Octavia Butler: Pioneering Sci-Fi & Shaping Dreams
“My books will be read by millions of people! So be it, See to it!”一 wrote young Octavia Butler signing off a journal entry where she had been writing declarations for the future she wanted for herself as a writer. For all the things that her legacy continues to teach writers and readers even to this day, her life, success as a writer, and especially her stories continue to answer the question “Without limits, where might one travel?”
Octavia Estelle Butler was a pioneering science fiction writer and the first African-American female science fiction author to be published and globally recognised, her impact on the genre and African-American literature has been recognised in many ways, including winning two each of science fiction’s highest awards, The Nebula and The Hugo awards.
In 1995, she became the first Science fiction author to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, and lots more, however, the real tea on what a visionary this woman was, lies in the work that preceded these honours and the stories it birthed.
Currently housed at the Huntington Library in St. Mario, Califonia, is her extensive archive of personal journals containing manifestations and personal observations of the world, and notebooks containing research for some of the stories we have all come to love and enjoy. These journal entries have soon become an important part of her legacy, it is not often that we witness the behind-the-scenes of creating a legacy like the one Butler has left behind. They serve as a reminder that we too can mould, create, write, or birth ourselves into spaces that may seem impermeable.
Her most referenced entry pictured above is dated to 1975, a year before she would publish her first-ever sci-fi novel, Patternmaster which would then go on to be the first published book of The Patternist Series. At the time, not only was the genre widely underrecognized, but it was also dominated by White male authors, yet Butler believed that her stories also deserved a place within the genre and in the world, it is this unflinching belief in the worthiness of her work that carried her throughout her career.
Another thing that stood out for me in this manifestation was that Butler’s desire did not just stop at her career success, in one of the entries, after a list of publications she wanted her work published in, she manifested material success as well for herself:
“I will buy a beautiful home in an excellent neighbourhood”
“I will get the best of healthcare for my mom”
“I will hire a car whenever I want and need to”
“I will travel wherever and whenever I want”
…
“For my own excellent Santa Monica home that is mine, free and clean”
“For my own free and clear personal fortune of $10 million”
Photo culled from Literary Hub
This desire for material success as a result of a successful career is something that many Black creators wrap in performative humility albeit genuine, my stan on this can be best described from this excerpt from an article on Butler in Vulture
“I don't celebrate my predisposition toward humility, primarily because it largely exists out of fear that anything or any goodwill I've ever earned can be unearned overnight.
This page of Butler's journal, though, is riveting for how it upends any tradition of shame around a relentless desire for success. And takes it a step further, even.
Butler's use of "I am," as opposed to "I want to be," when she hadn't yet published her first book, suggests an understanding that this life was already set and eager to welcome her, she was just taking her time in arriving to it.”
Butler’s audacity to dream and manifest a full life of success is a page worth taking from her story; a testament that our ideas, interests, and curiosities, though not clearly defined or shaped into anything that can be consumed, still deserve to be a catalyst for our dreams.
Octavia Butler’s breakthrough meant she wasn’t only taking up space as a female writer or as an African-American writer, she ventured into a genre that did not recognize women beyond characterization let alone a woman of her race.
The genre at the time was mainly occupied by white male authors who wrote stories that placed them as saviours of humanity, many scholars often critiqued the genre’s tendencies to “create technical fixes for racism and racial politics; erasing race as a part of the future” while envisioning futures with simplistic utopian approaches to very real contemporary problems.
American journalist Thulani Davis in her 1983 essay “The Future May be Bleak, but It’s not Black” criticised the genre’s rigid conventions that often resulted in stories placed in futures in which white men thrive and dominate, its lack of “futures in which living black cultural communities survive, grow, and influence the world around them, and one which had black women recognised as actors to be reckoned with.
Butler herself also criticised the genre’s limitations stating that it often tended to involve a lot of conquests “In earlier science fiction…you land on another planet and you set up a colony and the natives have their quarters someplace and they come in to work for you”
Butler sparked interest in the genre at the age of 12 after she came across a science fiction B movie titled Devil Girl From Mars.
