Last reviewed: June 2017
Author
June 22, 1947
Pasadena, California
February 24, 2006
Lake Forest Park, Washington
Octavia Estelle Butler could be categorized as a black feminist science-fiction writer, but although those labels partially describe her, her work goes beyond narrow categorization. After Butler’s father died when she was a baby, she was raised by her mother and grandmother. Growing up without a father or siblings early gave a solitary focus to her life, which was somewhat alleviated by the bedtime stories her mother read to her until the age of six. At that point she began to read on her own. Childhood reading included castaway books her mother rescued while working as a maid, as well as the books she found in the children’s section of the Pasadena library. At the age of twelve, when she learned that she could not enter the adult section of the library, she discovered science-fiction magazines and was instantly taken with the genre. One of her favorite authors was Zenna Henderson, who used young women’s viewpoints to write about telepathy.
In 1959 Butler saw the 1954 film Devil Girl from Mars, which inspired her to begin writing what later became her Patternist series. Painfully shy during her childhood and adolescence, Butler found solace in writing in a notebook. During these early years, however, she despaired of writing well enough to have her work accepted for publication, a fear that was heightened by her aunt’s telling her that a black person could not earn a living as a writer. Having never seen a printed work she knew to have been written by a black writer, Butler thought her aunt might be right. Octavia Estelle Butler signing a copy of Fledgling after speaking and answering questions from the audience. The event was part of a promotional tour for the book.
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Her first money for writing was the prize she won during her first year at Pasadena City College. Several years followed with no further success, but a breakthrough occurred when she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop at the age of twenty-three. Here she sold two stories to writer-editors who were teaching there, one of which, “Crossover,” was subsequently published.
During the next five years she continued to write. She supported herself with menial jobs, getting up at three in the morning to write. In late 1974 Butler decided to try longer fiction. By working on each chapter as a short story and using her earliest stories for inspiration, she produced Patternmaster in just a few months. Though Patternmaster is the first book in the Patternist series, it was only with the second, Mind of My Mind, that Butler established Patternist society. Here she established the reason why patternists are arranged into houses and, in describing the tendencies of so-called immature latents to inadvertently kill or maim inferiors, anticipates her later creation of “mutes,” or nontelepaths, as servants and of the code preventing their mistreatment. Rachel’s faith healing in Mind of My Mind presages Amber’s regenerative abilities in Patternmaster. References interweave throughout the Patternist books in a nonlinear fashion. The disease mentioned in Patternmaster that mutated humans into Clayarks is explained in Clay’s Ark, for example, and the groundwork for Survivor’s Alanna to seek freedom from Patternists and Clayarks is developed in both Patternmaster and Mind of My Mind. The Patternmaster series is, in fact, most appropriately viewed as one extended novel instead of a series of books on a linear time line. An omnibus of the series, titled Seed to Harvest, was published posthumously in 2007; it excluded Survivor, which Butler repudiated after its publication.
With the exception of Kindred, a more traditional novel about a black woman who is transported from the 1970s to the antebellum South to experience slavery on the plantation of the man who is her ancestor, all Butler’s novels through 1984 were Patternist tales. One of her two short stories during this period, “Speech Sounds,” extended her range on the subject of muteness and won a Hugo Award. The other story, “Bloodchild,” a compelling combination of love story and coming-of-age tale, also won a Hugo Award as well as a Nebula Award, which is decided by a vote from the active members of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Butler called “Bloodchild” her “pregnant man story.”
With Dawn Butler began her Xenogenesis trilogy, the story of a postholocaust Earth where surviving human beings are given the possibility of altering their genetic structure through interbreeding with aliens, the Oankali. Butler provides interesting, multidimensional characterizations for these aliens in Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. Some readers find similarities between the Patternist series and Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human (1953), and many consider Butler to compare favorably with other writers, among them Poul Anderson, David Brin, and C. J. Cherryh, who include alien characterization in their fiction. The books of the Xenogenesis trilogy were published together in 2000 under the title Lilith’s Brood.
In Parable of the Sower Butler pursues her interest in telepathy. Here her protagonist is Lauren, an empath leading a group on a twenty-first century odyssey precipitated by urban decay. This book was a Nebula finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and one of the New York Public Library’s “Top Seventy-Five Books of the Year.” Parable of the Talents continues Lauren’s story as her utopian community falls victim to fundamentalist zealots. Her 2005 novel, Fledgling, reimagines the vampire genre and received widespread acclaim. In mid-1995 Butler won a MacArthur Foundation grant, becoming the first science-fiction writer to do so. Butler died after a fall at her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, at the age of fifty-eight.