This is an overview of the writer Octavia Butler. If the mood serves, I will add further links and discussions to the stories themselves.
There are a number of glowing recommendations elsewhere (Tananarive Due discusses her meeting with Butler at Essence), but few tackle what about Butler makes her worth reading.
I, more or less, agree with the New York Public Library on which books to start with. Allow me to add a few, small explanations:
- If you're more of the character- or literary-type, start with Kindred. It deals with an African American in an interracial relationship. She time-travels between the antebellum South and the twentieth century.
- If you want speculative wows, go with Wild Seed. It's been awhile since I read it, but it was a strange kind of love story between two god-like immortals.
- If you're a writer or you want to get a sense of the author, your best bet is Blood Child and Other Stories.
I met Butler at and was drawn to the Clarion Writer's Workshop, in part, to study with her. One of my favorite photos of the time was a picture of her and me walking back from the workshop through Seattle. The sky, usually overcast and rainy, was a bright blue. She stood tall with her short-cropped head tilted back in a laugh, I was absorbed by the sidewalk, head down in concentration. I may have told a joke and forgotten about it as quickly as I'd told it--as I tend to do, especially then--and moved on to the next thing.We got along well, and I recorded an interview with her which I still hope to someday locate (I had moved around frequently after the interview). She had a soft, back-of-the-throat voice. As I told her then, her characters have much to be admired.
She had won a MacArthur Genius Grant and smiled that she thought she knew who gave her [nominated her for?] that.
Her finest ability as a mentor was to inspire. Much of what she told us that first day, she covered in the essay "Positive Obsession"--a goad for writers to keep trying. Not included in that essay, she talked about how she'd watched The Devil Girl from Mars, and she started writing because she knew she could write something better than that. She would have been seven or eight at the time. I always wanted to watch that movie to see what the young Butler saw as a child.
The essay is worth reading whenever a writer needs a pick-me-up.
ETA: To get an additional sense of Octavia Butler that builds what I've written here, here is an article at Open Culture [coincidentally published today as well], which includes motivational notes to herself:
"Tell stories Filled with Facts. Make People Touch and Taste and KNOW. Make People FEEL! FEEL! FeeL!"
They say she was twelve when she watched Devil Girl, so she must have watched it in some rerun form in the late 50s, not during its original release. I'm not sure how common that was then. Possibly she saw it on TV.
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| Photo By Nikolas Coukouma CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=602976 |
Here's her opening line from "Blood Child":
"My last night of childhood began"We are clued immediately into a coming-of-age tale. In the next paragraph, the family relationships (three characters)--over whether one sips an egg--are laid bare:
I lay against T'Gatoi's long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.We aren't told why the world is what it is, but we gain glimmerings and sense a tension between the different characters over whether they would sip from an egg.
In "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" she again simultaneously shapes two characters in one tiny paragraph:I won't describe the ward. It's enough to say that when they brought me home, I cut my wrists. I did a thorough job of it, old Roman style in a bathtub of warm water. Almost made it. My father dislocated his shoulder breaking down the bathroom door. He and I never forgave each other for that day.We have two characters responding differently to the same things. Note that she doesn't describe the ward. Description isn't Butler's thing. Besides, we've seen wards before. Readers should supply their own. Instead, the world is experienced through the bodies of her characters.
A similar but different scene occurs in "Speech Sounds" where in an apocalyptic world a cop and a bus passenger meet and exchange communication through a series of hand signals since they cannot communicate otherwise. They each have a slightly different approach to the other--at first. Gradually, we learn why they are wary.
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When Octavia Butler gave a reading after our workshop, a young African American man stood to ask a question. Deferential, he clearly respected her. I forget his exact question, but it was political, Usually so sweet, Butler became aggravated, not quite angry. Perhaps she was tired of having to represent in a certain manner. Instead, her answer turned what was an overly simple perspective into a complex one.
Much as I felt for the young man, I loved her answer. You can sense this aspect of complexity in her two later narratives--"Amnesty" and "Book of Martha." When people try to pin down her characters, they shift perspectives into complex positions, so that over-simplification is difficult. I recommend these stories for those more interested in Butler as a person than as the stories being exemplars of the field.
These two factors--characterizing deftly and not surrendering to simplicity--are two key strengths that contribute to her being well esteemed. It's nice to read writers who field a few strengths well, so writers realize that they don't have to be perfect at everything.
Two more factors pushed her good works into being her best: First, her characters were poised in a barrel about to tumble over a great waterfall. And second, by the end, we'd feel like she'd examined an issue with every possible lens, from every possible angle. Could there be anything simpler or harder to emulate?
