Octavia E. Butler was a six-foot tall lesbian who described herself as “a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist always, a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist, and an oil and water combination of ambition laziness, insecurity, certainly and drive”.
She spoke of perpetually feeling to be an outsider and the fact that she wrote mainly science fiction didn’t endear her to the literary establishment.
Sci-fi is to fiction what heavy metal is to music – continually sneered at by critics and rarely perceived as cool or trendy but ,for all that, a genre that remains hugely popular.
I’m ashamed to admit that I have only recently discovered Butler; I chanced upon the collection Bloodchild And Other Stories in my local library while looking for a book by Margaret Atwood.
This contains just five stories which turned out to be the sum total of Butler’s short fiction; in the preface she explains this unproductive output: “The truth is, I hate short story writing. Trying to do it has taught me much more about frustration and despair than I ever wanted to know”.
The book contains her first published story (Crossover) but the best in the collection are the title story and Speech Sounds both of which were first published in the mid-eighties in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Bloodchild is particularly memorable, telling of a future world in which large worm-like creatures co-exist with humans and survive by using women and men as hosts for their eggs. This relationship is a functional one rather than exploitative and Butler describes it as her “pregnant man story”. Speech Sounds imagines a ravaged and violent world where a disease has deprived humans of spoken communication.
What’s particularly enlightening about the edition I borrowed (published in New York by Four Walls Eight Windows) is that each story is followed by a short ‘afterword’ in which the author explains in a down to earth manner how she came to write them.
There are also two short essays about her working methods which are especially encouraging for those of us who feel we don’t have what it takes to be a writer. Her advice is conventional up to a point, saying that you must read constantly, write regularly and revise meticulously. Where she departs from the norm is by stating that talent and inspiration are overrated qualities. She maintains that habit is more dependable and that, if you persevere, the mere act of continually working will feed the imaginative instincts. The key verb she stresses is to ‘persist’.
She overcame initial rejection to complete twelve novels before her sudden death in 2006 aged 58. Her determination and stature as a writer with a burning need to write lives on.
Related articles:
Remembering Octavia Butler by Karen Jay Fowler (Salon.Com)
Sci-fi writer a gifted pioneer in white, male domain (Tribute by John Marshall at http://www.seattlepi)
