After receiving her Associate's degree in 1968, she moved on to California State University at Los Angeles, taking "everything but nursing classes," as she recollected to Lisa See of Publishers Weekly. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since." The story upon which Butler embarked would form the basis for her first published novel and the rest of the Patternmaster series.īutler later attended Pasadena City College, winning a short-story contest during her first semester. "I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie and decided that I could write a better story than that. "I was writing when I was 10 years old," she told Black Scholar. The realizations sparked by these issues helped inspire Butler's novel Kindred, in which a modern black women travels back in time to the antebellum South and confronts slavery first-hand.īutler discovered her vocation at an early age. "I used to see her going to back doors, being talked about while she was standing right there, and basically being treated like a non-person." Butler recognized these kinds of working conditions as a tradition in her own ancestry, and that legacy helped alienate her from her peers, who in the 1960s blamed their parents' generation for contemporary problems. Her father died during her infancy and her mother's occupation provided Butler with early lessons in racism and economic inequity: "My mother was a maid and sometimes she took me to work with her when I was very small and she had no one to stay with me," Butler recalled to Black Scholar. The limits are the imagination of the writer." Used Fiction to Transcend Realityīutler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California. Such explorations, Cooper noted in Vibe, were previously absent from science fiction: "In the '70s, Butler's work exploded into this ideological vacuum like an incipient solar system." As the award-winning author told Black Scholar, "A science fiction writer has the freedom to do absolutely anything. She gives us a future." The Washington Post went further, declaring Butler to be "one of the finest voices in fiction period."īutler's work helped put race and gender into the foreground of speculative fiction, exploring these and other social and political issues with a developed sense of ambiguity and difficulty. Along with "cyberpunk" novelist William Gibson, Terri Sutton of the LA Weekly listed Butler among " science fiction's most thoughtful writers." Vibe magazine's Carol Cooper declared that what Gibson "does for young, disaffected white fans of high tech and low life, Octavia Estelle Butler does for people of color. "It just happened." Butler-the most recognized black woman writer in the genre-became one of sci-fi's leading lights with a career that included publishing the Patternmaster series, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, the celebrated historical fantasy Kindred, and the highly praised dystopian saga The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents, among other works. "I didn't decide to become a science fiction writer," Octavia Butler claimed in an interview with Frances M.
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