A shy girl who thought she could beat a bad movie became a science fiction giant
At twelve, Octavia Butler watched Devil Girl from Mars and decided she could write something better. A year later an aunt told her Black people could not be writers. She kept typing two-fingered on a Remington her mother bought her, and in 1995 became the first science fiction author awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Butler was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947, the only child of a housemaid and a shoeshiner. Her father died when she was three, and she grew up with her mother and grandmother in a strict Baptist home. Going along to her mother's cleaning jobs, she saw the two of them sent through the back doors of white households. Crippling shyness and mild dyslexia made her a target for bullies, so she hid in the Pasadena Central Library and filled a big pink notebook with stories.
She took night classes at Pasadena City College, where a short-story prize paid her first $15 as a writer. A classmate in the Black Power movement who scorned older generations as servile planted the seed of Kindred: she wanted to show that such submission could be quiet, brave survival. Harlan Ellison spotted her at a Writers Guild workshop for minority writers and sent her to the Clarion workshop in Pennsylvania, where she met Samuel R. Delany and sold her first stories. Then came five more years of rejection slips and grim temporary jobs.
The Patternist novels, beginning with Patternmaster in 1976, imagined humanity split into telepathic rulers, disease-mutated Clayarks and ordinary Mutes. By 1978 she could write full-time. Kindred, published in 1979 and her best seller, sends a Black woman from 1976 Los Angeles back to a slave plantation in Maryland to meet her own ancestors. Speech Sounds, about a pandemic that robs people of language, won the Hugo for short story in 1984, and Bloodchild took another Hugo a year later.
Research trips to the Amazon and the Andes fed the Xenogenesis trilogy. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents followed in the 1990s, the second winning the Nebula, and the MacArthur award carried $295,000. She planned four more Parable books but found the series too depressing, turning instead to a lighter vampire novel, Fledgling, in 2005. Butler died of a stroke in 2006, aged 58; her papers are at the Huntington Library.
Source: Octavia E. Butler
