Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,702

This is the grave of Octavia Butler.

Born in 1947 in Pasadena, California, Butler grew up in the Black working class. Her parents did the most typical jobs for Black workers of that time–her mom was a housekeeper and her dad was a shoeshiner. Her father died young and her mother raised her strict and within the Baptist church. She was an extremely shy child and was dyslexic as well. Not surprisingly then, this was a tough childhood–single mother, poverty, the strictness of the church, bullying from other kids. But she did have books and like a lot of shy kids, books get them through. Not sure how true this is today, but hopefully it is.

Butler grew up in the 50s and this was a peak era of science fiction, so it’s not surprising that she started reading and then writing in that genre, still as a kid. Now, I should say here that it’s complete coincidence that Butler directly follows H.P. Lovecraft in this series. I’ve never read Butler either, as I disdain science fiction and fantasy generally (the allegories of sci fi can be OK I guess and from Butler they might be relevant enough to my interests that I could get something out of it I suppose). So I am not going to go too deep into the details of the books and leave that to comments. She had an interesting a-ha moment. When she was 12, she was watching TV and the 1954 film Devil Girl from Mars came on. She was like, this is horrible, I could write a better script than this. And so she started working up ideas. She wanted to send stories off. Her family discouraged her, not out of meanness, but trying to get her to understand what being Black in America meant. She did not listen.

Still, it took awhile. She went to a community college and took lit classes, winning a college short story contest. She was not a political activist, but she went to college with them and became influenced by Black Power ideas that later entered her writing. Now, the Writers Guild of America was also influenced by the political upheaval of the period and so created a program to help aspiring minority writers. Butler attended. One of the teachers at that time was Harlan Ellison and he liked her work and encouraged her. He urged her to attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. This is fascinating to me because I can’t believe something positive ever happened at Clarion University in western Pennsylvania, where my wife taught for 6 years. This was a place where, in 2016, a farmer nailed a sign to a tree near the road that read “TRUMP: VOTE FOR BALLS”. So I am curious how she responded to being out there. To say the least, while it kept the name, it did not continue at Clarion long, soon moving to Michigan State. Anyway, one of the teachers there that year was Samuel Delany, another Black sci-fi writer, and he encouraged here more. So all the right people were like, you’re pretty good at this.

So Butler kept working on what became the Patternist novels, published in 1976, 77, 78, 80, and 84. They sold much better later than at the time, but in 1984, she won the Hugo for her story “Speech Sounds” and that got her a much larger public. Since sci-fi/fantasy writers really like long series of books, she then moved on to the Xenogenesis series, which took up most of the 80s and for which she did extensive research in South America to get her idealized setting correct. Then the 90s saw the Parable series. Again I will allow you all to comment on all this stuff, since I have read none of it. I guess if I was to read a series like this, I probably would read Butler just based on its relevance to modern life. The environmental crisis side of the Parable novels would interest me at least, given, you know, what has happened to this planet since she wrote them. I will also say this–I do enjoy Afrofuturism in art and music. As someone who listens to Sun Ra, I am used to crazy lyrics about other planets. And while I claim no expertise in Afrofuturism in visual art, I have seen some museum exhibits that I have enjoyed a great deal. Of course, reading a novel is a significantly greater time commitment than listening to Space is the Place, plus the lack of crazy keyboards. But maybe!

One thing many critics credit Butler for is bringing science fiction to the disfranchised and the poor. I don’t know enough about the genre to know if for some reason previous authors had largely told these stories from the perspective of elites and whites and others who reflected power, though knowing the popularity of the vile human Lovecraft, I can see how that would at least be popular. I am sure commenters will be able to learn me a bit on this. What I do know is that Butler has now inspired a couple of generations of Black and Brown and queer science fiction writers, who see her as completely reshaping the genre to not only include them, but to open a world for them to write the best stuff out there.

The late 90s were hard for Butler. She had writer’s block. She did publish a last novel in 2005, but much of her later life was spent teaching and lecturing, both of which she was good at. She was upfront with her discussions of race, often making whites a little uncomfortable, as they usually are. She also faced depression late in life. She was on medicine for high blood pressure and while I am not really aware of how that would affect mental health, in her case evidently it did. Her health was genuinely quite bad by the 2000s.

Also, I want to quote something from one of Butler’s notebooks. In 1988, so wrote out three remaining life goals for herself.

“I will send poor black youngsters to Clarion or other writer’s workshops

“I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons

“I will help poor black youngsters go to college”

Pretty great person, even I know nothing of her work.

Butler died in 2005, at the age of 58. She had moved to Seattle, was outside at her home, had a stroke, and hit her head on the sidewalk as she fell, so that was a double whammy of brain injuries.

Octavia Butler is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California.

Butler was honored by the Library of America with Volume 338. If you would like this series to visit other authors in the LOA series, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Updike, who is at 339 among other volumes, is in Plowville, Pennsylvania. I’ve never read any Updike either. E.O. Wilson, the scientist and writer who is at 340, is in Lexington, Massachusetts. Hey, that’s another author I’ve never read. This is all sounding like I don’t read, but I read a lot! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.