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”. Continue reading
