"We were all social retards," she quipped to Publishers Weekly about her class there, "but we seemed to get along with each other." She elaborated on this sense of isolation among her peers, believing that "to write science fiction you do have to be kind of a loner, live in your head, and, at the same time, have a love for talking. Six Weeks at Clarion Started Writing Momentumīutler spent six weeks at Clarion. The venerated Ellison was supportive of her work, offering to publish one of her stories in an anthology and encouraging her to attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in Pennsylvania, described as a "boot camp" for would-be practitioners of the genre. "I'm a little bit dyslexic and worried about killing people." Thanks to the Open Door Program at the Screen Writers' Guild, Butler wasĪble to attend a class taught by esteemed science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. 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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