She wanted to give us time, and tools, to correct the course.Īs a young woman living in Pasadena, Octavia Butler often took the long bus ride into the busy maze of downtown Los Angeles to visit the multistory Central Library. She didn’t want to be right - far from it. What readers, fans and scholars often note about Butler’s work is its predictive qualities: Her vision about the climate crisis, political and societal upheaval and the brutality and consequences of power hierarchies seems both sobering and prescient.īut, as Butler often noted, being right was never the point. Her themes, ideas and characters continue to resonate with new readers at a time when so many are looking for, if not hope, then a map for a way forward. This year marks the 75th anniversary of Butler’s birth. In 2020, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many readers turned to Butler’s 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower,” which details the journey of a visionary and headstrong teenager, Lauren Olamina, set against a California landscape besieged by climate change and socio-economic crises - so many readers, in fact, that the novel appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, a first for Butler, fulfilling her stated lifelong dream 14 years after her death.Īs a Black woman and a writer, Butler demolished walls that seemed impermeable, writing on themes that seemed uncategorizable. “Kindred ,” her now canonical 1979 novel about a Black woman who is yanked back in time to the antebellum South and marooned on a working plantation, will premiere as a TV series from FX in December, adapted by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. She led the way for the next generation of Black readers, thinkers and builders to picture themselves in the collective future, laying the groundwork for an Afrofuturist movement before the term even existed.įive adaptations of her fiction are currently in various stages of film and television development, by producers ranging from J.J. Her extensive archives, housed primarily at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., contain her voluminous notebooks and meticulous research. They now appear on university syllabuses and high school reading lists. Since her death at 58 in 2006, after a fall outside her home in Lake Forest Park, Wash., her novels have inspired art installations, librettos and jazz suites. She is also, increasingly, a writer recognized as one of the most important voices and visionaries of the 20th century, and now the 21st. While drafting one autobiographical note, she described herself as “a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles - 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, certainty and drive.” Her responses were intended for her publisher - and ultimately for the world - but they were written especially for herself. With great discipline, she engaged honestly with a set of questions about who she was and where she was going. My books will be read by millions of people! I will travel whenever and wherever in the world that I choose. I will help poor Black youngsters broaden their horizons. I will buy a beautiful home in an excellent neighborhood. She recorded her goals and aspirations in her personal journals in terms that have since resonated across the decades: Part of what has made Butler so beloved is the work that preceded these honors: the way she envisioned her own future and encouraged herself to keep going despite the very real obstacles in her path. Butler, “Her imaginative stories are transcendent fables, which have as much to do with the future as with the present and the past.” The MacArthur Foundation said of Octavia E. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. She wrote 12 novels and won each of science fiction’s highest honors. What follows is a tour of the worlds that made her - and the worlds that she made. The future she wrote about is now our present moment. Sixteen years after her death, the writer Octavia Butler is experiencing a renaissance.īutler, seen here on a mural at a middle school that bears her name, is celebrated for novels that grappled with extremism, racial justice and the climate crisis.
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