Devil Girl From Mars is a 1954 British film that tells the story of a female alien commander, Nyah, sent from Mars to collect male humans to restore the declining male population on Mars that resulted from a “battle of the sexes.” Butler often talked about how she thought the storyline was bad and how she believed she could write a better story, she did.
“I needed my fantasies to shield me,” she said in an interview once, when asked why she started writing, for her, writing science fiction was an escape, an escape from the circumstances of her birth, a sort of blueprint for the woman she wanted to become, this is what I would say probably influenced Butler’s approach to the genre, introducing literary elements that let her tell stories that mattered to her through a medium that otherwise did not accommodate such.
Bending the genre’s structure was a major thing that stood out in Butler’s stories, Science fiction for many writers then (and even in our time) was writing stories that reimagined alternatives to our current social structures, played around with futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life and so on.
While Butler’s work still incorporated these pillar elements, this excerpt from A Memorial to Octavia E. Butler best describes her approach to the genre:
“Butler approached Science fiction askance, choosing to write self-consciously as an African-American Woman marked by a particular history. Her example clarifies the stakes for any particular minority breaking into forms seen as ethically exclusive.”
Her inclusion of science and sci-fi elements in the medley of cultural material positioned her stories as a challenge to generic conventions within the sci-fi genre, the futures she wrote about explored raced subjects and highlighted histories that were often erased from the futures that existed in the storytelling within the genre. Butler found tools within the genre that helped her write stories that imagined a radically different world and forged a new path within the genre that Black writers within the genre continue to see themselves within to this day.
For Butler, fiction was more than just stories, it was also a way to acquire a new set of eyes to effect change.
In a 1999 journal entry, Butler wrote, “I never bought into my invisibility or non-existence as a Black person. As a female and an African-American, I wrote myself into the world. I wrote myself into the present, the future, the past.”
I wrote myself into the world…
Photo culled from Literary Hub.
Through her stories
In her lifetime, Butler published 12 novels, two short story collections, and a host of single short stories.
Butler did not simply write stories about Utopian societies incorporating futuristic ideals and solutions to contemporary problems, her stories pushed the genre to explore cultural and historical elements that spoke to her lived experiences as an African-American, she often built her stories within the juxtaposition of the genre’s conventions that produced stories that imagined alternatives to our social arrangements and her desire to use it as a tool to tell timeless stories that engaged the problems of our raced and gendered world.
It is notable to mention that although Butler’s stories stretched beyond the confines of conventional science fiction, her stories were also not told in a “condition-of-the-people” way like stories from writers like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and the likes, nevertheless, the dynamics of the extraterrestrial worlds she built and the stories she plunged in them spoke to similar realities.
The Patternist Series
The Patternist series details life over centuries within a fictional humanity not so different from ours in many ways, from genetic mutilations to the workings of social structures, many lessons can be learned.
The series is made up of five books including, Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), Clays Ark (1984), and a posthumous release, A Necessary Being (2014).
Although the books in the series were not published following the story chronologically, they are each set within the same story-scape, having different main characters the story is built around in each book.
Wild Seed, which chronologically starts the series, is set in the 17th and 18th centuries and tells the story of the relationship between two immortals, Doro, a man who has lived for over a thousand years by transferring his consciousness and essence from one body to another, feeding off the mental capacity of his victims, and Anyanwu, a shapeshifter woman with healing powers.
Doro is trying to create a “new world” of superhumans, he develops a breeding program and has colonies of inbreeds called “seed villages.” Anyanwu is forced to become his breeding slave to fill up his seed villages.
The rest of the stories in the series account for different events that occur over centuries as a result of Duro’s breeding program, In the last book Patternmaster, the human race, in a distant future, is divided into, Patternists; a group bred for superhuman abilities (from Doro’s breeding program,) that form a network powered by telepathy, the Patternists are ruled by the most powerful Telepath known as the Patternmaster. Clayarks; the enemies and outcasts who are diseased and animalistic, and Mutes; regular humans without any enhanced abilities are enslaved.
The book however tells the coming-of-age story of Teray, a young Patternist who finds out he is the son of a Patternmaster and begins to fight for his place in the Pattern society.
