north. Along the way she creates a religion called Earthseed. The power of these books is again in their social commentary and vision, viewing a world gone mad but one that still relies on extremism, hate and subjugation to survive. It’s devastating and remarkable.

Octavia Butler matters because she was the model of persistence paying off in publishing. She matters because she broke all the sci-fi rules, carving out a new spot as an African-American woman writer. She matters because she offered up a vision of strong females of color facing catastrophic circumstances, and who persevered because they were women, and not in spite of it. She matters because she created the best of sci-fi, shining lights into the shadows of our society and reminding us of the power for good and evil we all have. She matters because she was a gracious, beautiful, fascinating woman who seemed genuinely surprised and excited when fans clapped and cheered at her speech in Louisville, and moved at the notion that her work moved us. She was a great example of what we can aspire to.

[I’m] 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.
- Octavia Butler

What writers matter to you? What writers would you like to see profiled here?

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