What stands out about the Patternist series is how Butler places these fictional structures in the backdrop of real history, the series explores and challenges the creation, growth, and maintenance of social structures and hierarchies.
Kindred
Through time travel, Kindred explores slavery in the United States. It tells the story of Dana, an African American writer who keeps getting transported between her life in 1976 Southern Califonia and 19th century Maryland during the antebellum slavery period, she lands on a plantation that she finds out is, in fact, her inheritance, and she meets some of her ancestors and builds a bond with the plantation community.
The story explores the dilemma of experiencing slavery with the sensibility of someone from the future who is aware of the legacy in contemporary America of the 20th century but yet experiences what it truly felt like.
Kindred is a classic and one of Butler’s most celebrated works to date because of the themes it explored and the experiences it spoke to.
Butler *expressed that she had written Kindred because of the way the young people of that time had talked about the subject and how they often minimized its severity, how they would talk about how they wouldn't have tolerated slavery, she wanted them to not only know the facts but also experience how it felt and understand that their ancestors were heroic enough for even being able to survive the times.
Lilith’s Brood (Xenogenesis Trilogy)
The Xenogenesis Trilogy or Lilith’s Brood explores the life of Lilith and her genetically altered descendants in three books, Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)
In Dawn, a nuclear war started by the military leaves the earth uninhabitable and renders humankind extinct, however, the few human survivors, including Lilith, are taken away by an alien race, the Oankali. At the beginning of the story, Lilith wakes up on an Oankali ship 250 years after the war in shock. As the story goes on, she builds a relationship with the Oankali as they help rebuild the earth and make it habitable again but in exchange, they want to interbreed with the humans to form a new race in what they call a “gene trade”. Lilith aids them in sensitizing the humans and training them to survive on the changed earth but they betray her, rebel, and kill her Oankali mate.
The other two books in the series explore Earth, now cohabited by the humans and Oankali, and their struggle to live together. The Oankali have made all humans infertile and their only means of reproduction is by breeding with the Ooloi (a third gender of the Oankali) the results of the breeding are called “constructs” but there are also humans who refuse to breed called “resisters”
Adulthood Rites and Imago centre different main characters as they fight the genetic hierarchy now present on the new earth.
Parable of The Sower
Parable of the Sower takes the form of journal entires written by an African American teenager Lauren Olamina who is genetically altered with hyper-empathy, an ability to feel the pain of others and of the world at large due to her mithers abuse of drugs during pregnancy. The book was written in 1993 but the story is set in 2024, a time when the United States and the rest of the world have been heavily affected by massive climate change and socio-economic crisis that results in extreme poverty and genetic mutilations.
As the earth continues to deteriorate, Lauren develops a new faith, her religion called “Earthseed,” a belief system that pushes that “God is change” and believers need to shape God through a conscious effort to influence changes around them as it was the only way to aid the restoration of the earth, through this religion, Lauren was able to create a community of followers who lived in harmony until they were attacked and looted by the world outside the community that was ravaging in chaos, lack of resources, slavery, cannibalism and heightened sexual assault.
After the attack, Lauren travels disguised as a man on a new journey where she keeps spreading this religion.
During the 2020 pandemic, scholars and lovers of Butler's work often referred to this story for its predictive nature of our predicament at the time, which landed the book on the *New York Times bestseller list, a first for Butler and a fulfilment of one of her journal manifestations.
When asked what her inspiration was for the story, the *New York Times reports that Butler stated “I couldn’t help but wonder what environmental and economic stupidities might lead to”
Parable of The Talents
Parable of the Talents is a sequel that takes place five years after the events in Parable of the Sower. The book is told from the perspective of Lauren, her daughter, and her husband who are now all settled in a new community called Acorn, centered around the Earthseed religion somewhere in Northern California.
The rest of America outside Acorn is still ravaged by crisis and the leadership of a Christian Fundamentalist denomination called “Christian America” led by the President. The denomination goes on a crusade that seeks to cleanse America of non-Christians and restore power to America.
The Crusaders attack and take over Acorn, enslaving Lauren and the others but by 2036, they rebel and kill their captors and Lauren begins her journey to find her family.